BLACK BLOGGAH

Get your dome blown open by the sounds of Jazz saxophonist, educator and activist Archie Shepp profiled this week on the BBC Radio 3's Jazz Legends show with Julian Joseph.





This week on the BBC Radio 3's Jazz Legends, Julian Joseph and James Wyllie profile the tenor saxophonist, educator and activist Archie Shepp. It's a great mini-course on this important "New Wave" Jazz artist, who was also a playwright, philosopher and activist. Mentored by Coltrane in the early 60's Shepp was considered avante-garde, and played on some of his earliest recordings with Free Jazz pianist Cecil Taylor. A historian of the Black musical experience in American, Shepp drew from the full range of African American styles - Blues, Spirituals, Rhythm and Blues, African percussion and electronic. His style is both experimental, lyrical and funky and should be a part of every serious brotha's musical vocabulary. In the late 60's, Shepp, like many other Jazz musicians made the pilgrimage to Paris, to continue working during the difficult years of the British invasion and the rise of Rock. He returned to the U.S. and remains vital today as a performer and professor at the University of Massachusetts. Listen up here.