BYG Actuel 11: Archie Shepp - Poem for Malcolm

Archie Shepp’s remarkable first full studio album Four for Trane[1] consists mostly of Coltrane covers—unsurprising considering the title—but his follow-up Fire Music, recorded in the wake the assassination of Malcolm X, counts three Shepp compositions alongside tunes by Duke Ellington and Antonio Carlos Jobim. The last of these Shepp compositions is “Malcolm Malcolm Semper Malcolm,” a brief poem reflecting on X’s passing, which happened a week before the recording, followed by an expressive, pained solo by Shepp with minimal backing by David Izenzon and J.C. Moses on bass and drums respectively.

Malcolm X is not an explicit presence on any of Shepp’s albums in the four years after Fire Music, although his legacy haunts every sonic, cultural, and personal exploration that Shepp undertook during this time. In August 1969, when Shepp recorded three studio albums for BYG Actuel over the course of five days, he decided to grapple once again with the X’s towering legacy. What’s more, he again chose to use a poem to do this on “Poem for Malcolm,” which closes out the first side of the album of the same name.[2]

BYG Actuel 06: Claude Delcloo & Arthur Jones - Africanasia

The trajectory of alto saxophonist Arthur Jones’ career is one of the more disappointing stories in free jazz. The sounds of Ornette and Trane attracted him from his birthplace of Cleveland to New York City, and he made his recorded debut in 1967 on tenor saxophonist Frank Wright’s ESP-Disk Your Prayer. The next year, he traveled to Paris as part of Jacques Coursil’s band and became an integral if underappreciated part of the community of musicians hovering around Studio Saravah.[1] He played on seven Actuel records by Coursil, Sunny Murray, Archie Shepp, Dave Burrell, Clifford Thornton, and Burton Greene, and he recorded two albums, Africanasia and Scorpio, as leader or co-leader. After 1970, when Scorpio was released (it was one of the last records that the label released), Jones disappeared from recorded jazz, save for an appearance on Archie Shepp’s live Bijou album, recorded in Paris in 1975. His name basically disappears from the historical record after that, and he died in 1998 in the midst of a return to performing after a long hiatus.

Had things gone differently, Arthur Jones could have been one of the major figures in the loft scene in New York during the seventies. He was a wonderfully expressive player, infusing a bebop sensibility into his expansive solos. Even if he never recorded again as leader, he would have been a valuable member of any ensemble in both live and recorded settings. As he makes clear repeatedly on Africanasia, he was more than willing to step out of the way of his fellow musicians when it benefitted a composition, but he was consistently capable of being the defining voice during any passage in which he played.

BYG Actuel 04: Archie Shepp - Yasmina, a Black Woman

Out of the second wave of free jazz musicians,[1] Archie Shepp is part of the trinity of tremendously influential and important saxophonists that shifted the course of the art form, alongside Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders. By the time Shepp travelled to Algiers for the Pan-African Festival in 1969, all three were calling Impulse! Records home, but they had sharply diverged in their aims. Ayler was making some ill-advised moves into jazz/R&B fusion; he would be dead of a presumed suicide a year later. Sanders was crafting his own spiritualist identity in the post-Coltrane wilderness and writing some of his best music (including “The Creator Has a Master Plan”) while he was at it.

Unlike these two contemporaries, Shepp was staying the course by transforming his sound. On his second Impulse! album Fire Music, with its odes to the recently assassinated Malcolm X, Shepp had refracted his musical identity directly through the broader civil rights movement. 1965 was the year of X’s death, the Watts riot, and riots and racial violence in urban centers around the country. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act did not completely end de jure segregation, but they did shift attention and tension to the de facto segregation that was the hallmark of Northern urban centers. Anger and fire were the orders of the day. By 1969, however, Shepp’s philosophy, and in turn his music, shifted toward cultural nationalism. In 1968 and 1969 he recorded five songs that would make up his final Impulse! release in 1974. That album was named for the Los Angeles based US organization’s new black holiday Kwanzaa.

BYG Actuel 03: Sunny Murray - Hommage to Africa

There are probably arguments that could be made against this claim, but Sunny Murray is free jazz’s first truly free drummer. Instead of simply keeping time, Murray’s playing is purely expressionistic, pouring his entire being into a cacophony of textural percussion. Considering his place in the free jazz pantheon, it is unsurprising that he cut his teeth in the Cecil Taylor Unit and then in the Albert Ayler Trio and Quartet, three of the most important groups in free jazz’s development. While his playing on albums by these groups, and especially on the Albert Ayler Trio’s fiery Ghosts, is rightfully lauded by fans and critics, his work as a bandleader is too often overlooked. He recorded two great ESP-Disks—1965’s Sunny’s Time Now and 1966’s Sunny Murray—while still a member of Ayler’s band—along with the transitional Big Chief for EMI/Pathe in 1968 between his stint with Ayler and Archie Shepp’s invitation to join him at the Panafrican Festival at the start of the next summer. While Murray’s first three albums as leader are very good, Murray’s voice is still very much tied to his work with Ayler. Murray’s time with Shepp and his experiences recording for BYG Actuel freed him of these stylistic constraints and allowed him to find his own voice as a writer.

BYG Actuel 02: Art Ensemble of Chicago - A Jackson in Your House

Even though I think all of the group’s members are incredible players and a few of their group albums are free jazz masterpieces, I still really struggle with much of the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s music. A good portion of their most early work as a group sounds to me like collections of interesting elements thrown together in a haphazard way. They eventually honed in on what they were trying to do and became fairly consistent at tapping into that, but their early stuff, including their debut album A Jackson in Your House from 1969, is more noteworthy as a look into the group’s evolution than as a standalone recording.

Prior to A Jackson in Your House, the members of the AEC had collaborated on several albums by the group’s individual members starting with the Roscoe Mitchell Sextet’s brilliantly iconoclastic Sound in 1966. While these albums are great, they each clearly have one leader steering the group’s music, whether it be Mitchell (on Sound and Congliptious) or Lester Bowie (on Numbers 1&2). Their first recorded forays under the AEC name and their BYG albums especially show their first attempts to perform truly leaderless music. It took a few years to really work out the kinks in this democratic approach to their art.