Fire Music /Imp [Import]

"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.

This is one of the best and most overlooked Impulse albums of the free jazz era. Archie Shepp's fire music is an album essential to any jazz collection.

Actually, Fire Music is hardly free jazz at all. The album starts with Hambone. The convulsive piece is highly arranged and orchestrated, with scary, dark, dissonet chord blocks, to which the band plays almost in unison (I'll get to that ALMOST shortly) It breaks in the middle to a blues, and then it is back to the full frontal assult of the beginning.

More orchestrations abound: especiially on the second track, and on the rendition of Jobim's Girl From Ipanina. Shepp used Elingtonion princeibles on all these arrangemets, with Ted Curson on trumpet, Marion Brown on Alto and Joe Orange on trombone. "Malcom" is Shepps elegy to Malcom X read over a bowed bass and some free jamming sax.

But if Shepp used Ellington as a guidepost for arranging, he certianly did not as a guidepost for mood. This is a pitch dark, violent, scary album. Not so out of place when you think of 1965: bus boycotts, Bull Conners fire hoses and police dogs, Medger Evers and Malcom X recently slain, the cities looted and burning, and men lynched for looking at a girl the wrong way. These were witchy, brass knuckle times, and Fire Music puts all the brutallity vicerally on vynal. I am only 40, but I can understand what the era was like when I play Fire Music.

Now, we have the music, gorgeous in all its long ago riotous horror, but the arrangments raise a question: you'll notice if you are fortunate enough to hear Fire Music that when the horns play together, they come in a bit off, as if the players had missed their cue and are landing half a beat too soon or late. (PLEASE COMMENT: does anybody else notice this, or am I nuts???) I have a hard time beleiving that musicians of this calibre would make a mistake like this through a session. I wonder if this was done on purpose, to create an almost dixiland chaos. The effect is extreamely jarring, but adds to the intruge of the album. It is definately not like the perfection of, say, Mingus' big band records of this time, but it will definately draw you in to Shepp's ugly beauty of a vortex.

That aside, this is one of the most emotional albums I have ever heard. If you have any sense, you'll be hearing it soon, too.

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.