Ascension – added further propulsion to his career, emboldening him to delve deeper in his sonic explorations and liberate Black improvised music (Shepp wasn’t comfortable with the word “jazz”) from musical clichés as well as stock melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and structural conventions. While some of his contemporaries – like Coltrane, Ayler, and Pharoah Sanders – ruminated on cosmic and spiritual themes, Shepp was more overtly political. His music reflected the zeitgeist of an increasingly radicalized Civil Rights movement that had given rise to the ideologies of Black Power and Afrocentrism.
By the early 70s, Shepp was expanding his musical palette, combining the rhetoric of protest with a combination of free jazz and funk flavors on his seminal 1972 concept album,
Play
Hannah Pezzack
, May 18th, 2021 07:41
A re-issue from the 80s synth band Electric Party, Play is a fascinating slice of Amsterdam’s history, finds Hannah Pezzack
There’s a certain mythos that lingers in the history of the Dutch squatter’s movement. In the early 1960s, in response to Amsterdam’s housing crisis, local activists began taking over empty buildings which were kept in disarray by landlords in order to artificially increase rent prices. Incentivised by the collective action, the decade that followed was dubbed “Amsterdam Magisch Centrum” (Amsterdam Magical Centre), by the countercultural artist Robert Jasper Grootveld. The city gained traction as the cultural nexus of Europe; a place of creative and social innovation, attracting hordes of young, politically minded emigrates from all over the world.