Hambone

Marion Brown (alto sax), Archie Shepp (tenor sax), Ted Curson (trumpet), Joseph Orange (trombone), Reggie Johnson (bass) and Joe Chamber (drums). From the album Fire Music (1965).

Archie Shepp is an American jazz tenor saxophonist, writer, composer and teacher. In the 1960s he was a radical agitator willing to talk about the social injustice and the anger and rage he felt outright. His first influences were Ben Webster and John Coltrane. His sound had a rough tone, a broad vibrato, an intense swing, loud screams and multifonic effects, and his solos were fiery, hard and implacable, played with great enthusiasm. At first his instrument was the alto saxophone and in 1960 he played with dance orchestras and a Latin jazz group in New York, but then he switched to the tenor saxophone and joined the Cecil Taylor’s quartet, precursor of free jazz, for two years.

In 1962 he recorded his first album Archie Shepp - Bill Dixon Quartet with Savoy Records. He also formed the New York Contemporary Five with John Tchicai on alto saxophone, Don Cherry on trumpet, Don Moore on double bass and J.C. Moses on drums, with whom he recorded five albums and toured Europe, but the group dissolved in 1964. He then signed a contract with the Impulse! label, with whom he recorded 17 albums, and in 1965 he participated in John Coltrane’s essencial album Ascension.

Johnson and Chambers begin to play, and soon the rest of the group joins in to expose a very robust theme because of the wide wind section with constant instrumental changes and blocks of dark and dissonant chords. The first to make his solo is Curson while the rest of the rhythm section makes a continuous sound mattress underneath with a repetitive phrase. Curson exchanges balanced passages with more impetuous and daring ones, but in the end he is left alone with the rhythm section and calms down. Suddenly the group delivers an arrangement to give way to Brown with a suggestive and bluesy discourse in which he introduces more intense phrases. Then the group plays a new arrangement and Orange enters playing slowly, but well articulatedly while the rest of the rhythm section makes another recurring sound mattress below until everyone settles down. Right away the repetitive accompaniment comes back and Shepp reappears with a harsh sound playing in a free and passionate way, sometimes becoming overwhelming and at the end the group calms down again. To finish, the group re-exposes a small section of the theme.