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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, ....