Archie Shepp Quotes

18 quotes in 342 categories

• All the tenets that I had grown up with were thrown out the window.
• I find that here in the States, audiences are generally less knowledgeable, from the cognitive point of view, though they are emotionally more receptive.
• I can't see any separation between my music and my life. I play pretty much race music: its about what happened to my father, to…
• In America, for a brief time, people who followed John Coltrane were studied and considered important, but it didn't last long. The result is that…
• So, I was just a young guy, maybe with an idea, and Cecil Taylor, himself a rebel, would take a chance on a guy like…
• And when I met Cecil Taylor it was a complete transformation of musical identities. All the tenets that I had grown up with were thrown…
• So, rap has that quality, for youth anyway; it's a kind of blues element. It's physical, almost gymnastic. It speaks to you organically. Rap grows…
• Yes, the audience is so important to Negro music, especially the element of call and response.
• You get a show where people are jumping up and dancing, but it's not a critical event in the sense of profound catharsis. Essentially it's…
• To some degree, yeah, because I have to play a certain number of originals that might be considered avant-garde material. I realize though, that only…
• Rap actually took root in the Negro community, and then in the Hispanic community, long before it impacted on the larger American community as a…
• It was a particularly interesting and exciting time, and the European political and artistic establishment was turned on by the Civil Rights Movement and the…
• In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without…
• Black music has become a commercial commodity. Live performances are not so accessible as they were previously. It use to be possible to go to…
• A whole generation of young whites have involved themselves with traditional Negro music.
• Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade, a musical idea, no matter how innovative, is threatened.
• Today, music is visual.

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