WO!MAN (2 vinyls)

Description

THE LIVING LEGEND OF JAZZ. FOR THE FIRST TIME ON VINYL: WO!MAN! Archie Shepp, one of the best interpreters of Jazz's "Babylonian memory." Saxophonist, composer, pianist, singer, committed poet, playwright, Archie SHEPP is a living legend. Archie Shepp needs no introduction, a jazz hero, a Black Power icon, a virtuoso saxophonist, and a dedicated ambassador of all African-American music. Endowed with timeless virtuosity, Archie Shepp is an artist of many talents: instrumentalist (saxophone, but also piano and clarinet), singer, committed poet, composer, playwright... At eighty-three years old, Archie Shepp is an example for several generations of jazzmen. A top-tier artistic and intellectual personality, Archie Shepp, a leading musician of the free avant-garde, has managed to join the "royal road" of jazz art without abandoning the essence of this aesthetic. He has developed a broad multi-instrumentalism: a former alto player, he has also played soprano since 1969, piano since 1975, and, more recently, occasionally sings blues and standards. He populates his musical universe, whose substance is in continuous expansion, with themes and stylistic elements provided by the greatest voices in jazz: from Ellington to Monk and Mingus, from Parker to Horace Silver and Albert Taylor. He possesses the technical and emotional ability to integrate various effects and tricks inherited from the masters of the tenor, from Webster to Coltrane, into his saxophone playing, in a combination unique to him. This intensifies the specific characteristics of his style: savage rawness of attacks, a massive sound sculpted by a vibrato mastered in all its amplitudes, the sweep of a phrase to the point of breathlessness, abrupt shifts in pitch, intensity, and tempo, but also the velvety tenderness woven into a ballad. "Archie SHEPP and Joachim KÜHN, towering giants of two transatlantic avant-gardes, sign a manifesto of musicality, an absolute masterpiece with Wo!Man!" --- LE MONDE ---. "Archie Shepp is, along with Sonny Rollins, one of the best jazz interpreters, who, for his part, has applied his libertarian sensibility to the collection and presentation of the entirety of this music, as well as to its invention." --- JAZZ MAGAZINE ---. "All of Archie Shepp's work is an act of memory. The artistic decision is intimately linked to this requirement. Improvisation, which determines the forms of the always unique idiom, is coupled with an inscription in the fabric of a collective memory, that of the founding event in African-American history: deportation, slavery, segregation. This memory, carried by the blues, Archie Shepp is both its messenger and its witness." --- FRANCE CULTURE ---.