In 1960, saxophonist Archie Shepp and trombonist Roswell Rudd combined their instrumental voices to explore the revolutionary language of creative music or free jazz. The merger resulted in a seven-year triumph that reflected this culturally and politically tumultuous era and produced the exemplary albums Four for Trane and Live in San Francisco. The strength of this work justifiably marked them as champions of forward-thinking avant-garde jazz and linked their names to the period.
While they parted ways in 1967 with each finding success, musical satisfaction and acclaim in their own endeavors, the saxophonist and trombonist were reunited to co-lead a two-night date at New York’s The Jazz Standard in September 2000. The gig with bassist Reggie Workman, drummer Andrew Cyrille, trombonist Grachan Moncur III and poet Amiri Baraka was captured on the vivacious, Grammy Award-nominated album, Archie Shepp and Roswell Rudd, Live in New York. It also created a resurgence of interest and exposure for these important artists. Shepp and Rudd along with Workman and Cyrille arrive in New Orleans to perform at the Contemporary Arts Center on March 13.
Shepp, who was born in Florida on May 24, 1937, grew up in Philadelphia and got his start with jazz innovator pianist Cecil Taylor, was in Paris when we spoke about the latest album and the music’s past and present. On the disc the mighty Shepp not only blows hard and harmonically but also plays piano and sings. I mentioned how it might come as a surprise to some just how bluesy, elegant, swinging and even danceable some of the tunes are. The step from the outside to in are exemplified on such fare as Rudd’s “Acute Motelitis” and New Orleans-touched “Slide by Slide” as well as the saxophonist’s own “Deja-Vu.”
Just as Shepp maintained the blues when blowing free, he references his avant-garde both in his blues and his philosophical, political and intellectual outlook. Recently retired as a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Shepp’s fervor as an educator and activist also remains in his demeanor.
First, are you living in both Paris and in Amherst? You’ve always spent a lot of time in Europe through the years.
No, actually I live in the States and always have. I keep an apartment here now. Well, I have [spent a lot of time in Europe], fortunately because they provided me a place to work here and also a lot more is known about me here. I’m virtually unknown in the States. It’s very rare that I play in places like New Orleans or Florida or California—places where they have those big festivals. I sometimes ask myself why it is so rare, but apparently it’s like that.
It’s surprising for me to hear you say you are virtually unknown.
You know, I can go to my old neighborhood in Philadelphia where I was raised and 90 percent of the people there don’t even know I play music. There are other circumstances. For example, popular music in the United States—everything from the Beatles to gangsta rap—is pushed a lot more than people like [saxophonist] George Coleman or [pianist] Harold Mabern. Fame isn’t important to me anyway—money is. [He laughs].
Now that you brought up money, you were quoted in something I read as saying you’re playing less and less free (or avant-garde) music because other musics are more commercially viable.
Yeah, free music isn’t free. You’ve got to pay for it. Well, that’s not true in every case. There are people who’ve come after me like [saxophonist] David Murray and some of the younger guys who are playing today who are playing very much out of the same idiom that I was one of the pioneers of, one could say, and they’re making a good living in some cases. Not like [trumpeter] Wynton Marsalis, but surviving very well on free music. That music could be commercially viable. I suppose it’s a question of generations. Audiences tend to identify with people of their own generation. As I became older, playing the kind of music I played in the 1960s… somehow, the people my age are now listening to rock ‘n’ roll music or old Beatles records or like that. Younger people are in search of their contemporaries.
From what I know of you and the music that you were doing in the ’60s, your playing was a reflection of or a political statement on the times.
My music has always corresponded to how I feel about things. We are by nature, political individuals whether we express our opinions openly or not. I am still as a political person as I ever was. Perhaps not as outspoken—I don’t have the same forum that I had at the time. Magazines like DownBeat were open to me—I could write articles—and do things that are no longer possible. I even wrote articles occasionally for The New York Times. Today those things aren’t available to me. My music couldn’t exist without my history, my sense of experience which are my politics simply because I’m black. When I’m born, it’s a political fact—three strikes and you’re out and I’m born with all three of them.
I guess I am asking how you express your politics beyond the free jazz vehicle—I mean on Live in New York you do some swinging and there’s a lot of celebratory feel in the music. I mean you were always bluesy but perhaps this sounds, well, less angry, mellower.
Free jazz is just a term coined at the time by critics. But I mean who was any freer than Louis Armstrong? He sort of opened the door to freedom. Even when you’re angry in the United States you’re supposed to not seem angry. For example, everybody criticizes Howard Dean for shouting. But I think sometimes we should shout. Why must we always hide our feelings? When we’re in pain, must we seem like we’re happy? Otherwise people don’t feel our pain. So, to that degree, yes, I suppose I’ll always be angry as long as I look at the world today. There’s a lot to be angry about from the economy to things beyond our shores.
You were teaching music history or jazz history? As an educator, did you have some type of core philosophy? Is there something that would exemplify that?
I’ve been retired from teaching for two years—oh yes and thank the Lord. I paid my dues. I taught African-American music from the United States. I say that advisedly because jazz in my estimation is a very limited way to describe the entirety of African-American music. I begin in Africa—I talk about Diasporic music from Cuba, Haiti, the Antilles and the evolution of that music on the mainland in the Americas from 1619 to John Coltrane. Basically, my investigation of African-American music ends there because I think Coltrane is the stopping point for the evolution of this music. I played with John and had the privilege of being around him and I think as far as diatonic music and fundamental harmony—basic root movement—he exhausted all the possibilities of that form in his piece called “Giant Steps.”
My teaching grew out of my philosophy that much of American popular music by way of the African-American begins in Africa and this can be confirmed by the writings of various scholars. Of course, this is quite clear in a place like New Orleans where you had Congo Square. In Sydney Bechet’s book, Treat It Gentle, he talks about the early dances in the Square. He gives a very elaborate picture of the implications of African music as regards to the eventual evolution of African-American music. So my basic philosophy grows out of a continuum, an experience that continually evolves right on up to rap music, which I feel is the music of our time today. It’s not just generational but the inspiration to create new ideas that I don’t think exists in jazz anymore. It’s become for me a very middle-class, bourgeois experience. I began to research more blues as the most vital and fundamental experience. So we’re left with rap music as the expression of our times the way jazz used to be.
You worked with Roswell (Rudd) for many years as well as employing also other trombonists. In jazz the trumpet/saxophone team is more common. Do you find the trombone/saxophone combination more satisfying to you?
Well, the trombone is very close to the sound of the tenor and they make beautiful harmonies together. I sort of hit on that by accident during the early 1960s. I got whoever was available—trumpet player, clarinet player, harp player. But the trombone players seemed to have a special affinity or by some fortuitous reason I came across very good trombone players and eventually I stuck with the idea. I mean I do like the sound of the trumpet but I just haven’t been lucky enough to run up on a trumpet player who is willing to give me the time. All the great ones have their own bands.
Because your name is so associated with creative—or free—music, are people surprised at how much you’re swinging these days?
Oh, I don’t know. I think people who’ve listened to my music always realized where I was coming from. The newer audiences probably don’t know about my music before Attica Blues. I have a number of young people who come to my concerts today and that is part of the reason why I try to stay in touch with audiences. Blues and the fact that I sing some now has been tremendously helpful to me in opening up an entirely different audience. After all, this music has always represented what’s going on. I mean if you listen to Louis Armstrong in 1924, it’s exactly the feeling of those times. So in the 1960s we played music which corresponded to the times—Martin Luther King, the sit-ins, the Civil Rights movement, the Black Muslims, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers. It was a time of turmoil and change so the music is very much that. Not only mine but listen to Coltrane—the power of that music, it’s symphonic.
So here in 2004, we’re in Iraq, we just spent another $100 billion on staying in Iraq and most of the young kids are very passive—they only want grades. So yes, my approach has changed because audiences have changed profoundly. My audiences are younger but I don’t play down to my audiences—I love the blues and they love the blues so we have a good time.
You were quoted as saying that black music thrives on change. Why would you qualify it to black music, doesn’t all music and all things?
I look at Western classical music and that hasn’t changed. The people who play it, if they change a note, they take great risks at offending their classical audience unlike a rendition of blues by B.B. King or John Lee [Hooker] or Bukka White. Hey, that could change from night to night depending on how the player feels. It’s part of the music. It is something that is essential and intrinsic to what that music comes out of—the African folk song, the work song. They’re always extemporized. It comes out of a lifestyle and an ethic. As black music evolved through all the rigors and terrible times of slavery, blacks held on to certain aspects of their music. It’s the nature of the black experience. You can even look at sports—like how basketball has changed from a straight up-and-down white man’s sport to what it is today—how rich it is and how interesting it is. The same with baseball—stealing bases and all—those things came in with African-American players. So, we have, I think greatly enriched the larger culture with some values that we imported from Africa. Especially those values of extemporization and improvisation—of doing very interesting things without rehearsal.
So what can those who come to your New Orleans show expect? Are you performing the tunes from the album? Will you also be playing piano?
We don’t use the same repertoire that’s on Live in New York. The only thing that comes from that is the theme song, written by Roswell called “Keep Your Heart Right.” I always have played piano—I played piano before saxophone as a young child and played it right through college. It’s one of my favorite instruments. I’ve never really played it the way I want to play it. I suppose if I put in the time on piano that I did on the saxophone I might have become a good piano player. When I was about 18, Lee Morgan couldn’t find a piano player and that was my first professional gig on piano. From time to time I make gigs on piano. When I was in Amsterdam, I was broke—it was about maybe 15 years ago—I worked at a place called the Alto Bar and played exclusively piano there.
I guess we’re trying to do a sort of Buena Vista thing here [The Buena Vista Social Club, an assembled group of Cuban veteran musicians].We bring a lot of history with us. When I look back on it, 1960 doesn’t seem so far away but it was almost a half a century ago. A lot of children have been born since then and have become adults and listen to this music entirely differently. So we have a way to forge a very special communication with audiences of our generation and audiences of the new generation who don’t know this music. It’s just free enough to give them a sample of what free music is about and swinging and nostalgic enough to be compelling.
So when you played piano in Amsterdam did you sing too?
No, at that time I wasn’t singing. I started singing gradually—doing a little blues. I’ve always had an affinity for the spoken word on stage. I majored in theater in college not in music. I took my degree in playwriting. So the spoken word and my perception of the stage as the proscenium rather than a stage for jazz music gives me an entirely different perspective of what happens up there. It’s an amphitheater.
I’ve been asking almost everyone that I interview—because I’ve gotten some interesting answers—about their choice of instrument. What is it about the saxophone that drew you to it?
Well, I was playing clarinet in high school and junior high school. In high school I happened to hear a guy, Norman Satchel—we are friends today—and he played the tenor in the auditorium. He played a song by Sonny Stitt called “Stringing the Jug” and I was totally blown over. I went home to my mother and said, “Mom, that’s what I want, a tenor saxophone.” I just fell in love with the horn.
What does coming to New Orleans mean to you?
It has a great deal of meaning—historically, culturally. Esthetically I think it is one of the most beautiful cities—topographically, I’m not speaking about its politics—to look at. The music speaks for itself going back to Jelly Roll and before him Buddy Bolden who were enormously important for the evolution of African-American music and I would say for jazz music in the United States especially vis-à-vis the horn players who established the first improvised sounds that were widely imitated. Perhaps it’s an exaggeration to say that this music began there because clearly Earl Hines, who played with Louis Armstrong in 1924, played in a very original style that was widely imitated by other pianists. He came from Pittsburgh so it was not possible for New Orleans players to go up to Pittsburgh to teach players up there to play in that style. So apparently, that music was going on all over the country. But some of the greatest and most inspiring players of that music—including the piano players—came out of the city of New Orleans. So when I’m there I feel enriched. I feel that I’m in a place that is somewhat sacred to my music.
Will you get to spend some time here?
Well they never let me stay in New Orleans for any time. I come in for a day and then I gotta go. I think the whole concept of a gig should be changed so that players could be brought to town and given a chance to sort of interact with other musicians, some fans and the audience and see some of the city. It’s very important.
