Music CD - Archie Shepp: Fire Music

	Music CD: Fire Music Artist: Archie Shepp List Price: $15.98 Our Price: Your Save: $ 15.98 ( 100% ) Availability: Manufacturer: Grp Records
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Tracks: 1. Hambone 2. Olvidados 3. Malcolm, Malcolm, Semper Malcolm 4. Prelude to a Kiss 5. Girl from Ipanema 6. Hambone [Live]
Binding: LP Record EAN: 0011105015813 Label: Grp Records Manufacturer: Grp Records Number Of Discs: 1 Publisher: Grp Records Release Date: 1995-08-15 Studio: Grp Records
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Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: hands down one of the best Comment: I picked up Fire Music in the mid 90s and have never grown sick of this truly unique record. I would rank this recording as one of the finest and most overlooked in jazz of the 1960s. Shepp's sextet pounds out some blistering and intense music that is full of dynamics and wild composition that borderlines avantgarde, but never fully crosses over the line. This album teeters right on the edge without fully exploding, which makes perfect sense calling it Fire Music because the music is a steady burn. Shepp's playing is intense and passionate. there's longer and more dynamic heads than allot of other jazz. There's a certian sloppyness to it as well that actually makes this album better, exagerating the edgy nature of the music. I must also mention the awesome drumming of Joe Chambers. Shepp is a highly underrated genius. Customer Rating: Summary: A gift Comment: Searched for this CD for a friend, looking for "The Girl from Ipenema" I hope the gift was enjoyed! Customer Rating: Summary: The Best Shepp Comment: "Fire Music," with its rich horn textures, contsantly changing tempos, and inventive, original compositions and arrangements, has to be Archie Shepp's best album as a leader. Archie's tenor playing is passionate and wild, and the incredible band of Ted Curson (tp), Joe Orange (tb), Marion Brown (as), Reggie Johnson (b) and Joe Chambers (d) follow suit. The disc opens with "Hambone" and its wonderful shifting rhythms and mutated groove. Next is "Los Olividados," with its alternately haunting and playful melodies, followed by the eerie, laconic spoken-word/musical elegy, "Malcolm, Malcolm-Semper Malcolm," for the slain civil rights leader. After these three outstanding "new jazz," black power firestorms, it's not surprising that Impulse wanted Shepp to include accessible material like Ellington's "Prelude to a Kiss" and one of the era's (and history's) most popular jazz tunes, "The Girl From Ipanema," to conclude the album. But this is no watered-down finale, and you would be hard pressed to find more exploratory and original readings of these standards. With that being said, it's too bad Shepp couldn't have combined the first three tracks here with say, the beginning of "On This Night," because that would have been one of the greatest avant-garde jazz albums of all-time. As is, "Fire Music" is still pretty amazing. Customer Rating: Summary: Fire Music Comment: Fire Music: Its just that. Passionate fire, anger, melancholy--upended and roaring through the hi-fi. Get this album, check the updated Ipanema--its hot. The horn choir effect and Shepp's screaming tenor mix, reaching, reaching, reaching...epiphany? More Reviews
Editorial Reviews: Tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp was an essential voice in the revolutionary jazz of the 1960s, creating a music that insistently linked art and social issues. He was also a musician who fused the past and present in jazz, leapfrogging over bebop to develop a sound that combined the expressive breathiness of Ben Webster with the new vocabulary of free jazz. Those qualities are much in evidence in these 1965 sessions. The principal band here is a sextet, and it brings a primal force to Shepp's charging, complex, multidimensional compositions. But within this potent brew, individual voices distinguish themselves. Altoist Marion Brown's lines always invoke the blues, while trumpeter Ted Curson, a veteran of Charles Mingus's bands, provides a sense of detached perspective. The riffing horns create a backdrop for some of Shepp's most volatile orations on "Hambone" and "Los Olvidados" as his tenor seems to shout, shriek, strut, and cajole with a life of its own. A live septet version of "Hambone" is even more turbulent than the studio take. The rest of the CD heads off in a variety of directions. Duke Ellington's "Prelude to a Kiss" is recast with some fresh dissonance. Taking his initial cues from Webster, Shepp goes on to turn the ballad into something very much his own, though still Ellingtonian in spirit. His arrangement of "Girl from Ipanema" adds unlikely fire to the Jobim tune, while "Malcolm," a poem inspired by the assassination of Malcolm X, has Shepp's voice and tenor accompanied by just bass and drums. While these diversions might now seem forced or melodramatic, Fire Music is a varied CD that retains much of its original power. --Stuart Broomer