Archie Shepp - Fire Music To Mama Too Tight Revisited

2022 release

One of the great things of the ezz-thetics Revisited Series is that is a great way to catch up on music I haven’t heard in a long time, discover new records, or fill out gaps in my collection with albums that are long out of print that I have either never been able to find or could afford. This double dip into Archie Shepp’s mid-60s Impulse catalog is example nonpareil of the series’ importance for me: this was my first encounter with Mama Too Tight (1967) and it had been ages since my LP of Fire Music (1965) hit the turntable.

Fire Music, is, well, a classic. If one could only have one Shepp album in their collection, I wouldn’t argue against anybody who said this was it. A sextet date with Marion Brown, Ted Curson, Joseph Orange, Reggie Johnson, and Joe Chambers, Fire Music was the follow up to Shepp’s debut for Impulse, Four for Trane. It marks a growth in Shepp’s compositional ambitions and voice, as his charts show range and complexity; they are more than just heads harmonized for four horns. One hears both the influences of Ellington and Mingus and there’s a taught push and pull between the solo and the ensemble throughout. The album’s centerpiece is “Hambone,” which opens the album. With a series of different themes that range from declarative and bold to chaotic and sober, Shepp creates a set piece for each horn player. Curson blows over a charging, angry, waltz horn figure; Brown swaggers over a sly medium swing; Orange is somewhat relaxed, as his setting is similar to Brown’s. Where Curson sounded as if he was just a slip up away from being swallowed by the ensemble, Shepp blows with fire, quickly putting distance between him and the rest of the band. The head themes return just before Shepp loses his mates for good. Shepp’s arrangement of Ellington’s “Prelude to a Kiss” has the same drama and presence as the genuine article and makes the band sound much larger than a sextet, while his solo conjures the soul of Hodges and Webster. "The Girl from Ipanema” has a bright, almost big band feel, perhaps due to Chambers’ driving kicks, accents, and fills. Here, Shepp stretches out to take the longest solo on the album, taking his time and keeping the speedometer at a nice and easy 45 mph. A Sunday drive in Brazil. With its spoken word and tenor/bass/drums configuration (David Izenzon and J.C. Moses), “Malcolm, Malcolm, Sepmer Malcolm” always stuck out from the rest of the album. On the ezz-thetics edition it has been moved to the last track on the album, making that out-of-place feeling even more exaggerated.

Recorded about eighteen months after Fire Music – a stretch during which Shepp released On This Night, New Thing at Newport, and Live in San Francisco – Mama Too Tight is a similarly scintillating mix of Shepp originals and covers. The whole of side A is the epic “A Portrait of Robert Thompson (As A Young Man).” Here Shepp shows his compositional growth since Fire Music. The transitions between sections are somehow both nuanced and unexpected. The shift from the frenzied opening – which features a wild and fiery Shepp rocked by blasts and bellows from tubist Howard Johnson and trombonists Roswell Rudd and Grachan Moncur III, and Beaver Harris’s loud and active drums – to a new arrangement of “Prelude to a Kiss” is instantaneous, unexpected, and arresting. Later, a free jazz blowout quickly morphs into a march that is first comic and then heads out for Sousa territory. Somehow, none of it feels forced or incongruent. The title track is a grooving thirteen-bar blues that lives somewhere between Lee Morgan’s “The Sidewinder,” James Brown, and a free jazz jam session. Like the two “Preludes” heard earlier on the disc, Shepp’s arrangement of Fred Lacey’s lush ballad “Theme for Ernie” is a continuation of his rough and ready take on Ellingtonia – as if the Duke’s band stopped shaving for a month or two (although the switch to a Latin feel at the end is a curious choice). The album closes with “Basheer,” a sprawling and raucous ten-minute work that sounds Mingus-y in its approach. There are multiple themes, hints at themes, free-wheeling blowing over written counter ensemble lines, a Tommy Turrentine solo backed by long held horn chords, and simultaneous soloing where voices surge and scream to the top and recede. The piece often sounds as if it’s held together with scotch tape and hope – nearly always a recipe for excitement.

The ezz-thetics edition’s remastering of Fire Music far outpaces the sound quality of my slightly beat up first pressing: the music is crisp, clear, and punchy, although I do not know how it compares to the mid-90s Impulse reissue. The sound quality on Mama Too Tight is similarly excellent. While Fire Music and Mama Too Tight aren’t as hard to find as other albums in the Revisited series, their pairing on one great sounding disc makes discovering or revisiting (no pun intended) two of Shepp’s great works pretty easy.

–Chris Robinson

Track 1,2,3,4 from Fire Music
Archie Shepp - tenor saxophone
Marion Brown - alto saxophone
Ted Curson - trumpet
Joseph Orange - trombone
Reggie Johnson - double bass
Joe Chambers - drums

Track 5
Archie Shepp - tenor saxophone
David Izenzon - double bass
J.C. Moses - drums

Track 6,7,8,9, from Mama Too Tight
Archie Shepp - tenor saxophone
Perry Robinson - clarinet
Tommy Turrentine - trumpet
Grachan Moncure III - trombone
Roswell Rudd - trombone
Howard Johnson - tuba
Charlie Haden - double bass
Beaver Harris - drums