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Archie Shepp, the fearless saxophonist, composer, playwright and poet, was born on May 24, 1937. As he turns 85, we honor his recorded legacy with a special edition of Take Five.
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 increasingly radicalized Civil Rights movement that had given rise to the ideologies of Black Power a...