Loading details…
Artist
Bill Dixon & Archie Shepp
12+ albums
about
Archie Shepp – Bill Dixon Quartet is the debut album by saxophonist Archie Shepp and trumpeter Bill Dixon released on the Savoy label in 1962. The album features three performances by Shepp & Dixon with Don Moore and Paul Cohen and a version of Ornette Coleman's composition "Peace" with Reggie Workman and Howard McRae. In his book Free Jazz, author Ekkehard Jost observed that among the things Shepp and Dixon had in common was "the ambition to play a kind of music unburdened by traditional constraints and yet retaining to a great extent the essence of older jazz styles." He wrote: "In several ways the quartet recalls the early Ornette Coleman groups. First, there is no piano. Second, in the general compositional and formal frame of reference and even in certain details of Shepp's improvisations, there is not much difficulty recognizing Coleman as the model... Third, as with Coleman, the tunes act principally as emotional triggers and not as determinants of harmony and form. The players improvise on a tonal centre..., or on a relatively flexible modal groundwork... In both cases a steady swinging beat is present at all times, with no recognizable symptoms of rhythmic dissociation." User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.
