June 29, 2021 • 42 mins
Archie Shepp is a tenor saxophonist and composer who's spent over half a century contributing to the evolution of Black music. Shepp has long fought for Black musicians to get their fair share of credit, recognition and recompense for their contributions to popular music. Shepp's been considered a leader of avant-garde jazz since the 60's. He's famously played alongside John Coltrane, Lee Morgan, and the great free jazz pianist, Cecil Taylor. But 84-year-old Shepp doesn’t consider the music he plays jazz at all. He calls it “African American music” to acknowledge the Black Americans who created the tradition.
On today’s episode, Justin Richmond talks to Archie Shepp about how an assignment he received in the third grade sparked the activism that's been ever present in his 60-year career. Shepp also talks about his relationship with Coltrane, who he says never took his horn out of his mouth. And he also recalls the rhetorical power of Malcolm X and the lasting image of seeing him speak to a sea of black heads on the streets of Harlem.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
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up for Pushnick and Apple Podcasts subscriptions. Archie Shep's been
(00:55):
a leader in what's known as avant garde jazz since
the nineteen sixties. He famously played tenor sacks alongside John Coltrane,
Lee Morgan, and the great free jazz pianist Cecil Taylor.
But like some musicians who are consider jazz artists, eighty
four year old Shep doesn't consider the music he plays
jazz at all. He calls it African American music to
(01:18):
acknowledge the Black Americans who created the tradition. Shep has
been politically engaged for his entire sixty year career. Every
one of his dozens of albums touches on African Americans
struggle to attain equal rights In some fashion one of
my favorite albums. For instance, Attica Blues takes a critical
look at the Attica prison riots of nineteen seventy one.
(01:41):
On today's episode, I talked to Archie Shep about how
an assignment he received in the third grade sparked his activism.
Shep also talks about his relationship with Coltrane, who he
says never took his horn out of his mouth, and
he also recalls the rhetorical power of Malcolm X and
the lasting image of seeing him speak to a sea
of blackheads on the streets of Harta. This is broken
(02:08):
record liner note for the digital age. I'm justin Richmond.
Here's my conversation with Archie Shepp. I first heard your
music when I was probably fifteen years old. Sixteen years old,
I discovered Attica Blues, Yeah, and it was at this
(02:29):
time when I was just developing a love of jazz
music and I heard Attica Blues and it changed my
whole idea of what people were doing then and what
jazz could be. And obviously there was a journey to
that album, but I thought it could be a good
place to start one because it was my starting point
(02:49):
with your music that I've since dived real deep into
and fallen in love with. But it also really matches
sort of the tenor of the present time here in America. Well,
the idea was given to me by my drummer at
the time, Bieber Harris, who suggested that it might be
a good idea to commemorate what it going on in Attica.
(03:13):
And I thought it was a good idea, and at
that point I began to write music and put together
the idea for the album. One of the reasons that
it really kind of opened my eyes to what jazz
could be because there's these kind of incredible vocals on
that album that are unlike other vocal jazz. It's not
(03:36):
like a vocal jazz record the way you might think
of an Ella Fitzgerald album sounding right, And I know
your drummer wrote those lyrics. Did he come to you
with the lyrics first? When he had the idea, Well,
he didn't actually write the lyrics. I wrote the lyrics,
and I gave him credit for it because at the
time he was trying to become a member of BMI
(03:58):
and he had to have some document recorded, and I
gave him cridit for the words the lyrics, though I
actually wrote the lyrics. Did you write them before you
compose the music? Well, at the same time, some of
the lyrics were suggested to me by him and just
(04:24):
in conversation. He had a worry of describing things about
the natural forces and various things that he would say
that gave me an idea of what I wanted to put.
I wanted to construct the lyrics only when the natural
(04:46):
forces told the world it's getting old. Do I worry? Yeah,
I worry? Can you dig it about the human soul?
So some of some of his conversation influenced my writing
of the lyrics. Was it common for you or uncommon
(05:08):
for you you to sort of derive inspiration for a
song or an album from political happenings of the time. Well,
I've been politically engaged just about all my career. All
my albums have some make some illusion to struggle for
African Americans to attain equal equal rights. So it was
(05:35):
not unusual that Nattica Blues was dedicated and focused very
intensely on the on the civil rights struggle. Because I
was an activist on the streets with a very Baraka
and people Calvin Hicks, people like that, and we were
(06:01):
frequently on the streets of Harlem, with handing out the
handbills and occasionally making speeches on the street to the people.
So it was not unusual that Attica was so focused. Well,
when did you first become politically aware in terms of
(06:24):
the African American struggle for dignity, equality, freedom. There's a
very young man I remember in the third grade the
teacher asked us to write a paper about anything. Couldn't
write about much at that age, but I wrote a
paper about the struggle of black people to be free.
(06:46):
And she was really quite amazed, and she asked me
where did I get those ideas from? And I said
from my father and the man upstairs. It was Billy Myers,
who rented an apartment in my family's house. My father
and he used to on the weekends would discuss political events.
(07:07):
So I was very early inversed in in the civil
rights dialogue. That would have been maybe mid forties. Yeah,
I would say a lot of people now don't think
about there being a robust civil rights movement. You know,
doctor King and Salma and all that is in you know,
(07:28):
the fifties. Maybe ten years after this, well, there was
no movement, but black people were very aware of the
contradictions in the society, and my father and a man
upstairs just to frequently discuss the inconsistencies that existed in
(07:48):
black life, visa be the struggle to be freedom, which
which was almost continual after the end slavery, we've continually
fought to extricate ourselves from oppression. Your dad seems like
you must have had a pretty big influence on you.
(08:09):
I mean, you're citing him as as a person would
kind of opened your mind and was you would always
hear him talk about the struggle for black freedom, and
I know he also played banjo. Yeah, it was. He's
an influencer who playing music. And also his mother, my grandmother,
Mamma Rose, was very active in civil rights affairs and
(08:34):
and the Baptists. Black Baptists were very committed in the
in the South, so they had what might have had
amount to pre civil rights organizations. And then my grandmother
frequented and she she read quite a bit, she ran intensely,
(08:57):
and and her daughter, my aunt Advis was a school teacher,
so I was frequently acquainted with was going on in
the black community. Did your dad teach you to play
your first instrument. Well, my first instrument was the banjo,
(09:19):
and he taught me a few chords on the banjo.
I later took piano lessons formerly and clarinet, and a
studied a bit of saxophone with Tony Mitchell. And in
the early days when you were learning banjo with your dad,
what would you have been listening to or playing? Well,
(09:41):
what he was playing? In fact, he played. He taught
me the first few bars of the Charleston. The Charleston
like the dance Charleston, Charleston dumped up up Babe, Dub
dub d dot dot. That's James P. Johnson's. It was
(10:01):
a dance, and it was a dance that was inspired
by the music The Charleston. That's so cool. How did
you end up settling on sax Well, I was a
boy in school. I heard play well, we had quite
a couple of very good musicians, Brinkley Blackwell, Norman Satchel,
(10:26):
and a white white boy, George Obuletski. I believe it
was quite adapted the saxophone. So I was, you might say,
influenced by all three of them, especially Satchel, who one
day he played for the Art in the Assembly a
(10:49):
piece of Sunny Stitt stringing the jug and I went
home and I told my mother I want to get
a saxophone. I was about fifteen at that age. After
that time, I had been studying piano and clarinet. Philadelphia
is a rich jazz town. When did you start listening
(11:10):
to jazz? When did you become aware of it? And
when do you start becoming aware of the musicians who
were in your city? In Philly, first, I became aware
of the music, and that was from the beginning because
my father played what you called so called jazz music,
I called an African American music. From the very beginning,
(11:30):
that was all I listened to. He had recordings of
Duke Ellington, count By See a lot of blues recordings.
So through him I became aware of what was going on,
thinking about the people who are you're in your town,
the Heath Brothers, Coltrane. Yeah. I heard Jimmy when I
(11:51):
was seventeen. I believe I'd go into a concert of
stand Getz. He was playing at a place called Reynolds
Hall in Philadelphia, and he was there was Jimmy and
Rainy and the place was packed. So they played the
first set, but Reynolds Hall had a number of rooms
(12:15):
that they rented out to private affairs, and a friend
of mine who I was with at the time, Eddie Ford,
we started wandering around the building and we hit on
this room where there was some kind of affair going
on and Jimmy Heath was playing, and I remember we
(12:36):
were so attracted by what he played that we never
went back to hear the stand guests after the intermission.
And I asked Jimmy when I took the liberty to
asked him if he would give me some help on
the saxophone, and he said he would. I remember going
(12:59):
to his home the following week and I found out
he didn't own a saxophone. In fact, he'd been playing
on a borrow at horn and I brought my sax
with me and he played it. I couldn't get much
shout of it, but I remember after he played it,
it seemed like a ticket the life of its own.
It's the color had changed the who He sort of
(13:23):
warmed it up and hung out with him all that
That afternoon he went to his jam session and played.
And the next week I was going back from my
lesson and his brother two d Albert answered the door
and he said, Jimmy's in the joint. He was in
jail and he stayed in jail for six years. WHOA,
(13:47):
I didn't. I didn't know that part of the story. Yeah,
he had. They had caught him with smoking jan on
the back of a car and he was imprisoned for
six years. So I never got the second lesson. Wow.
So he had one lesson with him, Yeah, And that
(14:07):
was really listening to him play, and that was quite
informative by itself. But I never really formally got to
study with him. I know. Not too long after that
you had you were in a band with Lee Morgan. Yeah.
I met Lee as a kid. I was a year
(14:30):
older than him, but he was very advanced and he
was playing with really professional music. He was a professional
when I met him. He was playing with guys like
C Sharp and Coltrane. He was known even though he
was only fifteen or sixteen years old. I asked him
to give me some help on the instrument, and he
(14:55):
consented to do so. The first session I made with him,
I had only heard stern gets really on the saxophone,
and I tried to create my stand get sound, and
he and his friend who were observing me. They seemed
(15:16):
to be somewhat They thought it was rather peculiar. They
didn't I don't think that they They accepted my offering.
So finally he asked me to play something with him,
to play a blues and I learned the blues from
(15:38):
my father because I knew the blues instinctively. When I
finished playing this my solo, he said, man, don't ever change.
And that's how we developed a very lasting friendship. And
(16:00):
when he would have blues gigs, he would call me
to play with him. Because he played standards in Ballot,
he had a very wide knowledge of music, but I
was sort of limited to the blues. But I could
play the blues. So it's like you went back to
the source. Well, yeah, I used the sound that I knew.
(16:25):
I'd heard a lot of Bevin Webster prayers through the
recordings of my father, and I suppose that sounded a
little bit like Ben. That was my natural sound and
the sound that I later made my own. Yeah, Ben
(16:46):
Webster's quite a quite a soulful cat man. His sound
is oh yeah, soulful brother. We'll be right back with
more from Archie Shep after a quick break we're back
with more of my conversation with Archie Shep. So you
had a bean with Lee Morgan and Carl Holmes called
(17:07):
the Jolly Rompers. Well, in fact, I was with the
Jolly Carl and John Holmes. They had a band out
in Mullagrove, Pennsylvania. But I kept bugging, bugging them too
to get Lee Morgan in the band. So when they
got Lee, they fired me. You know, so much for
(17:34):
trying to do a good thing, Arn'tie. Yeah, yeah, trying
to help my friends get a gig. You mentioned that
Lee Morgan was a year or two younger than you,
but when you look at his career compared to yours,
you know, his was much more sort of straight ahead.
So it's funny to me that you two coming from
the same town, that you, being the older of the two,
(17:55):
kind of had this much more from the start, this
very adventurous career where you were really exploring and stretching out.
And not that Lee wasn't Lee was incredible, but his
sound was much more in line with the hard bop
sound tradition. Yeah that was because I seemed up the
Cecil Taylor. Really, I went in a direction I never
(18:17):
thought I would, in fact so called free jazz reimprovisation
that was encouraged by Cecil, and he kind of opened
my ears to another direction. And Cecil was a piano
player and maybe also like a poet from New York. Yeah,
(18:40):
it was one of the first to really completely dispensed
with traditional harmony and tempe. And after Ornette came to
New York. And I don't know, Ornette was probably doing
the same thing out in California, but ct was the
(19:02):
influence in New York. When did you first hear Cecil
Taylor and what made you when you heard him gravitate
towards that sound? Well, I didn't really like the sound
I heard him on record, and I wasn't very impressed.
My background was, as you said, very much oriented towards
(19:25):
lee and the kind of music he played. But his
bass player heard me at a jam session in New
York and Cecil was looking for a saxophone player, so
he recommended me to Cecil, and Cecil hired me without
(19:46):
having really heard me, on the advice of his bass player.
I met him one night on the streets in New
York in the West Village, and somehow he seemed to
know me though I had never been introduced to him.
So you're Archie Shepp. He said, you want to make
a record, and I said yeah. Almost immediately after I
(20:10):
met him, we started rehearsing for a recording which we
made the World of Cecil Taylor and I was with
his man that We didn't work much for about two years,
and he was quite an influence on me ideationally in
(20:34):
terms of my ideas. And he was the first time
I heard of Malcolm X was through Cecil really and
we used to have discussions after rehearsals went on for hours.
So he was quite quite an enormous influence on my
(20:56):
political and social ideas. Did you ever see Malcolm speak
in those days? Oh? Yeah, I heard him at Temple
Number seven and then on the streets of Harlem. He
spoke when one afternoon the street was crowded with the
(21:19):
people or you could see his heads black heads, and
and the police at that time were mostly white. They
were in the crowd. They were read with with probably fear.
(21:39):
And Malcolm he mounted the podium and at that time
you had to have the American flag when you gave
a speech. You'd probably still do, and he had this
little flag that you get from Wolvers. You could hardly
see it from where I was, and he planted it
(22:01):
on the podium and he said, you see that flag.
Your mother was raped under that flag in the crowd,
and oh yeah, he says, your father was murdered under
that plague. And the police were really visibly frightened by
intimidated by his language. But he was a probable speaker,
(22:26):
and I was immediately attracted to his discourse. Around the
same time, you not only fall in with Cecil Taylor,
who's ideologically expanding your horizon, but musically be expanding not
only your vocabulary but the way you think of the
(22:46):
framework for the music you play. And then you're also
hearing Malcolm X speaking Harlem and at the time, no
one else was framing the struggle for African Americans the
way Malcolm was. He had a great way of making
you understand your own condition yeah and still just sense
(23:09):
of identity, and made you proud of your African heritage
because he would often talk about the anti sdents of slavery,
and it was an awakening. It broughtened my horizons in
(23:32):
a way that I never imagined coming from Philadelphia. So
Cecil Taylor was a big influence on sort of your
journey to avant garde music. But also from your hometown
is Coltrane, who we were friends with and played with,
who was also a person who really moved things forward
with in terms of where jazz could go, along with Ornett,
(23:54):
along with Cecil. Did you pick up any of that
from Coltrane as well? Well? John confirmed the direction I
was taking. He came out of the tradition, and like
Hornette and Cecil, he didn't start on the fringes of
the music. He began right in the center of it.
(24:17):
And he was an improviser par excellence. And I was
very influenced by primarily by his work, and as I say,
he convinced me that by by example, that I was
(24:38):
right in terms of what my search because he did.
He later recorded with Cecil Taylor, and he was a
close friend of Hornett's, and so when I met him
at the Five Spot, he was playing with Monk and
he never really took the horn out of his mouth
(25:01):
from the time he started on the intermissions, when when
the other guys would be at the bar, he was
he went into the kitchen and he was practicing the
pieces that he that he had learned from Monk he
was refining them. And so after I heard him one night,
(25:23):
I asked him I was I was at the club
of your night to hear him. I asked him if
he would help me with the saxophone, and he graciously conceded,
and I was at his house the next morning at
ten o'clock. Of course, he didn't get home until four
in the morning, and then he usually practiced, so he
(25:46):
went to sleep, and so he probably hadn't gone to
bed and sleep until about six, and I was there
at ten. So his wife at the time, Naima, told
me that he was asleep, but I could wait for him.
So at about one o'clock he got up and he
went right to the saxophone, which was on the sofa,
(26:10):
and he played about fifteen minutes and under rooted something
like I imagined was giant steps, of which later became
Giants Steps. Then when he asked me to play for him,
and his advice to me was to keep my hands
closer to the keys so I would be able to
(26:33):
move faster. And he didn't really formally teach me. I
just had conversations with him. I remember talking with him
one day, and he spent the whole afternoon talking about
Monk and Miles and I'll teatum. And he explained to
(26:54):
me how he resolved chords, maybe starting a fifth away
from the tonic and coming down and half steps playing scales,
something that I later tried to adapt to my own style.
But really basically it was a communion of my appreciation
(27:17):
for him, and more than actual saxophone lessons, we became
conversant and and I really, I guess because I appreciate
it him so much. I look looks up to him
as an older brother. I had been an only child,
(27:41):
but an older brother that I wish I had had
and probably wish you had more time with him, sure too, Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.
And John Coldman helped you get your recordy with Impulse, right, yeah,
he was essential in my getting that recording. I had
(28:01):
been calling Bob Theel, the A and R Man Impulse.
I call him frequently. At the time. I was un
welfare and I used to take a dollar a day
and change it to dimes custom dime to make a
phone call, and I would call his office, his secretary Lillian,
(28:23):
whom I got to know later on fairly well. But
I always say Bob is out to lunch or he's
gone for the day. Finally, I asked John, on the
advice of Bill Dixon, who was working together. He said, well,
col change your friend, why don't you ask him to
(28:45):
get you a record date. So I kind of gave
me enough of a nerve to ask John the people
to help me talk to Bob Thield. And he looked
at me very hard, and he said, you know, a
lot of people think I'm easy. And I said, John,
and that's not where I'm coming from. I'm serious. And
(29:13):
he knew I respected him, so he said, well, I'll
see what I can do. The next day, I called
and Lee and the secretary said, Bob's he's out to lunch,
but he's expecting your call. In that way, I arranged
a recording date. He tried to talk me out of
(29:34):
him by saying that you guys are avant garde and
you want to play your own music, you will have
to play the songs of Coltrane. But I had already
been rehearsing. I knew that that was his line, and
I had already been rehearsing with Roswell Rudd a repertory
(29:57):
of John's music. So I said, yeah, I know, and
I'm ready. So that the date was arranged and when
we arrived at the studio, Rudy Van Yelder's Bob, but
he really was he didn't want to do this recording
at all. He has his back turned to me and
(30:18):
all I could see was smoke coming out of his pipe.
And by the time we did the third recording and
so he said, hey, this stuff is great. I'm gonna
call John and ask him to come and hear you.
So he called Sharane out on Long Island. We were
in New Jersey, and Shane very graciously conceded to come
(30:45):
to the recording date. It was late at night, and
so when he arrived you will see on the album
cover he doesn't have on any sucks. But I later
heard that John didn't wear socks anyway. So and he
(31:06):
played Bob. Theeld played some of the examples of the
recording for Train and the only one that he didn't
like was the piece that I had written. It was
a piece called Rufus Swung is back at lasted the
win in his next step. It was a title. It
was a bit lengthy and political in nature, and he
(31:31):
didn't wanted to use that, and he said, I don't
like this recording, and uh, he played it for John
and John said I like it, Bob, so they left
it him. So that's the only piece that I wrote
that's on the recording. It's the recording. It's war for Train, Yeah,
and it's a Those are some beautiful renditions of of Coltranes. Yeah.
(31:54):
I thought we we nailed it. We got it wasn't
exactly the way he would have played it. That's what
makes it great, though, Thank you. And you also played
on the Love Supreme sessions with Coltrane and then also
on the Ascension record. Yes, how are those sessions with John?
(32:15):
I was always overwhelmed by the presidents of John Coltrane,
and I always tried to do my best and to
present my work as originally as possible. I Love Supreme,
I was, I suppose somewhat intimidated, though he didn't mean
(32:38):
for me to be. But I had a problem just
expressing what I really might have done, because I could
have really approached the song more moodally and gotten into it.
But I wanted to do something that was somehow different,
(32:59):
and so the first takes I don't know I don't.
I didn't feel like I got into the music like
I really wanted to. But as we did several other
ticks they've released them recently, I can see that I
relaxed and I got into the music more intensely. What
(33:23):
did you think of the music he was making on
A Love Supreme and Ascension too at that time? I mean,
was it surprising to you that that's what he was composing? No, no,
not at all. In fact, when we did Ascension, he
had a set of chords that he gave to McCoy
to play as the sort of interludes, and he would
(33:45):
play on the interludes. I often wish I had asked
him what were the chords that he gave McCoy to play,
But I didn't think to do that. After a quick break,
we'll be back with more from Archie Chep. We're back
with the rest of my conversation with Archie Chap. There's
(34:06):
a lot of Latin influence in your music, even songs
that might not even maybe harmonically or melodically sound Latin.
There's a there's a you know, like a three over two,
or you know, there's a rhythm sometimes going on and
through your music. Where did born in the South, move
to Philly, Dad plays banjo, slot of blues, going on
(34:29):
jazz music, of course, Where did this Latin influence coming?
At what point did that enter your consciousness? Well? When
I moved to New York, I played in the Puerto
Rican band with a guy called Chito Castro. He features
that marengue and rhythms like that, which I quickly and
(34:54):
it became attached to. And I still like those rhythms.
What is it about those rhythms that appeal to you. Well,
there's sense of dance and the dances they do are
really quite exciting. And it's interesting too, because by the
time you start recording records the sixties, jazz has really
(35:17):
gotten away from the idea of jazz is being dance
music is kind of gone or out of favor, and
you're bringing this element back into it. It's kind of interesting. Well,
I did, and I always consider dancing and essential fund
of African American music expression. This is a good chance
(35:40):
to talk about why you don't like the term jazz.
I read at some point the word art you said
you felt is a passive word. There's no function to
the word art. Art. It's not a functional thing, and
you consider at least your music, or maybe music in general,
to be functional. Is that still something you believe? Is
that something you ascribed to still? Yeah? Absolutely, And dance
(36:04):
is a function of music. So yes, I do feel
that the word art is a rather abstract unless it's
connected to something that has meaning. I think a lot
of people would say avant garde, and you, you know you,
I think you do consider the music you play avant garde.
(36:27):
That drings up an anecdote Duke and the Max and
Charlie Mingus but recording Money Jungle, and the story goes
that mister Mingus asked mister Ellington, why don't we do
(36:49):
something avant garde Duke, and Duke said, oh, Charles, and
let's not go back to that. So that's sort of
how I feel about avant guard because when I was
a younger man, they called me the leader of the
avant guard, and now they call me a veteran of
the avant guard. Duke's idea was, when you name the music,
(37:14):
you date it in time. So avalant guard is a
way of describing the music, but it doesn't fix the
music in a block of time. Imagine you feel the
same way about the term jazz. The label jazz, well, yeah,
and then I think the jazz is really a term
(37:34):
that limits the expression and the true meaning of African
American music, so that somehow blacks are left out of
the equation. They have made a part of the equation,
but in fact they're never given credit for the creation
(37:55):
of the music. It wouldn't exist without without our people.
Not to say that white people can't play that music,
but that's defined by African American innovations. Going back to
Louis Arms Show up to Coltrane, all the key innovators
(38:16):
have been African Americans. In fact, that the word jazz
is a French word, in my opinion, it's not in
the American lexicon English lexicon. There is a word in
French jazz a, which means to talk light batter, And
(38:41):
there's a town in France called Jazz, which is the
way jazz was originally spelled j ss. Yes, so it
seems to me to confirm the origins of the word
to the French people who settled in New Orleans and
who gave it the name jazz. I mean, yeah, that
(39:03):
would done to make sense. Then that would be the
French connection, Yeah, the French connection. Yeah. Yes. Do you
have a composition of yours that you return to most often,
either in your mind or and you're playing something you
think about most often? In other words, a favorite composition
or one that you just, for whatever reason, returned to
(39:23):
most often. I have a piece Ima, which is dedicated
to my daughter. I played that quite a bit, and
another piece I dedicated to Alma Hope Hope too, which
I have played quite a bit. I'll ask one last question.
(39:44):
When Quincy Jones put out Back on the Block in
the early nineties, I remember that you weren't the biggest
fan of it because it put people like Dizzy Gillespie
and surrounded them by these different trappions, these different idioms.
So I was curious, you know, how your views have
changed since then. You've never seemed to be a person
(40:06):
who felt restricted to one style music, So I'm just
curious how you felt collaborating with your nephew Who's Who's
a rapper, rap poetic. I feels very close to rap
because I did would would would be called a slam today,
(40:26):
I guess and tribute to my grandmother Murmur Rose back
in the sixties, and I did another poem set to
music called the Wedding when Elsa in California. So I
(40:47):
feel that in a way, I'm kind of one of
the originators of rap music, along with the Last Poets
and Lengths and News and Melbourne Van Trifles. I was
very early into mixing words and music, So playing with
(41:10):
my nephew was really a privilege. I enjoyed it very
much because it's like getting back into something that I
had been explored many years before. Well, Archie, I don't
want to keep you from your practice. I know you're
gonna be practicing now. Thank you so much for doing this.
(41:31):
It's really an honor, and it's been an honor to
listen to your music all these years as well. Thank
you so much, Thank thank you. You've asked some very
interesting questions and this is a very interesting interview. Thanks
Archie Chip for sharing stories with us from his incredible career.
Do you hear our favorite Archie Cheps songs? Tad to
(41:53):
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(42:16):
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You can try it for free for seven days. Sign
up for Pushnick and Apple Podcasts subscriptions. Archie Shep's been
(00:55):
a leader in what's known as avant garde jazz since
the nineteen sixties. He famously played tenor sacks alongside John Coltrane,
Lee Morgan, and the great free jazz pianist Cecil Taylor.
But like some musicians who are consider jazz artists, eighty
four year old Shep doesn't consider the music he plays
jazz at all. He calls it African American music to
(01:18):
acknowledge the Black Americans who created the tradition. Shep has
been politically engaged for his entire sixty year career. Every
one of his dozens of albums touches on African Americans
struggle to attain equal rights In some fashion one of
my favorite albums. For instance, Attica Blues takes a critical
look at the Attica prison riots of nineteen seventy one.
(01:41):
On today's episode, I talked to Archie Shep about how
an assignment he received in the third grade sparked his activism.
Shep also talks about his relationship with Coltrane, who he
says never took his horn out of his mouth, and
he also recalls the rhetorical power of Malcolm X and
the lasting image of seeing him speak to a sea
of blackheads on the streets of Harta. This is broken
(02:08):
record liner note for the digital age. I'm justin Richmond.
Here's my conversation with Archie Shepp. I first heard your
music when I was probably fifteen years old. Sixteen years old,
I discovered Attica Blues, Yeah, and it was at this
(02:29):
time when I was just developing a love of jazz
music and I heard Attica Blues and it changed my
whole idea of what people were doing then and what
jazz could be. And obviously there was a journey to
that album, but I thought it could be a good
place to start one because it was my starting point
(02:49):
with your music that I've since dived real deep into
and fallen in love with. But it also really matches
sort of the tenor of the present time here in America. Well,
the idea was given to me by my drummer at
the time, Bieber Harris, who suggested that it might be
a good idea to commemorate what it going on in Attica.
(03:13):
And I thought it was a good idea, and at
that point I began to write music and put together
the idea for the album. One of the reasons that
it really kind of opened my eyes to what jazz
could be because there's these kind of incredible vocals on
that album that are unlike other vocal jazz. It's not
(03:36):
like a vocal jazz record the way you might think
of an Ella Fitzgerald album sounding right, And I know
your drummer wrote those lyrics. Did he come to you
with the lyrics first? When he had the idea, Well,
he didn't actually write the lyrics. I wrote the lyrics,
and I gave him credit for it because at the
time he was trying to become a member of BMI
(03:58):
and he had to have some document recorded, and I
gave him cridit for the words the lyrics, though I
actually wrote the lyrics. Did you write them before you
compose the music? Well, at the same time, some of
the lyrics were suggested to me by him and just
(04:24):
in conversation. He had a worry of describing things about
the natural forces and various things that he would say
that gave me an idea of what I wanted to put.
I wanted to construct the lyrics only when the natural
(04:46):
forces told the world it's getting old. Do I worry? Yeah,
I worry? Can you dig it about the human soul?
So some of some of his conversation influenced my writing
of the lyrics. Was it common for you or uncommon
(05:08):
for you you to sort of derive inspiration for a
song or an album from political happenings of the time. Well,
I've been politically engaged just about all my career. All
my albums have some make some illusion to struggle for
African Americans to attain equal equal rights. So it was
(05:35):
not unusual that Nattica Blues was dedicated and focused very
intensely on the on the civil rights struggle. Because I
was an activist on the streets with a very Baraka
and people Calvin Hicks, people like that, and we were
(06:01):
frequently on the streets of Harlem, with handing out the
handbills and occasionally making speeches on the street to the people.
So it was not unusual that Attica was so focused. Well,
when did you first become politically aware in terms of
(06:24):
the African American struggle for dignity, equality, freedom. There's a
very young man I remember in the third grade the
teacher asked us to write a paper about anything. Couldn't
write about much at that age, but I wrote a
paper about the struggle of black people to be free.
(06:46):
And she was really quite amazed, and she asked me
where did I get those ideas from? And I said
from my father and the man upstairs. It was Billy Myers,
who rented an apartment in my family's house. My father
and he used to on the weekends would discuss political events.
(07:07):
So I was very early inversed in in the civil
rights dialogue. That would have been maybe mid forties. Yeah,
I would say a lot of people now don't think
about there being a robust civil rights movement. You know,
doctor King and Salma and all that is in you know,
(07:28):
the fifties. Maybe ten years after this, well, there was
no movement, but black people were very aware of the
contradictions in the society, and my father and a man
upstairs just to frequently discuss the inconsistencies that existed in
(07:48):
black life, visa be the struggle to be freedom, which
which was almost continual after the end slavery, we've continually
fought to extricate ourselves from oppression. Your dad seems like
you must have had a pretty big influence on you.
(08:09):
I mean, you're citing him as as a person would
kind of opened your mind and was you would always
hear him talk about the struggle for black freedom, and
I know he also played banjo. Yeah, it was. He's
an influencer who playing music. And also his mother, my grandmother,
Mamma Rose, was very active in civil rights affairs and
(08:34):
and the Baptists. Black Baptists were very committed in the
in the South, so they had what might have had
amount to pre civil rights organizations. And then my grandmother
frequented and she she read quite a bit, she ran intensely,
(08:57):
and and her daughter, my aunt Advis was a school teacher,
so I was frequently acquainted with was going on in
the black community. Did your dad teach you to play
your first instrument. Well, my first instrument was the banjo,
(09:19):
and he taught me a few chords on the banjo.
I later took piano lessons formerly and clarinet, and a
studied a bit of saxophone with Tony Mitchell. And in
the early days when you were learning banjo with your dad,
what would you have been listening to or playing? Well,
(09:41):
what he was playing? In fact, he played. He taught
me the first few bars of the Charleston. The Charleston
like the dance Charleston, Charleston dumped up up Babe, Dub
dub d dot dot. That's James P. Johnson's. It was
(10:01):
a dance, and it was a dance that was inspired
by the music The Charleston. That's so cool. How did
you end up settling on sax Well, I was a
boy in school. I heard play well, we had quite
a couple of very good musicians, Brinkley Blackwell, Norman Satchel,
(10:26):
and a white white boy, George Obuletski. I believe it
was quite adapted the saxophone. So I was, you might say,
influenced by all three of them, especially Satchel, who one
day he played for the Art in the Assembly a
(10:49):
piece of Sunny Stitt stringing the jug and I went
home and I told my mother I want to get
a saxophone. I was about fifteen at that age. After
that time, I had been studying piano and clarinet. Philadelphia
is a rich jazz town. When did you start listening
(11:10):
to jazz? When did you become aware of it? And
when do you start becoming aware of the musicians who
were in your city? In Philly, first, I became aware
of the music, and that was from the beginning because
my father played what you called so called jazz music,
I called an African American music. From the very beginning,
(11:30):
that was all I listened to. He had recordings of
Duke Ellington, count By See a lot of blues recordings.
So through him I became aware of what was going on,
thinking about the people who are you're in your town,
the Heath Brothers, Coltrane. Yeah. I heard Jimmy when I
(11:51):
was seventeen. I believe I'd go into a concert of
stand Getz. He was playing at a place called Reynolds
Hall in Philadelphia, and he was there was Jimmy and
Rainy and the place was packed. So they played the
first set, but Reynolds Hall had a number of rooms
(12:15):
that they rented out to private affairs, and a friend
of mine who I was with at the time, Eddie Ford,
we started wandering around the building and we hit on
this room where there was some kind of affair going
on and Jimmy Heath was playing, and I remember we
(12:36):
were so attracted by what he played that we never
went back to hear the stand guests after the intermission.
And I asked Jimmy when I took the liberty to
asked him if he would give me some help on
the saxophone, and he said he would. I remember going
(12:59):
to his home the following week and I found out
he didn't own a saxophone. In fact, he'd been playing
on a borrow at horn and I brought my sax
with me and he played it. I couldn't get much
shout of it, but I remember after he played it,
it seemed like a ticket the life of its own.
It's the color had changed the who He sort of
(13:23):
warmed it up and hung out with him all that
That afternoon he went to his jam session and played.
And the next week I was going back from my
lesson and his brother two d Albert answered the door
and he said, Jimmy's in the joint. He was in
jail and he stayed in jail for six years. WHOA,
(13:47):
I didn't. I didn't know that part of the story. Yeah,
he had. They had caught him with smoking jan on
the back of a car and he was imprisoned for
six years. So I never got the second lesson. Wow.
So he had one lesson with him, Yeah, And that
(14:07):
was really listening to him play, and that was quite
informative by itself. But I never really formally got to
study with him. I know. Not too long after that
you had you were in a band with Lee Morgan. Yeah.
I met Lee as a kid. I was a year
(14:30):
older than him, but he was very advanced and he
was playing with really professional music. He was a professional
when I met him. He was playing with guys like
C Sharp and Coltrane. He was known even though he
was only fifteen or sixteen years old. I asked him
to give me some help on the instrument, and he
(14:55):
consented to do so. The first session I made with him,
I had only heard stern gets really on the saxophone,
and I tried to create my stand get sound, and
he and his friend who were observing me. They seemed
(15:16):
to be somewhat They thought it was rather peculiar. They
didn't I don't think that they They accepted my offering.
So finally he asked me to play something with him,
to play a blues and I learned the blues from
(15:38):
my father because I knew the blues instinctively. When I
finished playing this my solo, he said, man, don't ever change.
And that's how we developed a very lasting friendship. And
(16:00):
when he would have blues gigs, he would call me
to play with him. Because he played standards in Ballot,
he had a very wide knowledge of music, but I
was sort of limited to the blues. But I could
play the blues. So it's like you went back to
the source. Well, yeah, I used the sound that I knew.
(16:25):
I'd heard a lot of Bevin Webster prayers through the
recordings of my father, and I suppose that sounded a
little bit like Ben. That was my natural sound and
the sound that I later made my own. Yeah, Ben
(16:46):
Webster's quite a quite a soulful cat man. His sound
is oh yeah, soulful brother. We'll be right back with
more from Archie Shep after a quick break we're back
with more of my conversation with Archie Shep. So you
had a bean with Lee Morgan and Carl Holmes called
(17:07):
the Jolly Rompers. Well, in fact, I was with the
Jolly Carl and John Holmes. They had a band out
in Mullagrove, Pennsylvania. But I kept bugging, bugging them too
to get Lee Morgan in the band. So when they
got Lee, they fired me. You know, so much for
(17:34):
trying to do a good thing, Arn'tie. Yeah, yeah, trying
to help my friends get a gig. You mentioned that
Lee Morgan was a year or two younger than you,
but when you look at his career compared to yours,
you know, his was much more sort of straight ahead.
So it's funny to me that you two coming from
the same town, that you, being the older of the two,
(17:55):
kind of had this much more from the start, this
very adventurous career where you were really exploring and stretching out.
And not that Lee wasn't Lee was incredible, but his
sound was much more in line with the hard bop
sound tradition. Yeah that was because I seemed up the
Cecil Taylor. Really, I went in a direction I never
(18:17):
thought I would, in fact so called free jazz reimprovisation
that was encouraged by Cecil, and he kind of opened
my ears to another direction. And Cecil was a piano
player and maybe also like a poet from New York. Yeah,
(18:40):
it was one of the first to really completely dispensed
with traditional harmony and tempe. And after Ornette came to
New York. And I don't know, Ornette was probably doing
the same thing out in California, but ct was the
(19:02):
influence in New York. When did you first hear Cecil
Taylor and what made you when you heard him gravitate
towards that sound? Well, I didn't really like the sound
I heard him on record, and I wasn't very impressed.
My background was, as you said, very much oriented towards
(19:25):
lee and the kind of music he played. But his
bass player heard me at a jam session in New
York and Cecil was looking for a saxophone player, so
he recommended me to Cecil, and Cecil hired me without
(19:46):
having really heard me, on the advice of his bass player.
I met him one night on the streets in New
York in the West Village, and somehow he seemed to
know me though I had never been introduced to him.
So you're Archie Shepp. He said, you want to make
a record, and I said yeah. Almost immediately after I
(20:10):
met him, we started rehearsing for a recording which we
made the World of Cecil Taylor and I was with
his man that We didn't work much for about two years,
and he was quite an influence on me ideationally in
(20:34):
terms of my ideas. And he was the first time
I heard of Malcolm X was through Cecil really and
we used to have discussions after rehearsals went on for hours.
So he was quite quite an enormous influence on my
(20:56):
political and social ideas. Did you ever see Malcolm speak
in those days? Oh? Yeah, I heard him at Temple
Number seven and then on the streets of Harlem. He
spoke when one afternoon the street was crowded with the
(21:19):
people or you could see his heads black heads, and
and the police at that time were mostly white. They
were in the crowd. They were read with with probably fear.
(21:39):
And Malcolm he mounted the podium and at that time
you had to have the American flag when you gave
a speech. You'd probably still do, and he had this
little flag that you get from Wolvers. You could hardly
see it from where I was, and he planted it
(22:01):
on the podium and he said, you see that flag.
Your mother was raped under that flag in the crowd,
and oh yeah, he says, your father was murdered under
that plague. And the police were really visibly frightened by
intimidated by his language. But he was a probable speaker,
(22:26):
and I was immediately attracted to his discourse. Around the
same time, you not only fall in with Cecil Taylor,
who's ideologically expanding your horizon, but musically be expanding not
only your vocabulary but the way you think of the
(22:46):
framework for the music you play. And then you're also
hearing Malcolm X speaking Harlem and at the time, no
one else was framing the struggle for African Americans the
way Malcolm was. He had a great way of making
you understand your own condition yeah and still just sense
(23:09):
of identity, and made you proud of your African heritage
because he would often talk about the anti sdents of slavery,
and it was an awakening. It broughtened my horizons in
(23:32):
a way that I never imagined coming from Philadelphia. So
Cecil Taylor was a big influence on sort of your
journey to avant garde music. But also from your hometown
is Coltrane, who we were friends with and played with,
who was also a person who really moved things forward
with in terms of where jazz could go, along with Ornett,
(23:54):
along with Cecil. Did you pick up any of that
from Coltrane as well? Well? John confirmed the direction I
was taking. He came out of the tradition, and like
Hornette and Cecil, he didn't start on the fringes of
the music. He began right in the center of it.
(24:17):
And he was an improviser par excellence. And I was
very influenced by primarily by his work, and as I say,
he convinced me that by by example, that I was
(24:38):
right in terms of what my search because he did.
He later recorded with Cecil Taylor, and he was a
close friend of Hornett's, and so when I met him
at the Five Spot, he was playing with Monk and
he never really took the horn out of his mouth
(25:01):
from the time he started on the intermissions, when when
the other guys would be at the bar, he was
he went into the kitchen and he was practicing the
pieces that he that he had learned from Monk he
was refining them. And so after I heard him one night,
(25:23):
I asked him I was I was at the club
of your night to hear him. I asked him if
he would help me with the saxophone, and he graciously conceded,
and I was at his house the next morning at
ten o'clock. Of course, he didn't get home until four
in the morning, and then he usually practiced, so he
(25:46):
went to sleep, and so he probably hadn't gone to
bed and sleep until about six, and I was there
at ten. So his wife at the time, Naima, told
me that he was asleep, but I could wait for him.
So at about one o'clock he got up and he
went right to the saxophone, which was on the sofa,
(26:10):
and he played about fifteen minutes and under rooted something
like I imagined was giant steps, of which later became
Giants Steps. Then when he asked me to play for him,
and his advice to me was to keep my hands
closer to the keys so I would be able to
(26:33):
move faster. And he didn't really formally teach me. I
just had conversations with him. I remember talking with him
one day, and he spent the whole afternoon talking about
Monk and Miles and I'll teatum. And he explained to
(26:54):
me how he resolved chords, maybe starting a fifth away
from the tonic and coming down and half steps playing scales,
something that I later tried to adapt to my own style.
But really basically it was a communion of my appreciation
(27:17):
for him, and more than actual saxophone lessons, we became
conversant and and I really, I guess because I appreciate
it him so much. I look looks up to him
as an older brother. I had been an only child,
(27:41):
but an older brother that I wish I had had
and probably wish you had more time with him, sure too, Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.
And John Coldman helped you get your recordy with Impulse, right, yeah,
he was essential in my getting that recording. I had
(28:01):
been calling Bob Theel, the A and R Man Impulse.
I call him frequently. At the time. I was un
welfare and I used to take a dollar a day
and change it to dimes custom dime to make a
phone call, and I would call his office, his secretary Lillian,
(28:23):
whom I got to know later on fairly well. But
I always say Bob is out to lunch or he's
gone for the day. Finally, I asked John, on the
advice of Bill Dixon, who was working together. He said, well,
col change your friend, why don't you ask him to
(28:45):
get you a record date. So I kind of gave
me enough of a nerve to ask John the people
to help me talk to Bob Thield. And he looked
at me very hard, and he said, you know, a
lot of people think I'm easy. And I said, John,
and that's not where I'm coming from. I'm serious. And
(29:13):
he knew I respected him, so he said, well, I'll
see what I can do. The next day, I called
and Lee and the secretary said, Bob's he's out to lunch,
but he's expecting your call. In that way, I arranged
a recording date. He tried to talk me out of
(29:34):
him by saying that you guys are avant garde and
you want to play your own music, you will have
to play the songs of Coltrane. But I had already
been rehearsing. I knew that that was his line, and
I had already been rehearsing with Roswell Rudd a repertory
(29:57):
of John's music. So I said, yeah, I know, and
I'm ready. So that the date was arranged and when
we arrived at the studio, Rudy Van Yelder's Bob, but
he really was he didn't want to do this recording
at all. He has his back turned to me and
(30:18):
all I could see was smoke coming out of his pipe.
And by the time we did the third recording and
so he said, hey, this stuff is great. I'm gonna
call John and ask him to come and hear you.
So he called Sharane out on Long Island. We were
in New Jersey, and Shane very graciously conceded to come
(30:45):
to the recording date. It was late at night, and
so when he arrived you will see on the album
cover he doesn't have on any sucks. But I later
heard that John didn't wear socks anyway. So and he
(31:06):
played Bob. Theeld played some of the examples of the
recording for Train and the only one that he didn't
like was the piece that I had written. It was
a piece called Rufus Swung is back at lasted the
win in his next step. It was a title. It
was a bit lengthy and political in nature, and he
(31:31):
didn't wanted to use that, and he said, I don't
like this recording, and uh, he played it for John
and John said I like it, Bob, so they left
it him. So that's the only piece that I wrote
that's on the recording. It's the recording. It's war for Train, Yeah,
and it's a Those are some beautiful renditions of of Coltranes. Yeah.
(31:54):
I thought we we nailed it. We got it wasn't
exactly the way he would have played it. That's what
makes it great, though, Thank you. And you also played
on the Love Supreme sessions with Coltrane and then also
on the Ascension record. Yes, how are those sessions with John?
(32:15):
I was always overwhelmed by the presidents of John Coltrane,
and I always tried to do my best and to
present my work as originally as possible. I Love Supreme,
I was, I suppose somewhat intimidated, though he didn't mean
(32:38):
for me to be. But I had a problem just
expressing what I really might have done, because I could
have really approached the song more moodally and gotten into it.
But I wanted to do something that was somehow different,
(32:59):
and so the first takes I don't know I don't.
I didn't feel like I got into the music like
I really wanted to. But as we did several other
ticks they've released them recently, I can see that I
relaxed and I got into the music more intensely. What
(33:23):
did you think of the music he was making on
A Love Supreme and Ascension too at that time? I mean,
was it surprising to you that that's what he was composing? No, no,
not at all. In fact, when we did Ascension, he
had a set of chords that he gave to McCoy
to play as the sort of interludes, and he would
(33:45):
play on the interludes. I often wish I had asked
him what were the chords that he gave McCoy to play,
But I didn't think to do that. After a quick break,
we'll be back with more from Archie Chep. We're back
with the rest of my conversation with Archie Chap. There's
(34:06):
a lot of Latin influence in your music, even songs
that might not even maybe harmonically or melodically sound Latin.
There's a there's a you know, like a three over two,
or you know, there's a rhythm sometimes going on and
through your music. Where did born in the South, move
to Philly, Dad plays banjo, slot of blues, going on
(34:29):
jazz music, of course, Where did this Latin influence coming?
At what point did that enter your consciousness? Well? When
I moved to New York, I played in the Puerto
Rican band with a guy called Chito Castro. He features
that marengue and rhythms like that, which I quickly and
(34:54):
it became attached to. And I still like those rhythms.
What is it about those rhythms that appeal to you. Well,
there's sense of dance and the dances they do are
really quite exciting. And it's interesting too, because by the
time you start recording records the sixties, jazz has really
(35:17):
gotten away from the idea of jazz is being dance
music is kind of gone or out of favor, and
you're bringing this element back into it. It's kind of interesting. Well,
I did, and I always consider dancing and essential fund
of African American music expression. This is a good chance
(35:40):
to talk about why you don't like the term jazz.
I read at some point the word art you said
you felt is a passive word. There's no function to
the word art. Art. It's not a functional thing, and
you consider at least your music, or maybe music in general,
to be functional. Is that still something you believe? Is
that something you ascribed to still? Yeah? Absolutely, And dance
(36:04):
is a function of music. So yes, I do feel
that the word art is a rather abstract unless it's
connected to something that has meaning. I think a lot
of people would say avant garde, and you, you know you,
I think you do consider the music you play avant garde.
(36:27):
That drings up an anecdote Duke and the Max and
Charlie Mingus but recording Money Jungle, and the story goes
that mister Mingus asked mister Ellington, why don't we do
(36:49):
something avant garde Duke, and Duke said, oh, Charles, and
let's not go back to that. So that's sort of
how I feel about avant guard because when I was
a younger man, they called me the leader of the
avant guard, and now they call me a veteran of
the avant guard. Duke's idea was, when you name the music,
(37:14):
you date it in time. So avalant guard is a
way of describing the music, but it doesn't fix the
music in a block of time. Imagine you feel the
same way about the term jazz. The label jazz, well, yeah,
and then I think the jazz is really a term
(37:34):
that limits the expression and the true meaning of African
American music, so that somehow blacks are left out of
the equation. They have made a part of the equation,
but in fact they're never given credit for the creation
(37:55):
of the music. It wouldn't exist without without our people.
Not to say that white people can't play that music,
but that's defined by African American innovations. Going back to
Louis Arms Show up to Coltrane, all the key innovators
(38:16):
have been African Americans. In fact, that the word jazz
is a French word, in my opinion, it's not in
the American lexicon English lexicon. There is a word in
French jazz a, which means to talk light batter, And
(38:41):
there's a town in France called Jazz, which is the
way jazz was originally spelled j ss. Yes, so it
seems to me to confirm the origins of the word
to the French people who settled in New Orleans and
who gave it the name jazz. I mean, yeah, that
(39:03):
would done to make sense. Then that would be the
French connection, Yeah, the French connection. Yeah. Yes. Do you
have a composition of yours that you return to most often,
either in your mind or and you're playing something you
think about most often? In other words, a favorite composition
or one that you just, for whatever reason, returned to
(39:23):
most often. I have a piece Ima, which is dedicated
to my daughter. I played that quite a bit, and
another piece I dedicated to Alma Hope Hope too, which
I have played quite a bit. I'll ask one last question.
(39:44):
When Quincy Jones put out Back on the Block in
the early nineties, I remember that you weren't the biggest
fan of it because it put people like Dizzy Gillespie
and surrounded them by these different trappions, these different idioms.
So I was curious, you know, how your views have
changed since then. You've never seemed to be a person
(40:06):
who felt restricted to one style music, So I'm just
curious how you felt collaborating with your nephew Who's Who's
a rapper, rap poetic. I feels very close to rap
because I did would would would be called a slam today,
(40:26):
I guess and tribute to my grandmother Murmur Rose back
in the sixties, and I did another poem set to
music called the Wedding when Elsa in California. So I
(40:47):
feel that in a way, I'm kind of one of
the originators of rap music, along with the Last Poets
and Lengths and News and Melbourne Van Trifles. I was
very early into mixing words and music, So playing with
(41:10):
my nephew was really a privilege. I enjoyed it very
much because it's like getting back into something that I
had been explored many years before. Well, Archie, I don't
want to keep you from your practice. I know you're
gonna be practicing now. Thank you so much for doing this.
(41:31):
It's really an honor, and it's been an honor to
listen to your music all these years as well. Thank
you so much, Thank thank you. You've asked some very
interesting questions and this is a very interesting interview. Thanks
Archie Chip for sharing stories with us from his incredible career.
Do you hear our favorite Archie Cheps songs? Tad to
(41:53):
Broken Record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to
our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast.
We can find all of our new episodes. You can
follow us on Twitter apt broken Record. Broken Record is
produced helpfully Arose, Jason Gambrell, Martin Gonzalez, Eric Sandler, and
Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chafee. Our executive
(42:16):
producer is mil LaBelle Broken Record is a production of Pushman.
In his stuis also consider becoming a Pushnick. Pushnick is
a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and add free
uninterrupted listening for four ninety nine. An look for Pushnick
exclusively on Apple Podcasts subscriptions and if you like the show,
please Rember to share, rate, and review us on your
(42:37):
podcast app. A team musics by Henny beats Down Justin
Richmond
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