David Izenon News Today

Ascension – added further propulsion to his career, emboldening him to delve deeper in his sonic explorations and liberate Black improvised music (Shepp wasn’t comfortable with the word “jazz”) from musical clichés as well as stock melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and structural conventions. While some of his contemporaries – like Coltrane, Ayler, and Pharoah Sanders – ruminated on cosmic and spiritual themes, Shepp was more overtly political. His music reflected the zeitgeist of an i...