Uploaded April 2012 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago
"ARCHIE SHEPP - BILL DIXON Quartet" (Savoy MG 12178 (LP) // BYG 529101 (LP, France) entitled "Peace")) // Archie Shepp (ts) Bill Dixon (tp) Don Moore (b) Paul Cohen (d)
"On this Shepp-Dixon LP one striking interpretation stands apart from all the others: the rendition of a hit tune from Leonard Bernstein's 'West Side Story.' Actually, the fact that Shepp and Dixon took, of all things, 'Somewhere' as a basis for improvisation is not at all surprising. (Many jazz greats have shown a special liking - at which some of their listeners have shaken their heads in disbelief - for rather hackneyed tunes. We need only recall Miles Davis' 'Some Day My Prince Will Come', Monk's 'Just a Gigolo', or Colemans' 'Embraceable You'.) What *is* astounding is what Shepp and Dixon do with 'Somewhere.' They play the tune nice and straight, without giving it the remotest semblance of a jazz piece by rhythmic recasting. The result is heightened banality, with a strong touch of irony. This underplayed humour becomes even more evident in Shepp's chorus. Sticking very closely to the thematic material in his improvisation, he adds occasional growl flourishes which take the mickey out of the tune, while at the same time confirming its insignificance. (Ekkehard Jost, 'Free Jazz' (1974))
(Jost's argument here recalls LeRoi Jones' famous description of John Coltrane' deconstruction of banal showtunes ('My Favorite Things', 'Chim Chim Cheree') as aggressive signifying practice. What both Jost and Jones neglect, of course, is the possibility that musicians actually had a fondness for these tunes; hence their puzzling (to white European critics) recurrence. Of course, whenever Shepp takes on a piece like this (at least in his 60s days - the deployment of old standards and blues from the 70s on becomes part of a historical tribute project, maintaining and paying homage to a particular tradition, with little sense of irony), one is unsure as to the play between 'sincerity' and subversive, sardonic humour: certainly, his takes on Ellington are not designed to mock, and even his version of the 'Girl from Ipanema' seems designed more to take the music back to its Brazilian roots, as part of a reclamation of colonized culture (viz. the Tropacalia movement, or Shepp's own use of South American tinges on 'There's a Trumpet In My Soul') with a rougher and more defiant (though still very much woozily emotional) edge - reclaiming bossa nova from Stan Getz, perhaps... Shepp has famously declared himself to be "a sentimentalist", and it is precisely that combination of declamatory emotional playing, out of Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins, with a rough and sometimes jolting bark and bite, that gives this music its unstable and multi-dimensional power: a refusal to occupy only one emotional territory, to be 'read' and contained in one particular category - the ability to wear one's heart on one's sleeve while carrying a knife up that sleeve at the same time, if that analogy makes any sense. There's a sense here, it must be said, of the band deliberately reining themselves in for the melodic statements, allowing themselves little eruptions at the tune's climax, which eventually burst out in Shepp's solo, only to die back down again - a kind of implied, simmering discord all the more powerful for being only occasionally and briefly emergent.
"ARCHIE SHEPP - BILL DIXON Quartet" (Savoy MG 12178 (LP) // BYG 529101 (LP, France) entitled "Peace")) // Archie Shepp (ts) Bill Dixon (tp) Don Moore (b) Paul Cohen (d)
"On this Shepp-Dixon LP one striking interpretation stands apart from all the others: the rendition of a hit tune from Leonard Bernstein's 'West Side Story.' Actually, the fact that Shepp and Dixon took, of all things, 'Somewhere' as a basis for improvisation is not at all surprising. (Many jazz greats have shown a special liking - at which some of their listeners have shaken their heads in disbelief - for rather hackneyed tunes. We need only recall Miles Davis' 'Some Day My Prince Will Come', Monk's 'Just a Gigolo', or Colemans' 'Embraceable You'.) What *is* astounding is what Shepp and Dixon do with 'Somewhere.' They play the tune nice and straight, without giving it the remotest semblance of a jazz piece by rhythmic recasting. The result is heightened banality, with a strong touch of irony. This underplayed humour becomes even more evident in Shepp's chorus. Sticking very closely to the thematic material in his improvisation, he adds occasional growl flourishes which take the mickey out of the tune, while at the same time confirming its insignificance. (Ekkehard Jost, 'Free Jazz' (1974))
(Jost's argument here recalls LeRoi Jones' famous description of John Coltrane' deconstruction of banal showtunes ('My Favorite Things', 'Chim Chim Cheree') as aggressive signifying practice. What both Jost and Jones neglect, of course, is the possibility that musicians actually had a fondness for these tunes; hence their puzzling (to white European critics) recurrence. Of course, whenever Shepp takes on a piece like this (at least in his 60s days - the deployment of old standards and blues from the 70s on becomes part of a historical tribute project, maintaining and paying homage to a particular tradition, with little sense of irony), one is unsure as to the play between 'sincerity' and subversive, sardonic humour: certainly, his takes on Ellington are not designed to mock, and even his version of the 'Girl from Ipanema' seems designed more to take the music back to its Brazilian roots, as part of a reclamation of colonized culture (viz. the Tropacalia movement, or Shepp's own use of South American tinges on 'There's a Trumpet In My Soul') with a rougher and more defiant (though still very much woozily emotional) edge - reclaiming bossa nova from Stan Getz, perhaps... Shepp has famously declared himself to be "a sentimentalist", and it is precisely that combination of declamatory emotional playing, out of Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins, with a rough and sometimes jolting bark and bite, that gives this music its unstable and multi-dimensional power: a refusal to occupy only one emotional territory, to be 'read' and contained in one particular category - the ability to wear one's heart on one's sleeve while carrying a knife up that sleeve at the same time, if that analogy makes any sense. There's a sense here, it must be said, of the band deliberately reining themselves in for the melodic statements, allowing themselves little eruptions at the tune's climax, which eventually burst out in Shepp's solo, only to die back down again - a kind of implied, simmering discord all the more powerful for being only occasionally and briefly emergent.
