Archie Shepp Quotes

Jazz music, as is also the case with the old down-home spirituals, gospel and jubilee songs, jumps, shouts and moans, is essentially an American vernacular or idiomatic modification of musical conventions imported from Europe, beginning back during the time of the early settlers of the original colonies.

Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition.

The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.

I believe that blues and jazz are the two uniquely American contributions into music.

Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

People have this perception of soul music of somebody shouting.

Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.

You can't seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues - you can't seperate it. Because that's where it all started, and that's where it all come from - that's where I learned to keep rhythm - in church.

I think that American music, for me, it's a synthesis of a lot of different things. But for me growing up in North Carolina, the stuff that I was listening to, the things that I was hearing, it was all about black music, about soul music.

Jazz told people about the special music that came out of America and about America in general and this kind of liberty and freedom that we have.

As far as I'm concerned, blues and jazz are the great American contributions to music.

Jazz is the American’s preferred music, and it is created by Negroes to satisfy their love of noise and to whet their sexual desires ...

Black musicians were imitating speech cadences, and Kerouac was imitating the black musicians' breath cadences on their horns and brought it back to speech. It always was speech rhythms or cadences as far as the ear that Kerouac was developing. All passed through black music.

Blues is such a dynamic and ever-changing system of music.

I was always drawn to gospel music and the roots of African-American music. It's the foundation of rock and roll.

Jazz is the music of unemployment.

Gospel music in those days of the early 1930s was really taking wing. It was the kind of music colored people had left behind them down South and they liked it because it was just like a letter from home.

Jazz is really 20th-century fusion music. You take West African harmony and rhythm, mix with European harmony, and boom!

The main three components are the blues, improvisation - which is some kind of element that people are trying to make it up - and swing, which means even though they're making up music, they're trying to make it up together. It feels great, like you're having a great conversation with somebody.

Blues was made for the recessed.

Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.

This music that was supposed to only come from tapes like in any restaurant. Something would happened. One bird will start to do a little jazz thing, and another bird will start to answer.

I grew up in Synagogue in the boys' choir. We didn't listen to music in the house; only at temple. Then I went to a mostly African American high school on the South Side of Chicago and joined a gospel choir.

Jazz should be recognized as music of the people, based in a lot of accents and melodies. What is jazz but music that people danced to? Jazz has the dynamic thing. I don't think you have to be playing only Charlie Parker licks on your horn or whatever the new version of that is.

Jazz is a music of great achievements but speed and chops serve a different function in jazz.