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. So after he died, I didn't know how to relate to other people. I didn't know what it means to love another person.

Haruki Murakami

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. They say in time all things will pass. But before they do, they last . . . for just a little while.

Jess Fulton

#6. But we need to be careful.

Cynthia Shepp

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. I believe that the American people ought to be part of the conversation about what's happening in our economy, and what's happening in Washington and what's happening on Wall Street.

Alison Stewart

#13. Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe. If you believe, clap your hands!

James M. Barrie

#14. Today, music is visual.

Archie Shepp

#15. 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

#16. Your future is bigger than where you were born.

Matthew Ashimolowo

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. Surfing soothes me, it's always been a kind of Zen experience for me. The ocean is so magnificent, peaceful, and awesome. The rest of the world disappears for me when I'm on a wave.

Paul Walker

#21. I feel that one should employ methods that reflect the physics of the problem at hand rather than the methods one happens to know.

Lawrence Shepp

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

Archie Shepp

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

Archie Shepp

#24. Of course it was always a friendly debate though sometimes I got too loud.

Lawrence Shepp

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

Archie Shepp

#26. You build and do not destroy; you sow goodwill and reap it; smiles bloom in the wake of your passing, and I will keep your kindness in trust and share it as occasion arises, so that your life will be a quenching draught of calm in a land of drought and stress.

Kevin Hearne

#27. 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

#28. As the circle of light increases, so does the circumference of darkness around it.' Albert Einstein

Karishma Attari

#29. Ye have locked yerselves up in cages of fear and, behold, do ye now complain that ye lack FREEDOM!

Robert Anton Wilson

#30. 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

#31. If you hurt her I'll make you pay. I may be old, but that doesn't mean I can't make you suffer."
"Damn right. You've got the AARP on your side.

Shannon K. Butcher

#32. Data-driven statistics has the danger of isolating statistics from the rest of the scientific and mathematical communities by not allowing valuable cross-pollination of ideas from other fields.

Lawrence Shepp

#33. Everywhere you see in creation there is Divine love. Love is the highest force, the greatest force, and the simplest

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

#34. The task which we have set ourselves is simply to show why and for what purpose we hold that standpoint during most of our lives, and why and for what purpose we are provisionally obliged to abandon it.

Ernst Mach