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.
But it is the five albums that Shepp recorded in France and
Algeria for BYG Actuel that represent the culmination of his newfound Pan-African
impulse. Twelve days after his performance at the Pan-African Festival he
embarked on three days of recording,[2]
the first of which spawned Yasmina, a
Black Woman. Yasmina is a
confused record, and it is difficult to reconcile the adventurous, brilliant
first side with the staid, formalist second.
The album’s title track fills the entirety of side one. An eleven
man ensemble, including AACM members Lester Bowie, Roscoe Mitchell, and Malachi
Favors along with Earl Freeman, Clifford Thornton, Arthur Jones, Dave Burrell,
Sunny Murray, Art Taylor, and Laurence Devereaux runs through a twenty minute
percussive ode to an African woman. As with so much of the BYG Actuel catalog,
the piece starts with a Sunny Murray drum solo establishing the bottom-heavy
thrust of the song. He is quickly joined by Favors, Freeman, the other
percussionists, and Shepp on yodeling and other vocals. Favors and Freeman’s
interplay on bass is almost telepathic, and everyone involved seems to tap into
the same headspace immediately, which is unsurprising considering how much
these people all recorded together in such a short period of time. By the time
the horns enter the picture with the main theme of the piece, the
percussion/bass/piano team has already established itself as the dominant force
in the song. For as good as all of the horn soloing is, this group of musicians
completely anchors and dominates the piece. This allows the horns take a break
in the middle of the piece, letting the energy level drop without the piece
losing any momentum.
Shepp in particular has lost none of the fire of his Fire Music days, and Roscoe Mitchell’s
squeaking bass sax provides him with a nice counterpoint. With the amount of
talented players in this ensemble, the twenty minute runtime is filled with
incredible soloing, including a bit of terrific right hand work by Dave
Burrell, so the piece feels much shorter than it is. When the band disappears
and we’re left with just Shepp and a simple accompaniment from Murray, it is
clear that we’ve reached the end of one of the definitive sides of Shepp’s
career.
Side two is a different story. Neither tune is bad; far from
it. They’re just disappointing after “Yasmina, a Black Woman.” “Sonny’s Back,”
written by Grachan Moncur III, finds Shepp working in a quintet with Hank
Mobley, Philly Joe Jones, Dave Burrell, and Malachi Favors.[3]
Mobley and Jones built their careers within the hard bop idiom, and it is a bit
surprising to see them in a group with three free cats. It is even more
surprising that these iconoclasts chose to work within the hard bop form
(albeit with some rough around the edges soloing from Shepp) for a whole album
side. While Shepp and Mobley’s dual soloing near the end of the piece is
enjoyable it all sounds a bit guarded, as if there was some low-level hostility
between the two players (or more likely between their two styles) underpinning
their performances. Moreover, Burrell’s soloing is a bit lackluster, as if he
isn’t really sure what to do with the hard bop leash on. Jones and Mobley not
too surprisingly sound the most comfortable within the piece, and Jones in
particular brings a crispness to the proceedings that isn’t usually present in
Shepp’s sixties body of work. Everyone else give the impression that they’re
trying to prove that they can play more traditionalist material, perhaps to
silence critics who believed that free musicians didn’t really have jazz chops.
The same is true of the melancholy standard “Body and Soul”
that closes the album. Working with the same lineup as “Sonny’s Back” minus
Mobley, “Body and Soul” is full of good but emotionally flat playing. It might
be the most straight-ahead jazz tune in the Actuel catalog, and it’s also
probably the weakest of Shepp’s Actuel period.[4]
He would do much better non-free work on his seventies Impulse! and Freedom
records, when he had followed black nationalism toward funk and Attica. In the
end, side two of Yasmina is required
listening for Shepp acolytes only.
Coming up in the
weeks ahead:
Actuel 05: Gong – Magick
Brother
Actuel 06: Claude Delcloo & Arthur Jones – Africanasia
Actuel 07: Michel Puig – Stigmates
Actuel 08: Burton Greene - Aquariana
Actuel 09: Jimmy Lyons – Other
Afternoons
[1]
I’m defining the second wave as the free jazz explosion that came in the
mid-sixties, after Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman were well established and
Trane had started to explore the sonic cosmos. Second wavers tended to cut
their teeth on Impulse! or ESP-Disk, with a few managing to get records out on
Blue Note or other less traditionally experimental labels (a la Grachan Moncur
III). The third wave consisted of the Chicago and St. Louis cats that showed up
in Paris during the BYG/Actuel period and then migrated to New York at the cusp
of the loft scene.
[2]
Spread out over August 12-16, 1969.
[3]
Considering that he was part of Shepp’s band at the Pan-African Festival and he
was a big part of the BYG Actuel community it’s a bit surprising that he doesn’t
play on this song he wrote or on the album at all.
[4] I
don’t want to give the false impression that I don’t like hard bop, bebop,
swing, or other forms of more straight-ahead jazz. Grant Green’s Idle Moments is one of my favorite jazz
records of all time and I’m on the verge of wearing out my vinyl copy of Duke
Ellington’s 1956 Newport performance. It was just a poor fit for Shepp at the
time.
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