Archie Shepp Quotes

#1. I listened to King Oliver and I listened to Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp ... I listened to everything I could that came from that place that they call the blues but, in formality, isn't necessarily the blues.

Eric Clapton

#2. Maybe that's what love is. Having someone who guides you through different experiences, coaxes you to try news things but still makes you feel safe.

Wally Lamb

#3. Black music has become a commercial commodity. Live performances are not so accessible as they were previously. It use to be possible to go to the bar on the corner and hear music. It was available for a fifteen cent beer.

Archie Shepp

#4. Art is fundamental, unique to each of us ... Even in difficult economic times - especially in difficult economic times, the arts are essential.

Maria Shriver

#5. 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.

Archie Shepp

#6. Let not a man glory in this, that he loves his country; let him rather glory in this, that he loves his kind.

Baha'u'llah

#7. And when I met Cecil Taylor it was a complete transformation of musical identities. All the tenets that I had grown up with were thrown out the window.

Archie Shepp

#8. 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.

Archie Shepp

#9. When you've done everything you can to train yourself for competition, you'll sleep well when the tournament is over, win or lose.

Karch Kiraly

#10. I find that here in the States, audiences are generally less knowledgeable, from the cognitive point of view, though they are emotionally more receptive.

Archie Shepp

#11. Today, music is visual.

Archie Shepp

#12. It was a tribute to my ability to present an image so at variance with what I felt that few noticed I was in any way different.

Kay Redfield Jamison

#13. In America, for a brief time, people who followed Coltrane were studied and considered important, but it didn't last long. The result is that the kind of music I played in the '60's is completely dismissed in this country as a wrong turn, a suicidal effort.

Archie Shepp

#14. 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.

Archie Shepp

#15. Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade, a musical idea, no matter how innovative, is threatened.

Archie Shepp

#16. Great men should think of opportunity and not of time. That is the excuse of feeble and puzzled spirits.

Benjamin Disraeli

#17. A defensive referendum is for avoiding war and to help keep the Taiwanese people free of fear.

Chen Shui-bian

#18. I can't see any separation between my music and my life. I play pretty much race music: its about what happened to my father, to me, and what can happen to my kids.

Archie Shepp

#19. It was a particularly interesting and exciting time, and the European political and artistic establishment was turned on by the Civil Rights Movement and the artistic revolution that was becoming a part of jazz.

Archie Shepp

#20. Part of me is drawn to the nature of sadness because I think life is sad, and sadness is not something that should be avoided or denied. It's a fact of life, like contradictions are.

Robert Redford

#21. I should be soaring away with my head tilted slightly toward the gods, feeding on the caviar of Shakespeare. An actor must act.

Laurence Olivier

#22. In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous.

Archie Shepp

#23. Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical.

Yogi Berra

#24. Clairvoyant, n.: A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron - namely, that he is a blockhead.

Ambrose Bierce

#25. Yes, the audience is so important to Negro music, especially the element of call and response.

Archie Shepp

#26. There was both love and despair in his voice.
He was truly handicapped when it came to emotions, and falling in love hadn't changed that ...

J.R. Ward

#27. A whole generation of young whites have involved themselves with traditional Negro music.

Archie Shepp

#28. The Self awakens only as he contacts the Earth.

Dane Rudhyar

#29. Music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential.

Archie Shepp

#30. 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.

Archie Shepp

#31. I wonder love can have already set
In dreams, when we've not met
More times than I can number on one hand.

Philip Larkin

#32. 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.

Archie Shepp

#33. Should I really tell her how that made me feel? How I thought for sure Les had something to do with it or that it was divine intervention or a freaking miracle? Because I honestly feel like it was too perfect to be chalked up to coincidence.

Colleen Hoover