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.
