Archie Shepp

Archie Shepp was a luminary on the jazz scene starting in the early 1960s. Born in 1937 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida but raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania he is a saxophone player, composer, pianist, singer, politically committed poet, and playwright. Shepp was a professor of music for 30 years and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst as well as a professor of African-American studies at SUNY, Buffalo. His most notable collaborations were with Cecil Taylor and John Coltrane but he also worked with Malcolm Goldstein to produce a soundscape dedicated to the life and works of Martin Luther King, Jr.