Acting
May 23, 1937
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA
Archie Shepp
Acting
Biography
Archie Shepp was born in 1937 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He was 7 years old when his family moved to Philadelphia, in the black neighborhood of "Brick Yard". He started playing the banjo with his father, then he studied piano and saxophone at the same time as he did his secondary studies at Germantown College. He entered university, got into theatre, frequented novelists and poets like Leroy Jones, and wrote his first play "The Communist", an allegory on the situation of black Americans. At the end of the 50s, Archie Shepp met the most radical musicians of the time: Lee Morgan, Bobby Timmons, Jimmy Garrisson, Ted Curson, Beaver Harris... During this period, his political conscience found expression in plays and theatrical productions that only allowed him to survive. It was at the beginning of the 60s that he met Cécil Taylor and made two recordings with him that would be decisive. In 1962, he signed his first album as co-leader with Bill Dixon. The following year, he founded the New York Contemporary Five with John Tchicaï, recorded four albums for the Fontana, Storyville and Savoy labels and discovered Europe with the same group. From August 1964, he worked with Impulse: 17 albums were recorded including Four for Trane, Fire Music, Mama too Tight, which are among the classics of Free music. His collaboration with John Coltrane took shape in Ascension in 1965 and marked a turning point in avant-garde music. His participation in the creation of the Composers Guild with Paul and Carla Bley, Sun RA, Roswell Rudd, Cecil Taylor, reflects his militant commitment. In July 1969, he went to Africa for the first time to the Pan-African Festival in Algiers, a city that was home to many black American opponents at the time. On this occasion, he recorded live for the Byg label, the first of six albums in the Actuel series and he played on stage with a group of Tuaregs. From then on, Archie Shepp would multiply the musical encounters "world" with Gwoka from Guadeloupe, Hungarians (CD Hungarian bebop with Mihaly Dresch) and many others. From 1969, he taught ethnomusicology at the University of Amherst, Massachusetts); he continued to perform around the world, asserting his identity as an African American musician. Francis Marmande wrote about him in the Dictionnaire du Jazz (published by Robert Laffont): "An artistic and intellectual personality of the highest order, Archie Shepp, a leading musician of the free avant-garde, was able to join, without abandoning the essential of this aesthetic, the "royal road" of jazz art. By deepening the spirit and the letter of the two sides of the song originating from Negro-American music: the blues and the spiritual. Of which he never ceases, through classical pieces or composed by him (Black Water Blues by Bessie Smith or Mama Rose, etc.) to revive the force of strangeness in the face of European music, in a unique mix of wounded violence and immemorial nostalgia. In recent years Archie Shepp multiplies the audacious encounters without ever fearing to take risks.
Feature Films (16)
It is Christmas Eve. Separated from her young son, Helly struggles for money. A solitary man, Didier pays her to play his fiancée for the night. But the act comes to a tragic end. Left stunned, Helly meets Marie, who takes her in, on her way to the coast. There they encounter Chris. All three will end the night together. It’s their last move in joy and perdition.
24 Bars
Paris, 1954. The story of the meeting, known thanks to the fortuitous discovery of a forgotten notebook, full of notes and photographs, between a white British aristocrat, Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, writer and jazz patron, and a talented black pianist, Thelonious Monk, one of the best bebop jazz musicians of all time; a prodigious union of wills that overcame the most extreme prejudices of the very conservative US society.
Monk & Pannonica: An American Story
Festival panafricain d'Alger is a documentary by William Klein of the music and dance festival held 40 years ago in the streets and in venues all across Algiers. Klein follows the preparations, the rehearsals, the concerts… He blends images of interviews made to writers and advocates of the freedom movements with stock images, thus allowing him to touch on such matters as colonialism, neocolonialism, colonial exploitation, the struggles and battles of the revolutionary movements for Independence.
The Pan-African Festival in Algiers
Following the uprising of inmates in the high security prison of Attica, in the state of New York, Archie Shepp launches, with a group of musicians gathered especially for the occasion, an album that will be recorded in the history of music: Attica Blues. After 40 years, the saxophonist decided to play this album again live with a big band, made up of young musicians and musicians his age.
