Attic Beats

Attic Beats 011 - Recorded October 5, 2005

If you were to bring up musicial obsessions, I have about a dozen names I’ll rattle off to you. Some of those artists I’ve already featured on Attic Beats. But when it comes to jazz, there’s no one that I obsess over more than saxophonist Archie Shepp.

Shepp, born in 1937, came to prominence in the 1960s by helping to shape the free/avant-garde jazz movement. His intense, fiery style was fiercely anti-establishment and pro-black in tone. There are few who played with as much heart as Shepp and it’s fully appropriate that his most widely recognized album is titled Fire Music.

Today, Shepp teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He’s still recording and his output in the late 90s and early 2000s is significantly better than what he released in the 1980s. Shepp’s catalog is extensive and there’s still an awful lot I have yet to explore.

This week’s episode focuses on some of Shepp’s best music from the 1960s. Since many of his songs are quite long, we only hit five tracks this week and three of them are segments.

Click through for this week’s set.

• (ab) Yasmina, A Black Woman [August 1969; Yasmina, A Black Woman]
• Black Gipsy (segment) [November 1969; Black Gipsy]
• The Girl from Ipanema [February 1965; Fire Music]
• The Magic of Ju-Ju (segment) [1966; The Magic of Ju-Ju]
• Le Matin Des Noire [July 1965; New Thing At Newport]