Archie Shepp Quotes

You get a show where people are jumping up and dancing, but it’s not a critical event in the sense of profound catharsis. Essentially it’s celebratory.

Today, music is visual.

To some degree, yeah, because I have to play a certain number of originals that might be considered avant-garde material. I realize though, that only a few people in the audience actually know what that music is, or understand it.

So, rap has that quality, for youth anyway; it’s a kind of blues element. It’s physical, almost gymnastic. It speaks to you organically. Rap grows out of what young people really are today, not only black youth, but white – everybody.

So, I was just a young guy, maybe with an idea, and Cecil Taylor, himself a rebel, would take a chance on a guy like me. It turned out to be a very symbiotic partnership. I learned a lot from him.

Rap actually took root in the Negro community, and then in the Hispanic community, long before it impacted on the larger American community as a whole.