Jazz legend Archie Shepp recently sat down with Red Bull Music Academy to chat it up about working with John Coltrane, revolutionizing his sound and his implications on free jazz versus blues.
Shepp has been running his own label Archieball for nearly 10 years and has collaborated with a number of artists, including playing on Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Shepp also released Four for Trane, his version of Coltrain's music, released in Ascension. Rumors, then, started to linger that Shepp may have been on his way to being the next Coltrane-esque artist.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Shepp about the subject. “What eventually happened was rather fortuitous for me, in the sense that I had the chance to meet John Coltrane and it was he who was the intermediary for me, in connecting me with Bob Thiele and Impulse! Records. In fact, Bob was totally negative in terms of doing that recording [Four for Trane]. I had been calling him for months, trying to get him on the phone, and his secretary always told me he was either out to lunch or he was gone for the day,” he continued.
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