newcritics

Last night we attended the most upsweeping, coolest, most thrilling live jazz show I’ve had the joy to get captivated by in ages. Archie Shepp’s tenor sax carries the old-school sweetness you hear in classics by Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins. His tone is that mellifluous but his performance is wild, ecstatic, and a political call to action. Charismatic and dapper at seventy years old, this master takes the audience deep into musical sea, but never loses an unschooled listener like me.

He plays mostly his own compositions, some of which I’ve heard before, but he plays them as if invented on the spot. Rooted in the blues, his music is deeply African-American and makes you feel both the culture’s anger and its deep spiritual freedom. His improvisation on Duke Ellington’s “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” was so vibrant and original, so unexpected but still familiar, it turned the old into new.

Not only does he play both tenor and soprano sax, but he sings as well—powerfully, running seductively through the dynamics between a throaty whisper and a deep, ululating shout. His voice mirrors his rich, devilish tenor-sax riffs.

Archie Shepp’s quartet, with Amina Claudine Myers on piano, Cameron Brown on bass, and Ronnie Burrage on drums, is at Iridium on Broadway and 51st in NYC this weekend, and if you can get there, I swear, you won’t be disappointed.