Archie Shepp and Jason Moran, Let My People Go

Before doing anything else, listen to Paul Robeson, in complete silence, alone. There is a weight. A code. A meaningfulness way beyond what any of us living now can know. Then play Archie Shepp and Jason Moran. There is a momentousness …

Published: 15 Feb 2021. Updated: 3 years.

Before doing anything else, listen to Paul Robeson, in complete silence, alone. There is a weight. A code. A meaningfulness way beyond what any of us living now can know.

Then play Archie Shepp and Jason Moran. There is a momentousness continued.

Back in December hearing the first stirrings available at the time drawn from Let My People Go, a beatifically striking treatment of the spiritual 'Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child' immediately past merges with time present, I turn to Marian Anderson, to Mahalia Jackson, and to OV Wright inspired by the superb treatment by these two giants of jazz: together, as one.

Hearing the rest of the album Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington's 'Isfahan' has an intimacy and crucially also a sense of anarchy that is part of the Archie Shepp rationale. Moran knows how to dismantle chords and you get a sense of collapse and then brand new construction more than reconstruction all over again. But above all he is responding.

Intergenerational albums are not unusual in jazz, one of the music's biggest and wisest strengths. Less heard however as on Let My People Go is when you have an intergenerational meeting of masters from wildy disparate generations.

Shepp was part of the ''New Thing'', the fire in ''fire music'', a revolutionary figure of free-jazz in the 1960s and onwards.

Moran, mentored initially by Greg Osby, emerged at the end of the 1990s and is one of today's greatest jazz pianists and bandleaders with his trio the Bandwagon and as a reimaginer of Thelonious Monk and Fats Waller among much else.

The best tracks are certainly the 'Motherless' and 'Go Down Moses' treatments that artistically are worth their weight in gold. Shepp has been down this road before many times and interpreted the melody of 'Moses' before with his great pianistic muse Horace Parlan (1931-2017) on Goin' Home (Steeplechase, 1977) for instance. However his duo with Moran is rare alchemy of another kind entirely given Moran's study of touch that in totality lifts us up like nobody's consciousness from theirs to climb into our own private space voiced literally and figuratively above all by Shepp. SG. Archie Shepp and Jason Moran photo: Accra Shepp

Out now on Archieball

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R+R=Now, Live

Call me a sucker but I always look forward to releases when I see a very tasty line-up because of course a band with top players is always a prospect. The crossover R+R=Now when first surfacing however left me cold. The forecast a few years on is …

Published: 14 Feb 2021. Updated: 3 years.

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Call me a sucker but I always look forward to releases when I see a very tasty line-up because of course a band with top players is always a prospect.

The crossover R+R=Now when first surfacing however left me cold. The forecast a few years on is much improved. And the good news however is that this latest album is not a hurricane more a warm wind blowing from a better direction.

The Robert Glasper supergroup is much more organic than the oversized work in progress Collagically Speaking from 2018.

Laid back, live, and very unpretentious the results have an authentic club flavour and tap into a still changing hip-hop sensibility pivoting to jazz for the 2020s that is still experimental.

Glasper's touch above all else is magisterial and moving whatever the wrappings and is the chief interest. A springboard of an album towards future sounds. SG

On Blue Note

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As a postscript a case of not for the purists? Reading the papers today and Clive Davis' piece on the album is worth a read but frustrating. Clive is a critic who I rate highly (his theatre pieces are even better than his jazz writing) but here completely disagree with his Sunday Times review. You won't be neutral about R+R=Now, however. Dull they are not.