Goin' Home (Archie Shepp and Horace Parlan album)

Goin' Home is a

After rising to the top of the avant-garde jazz movement during the 1960s, Archie Shepp faced a career challenge during the 1970s after the style lost popularity in the jazz scene, which had split between artists who played either a tamer or a more experimental sound.^[1] Shepp became a more mainstream performer, mostly playing hard bop, although he would occasionally return to his free jazz sound. To support himself financially, he spent most of his time playing in Europe.^[2] In 1972, jazz pianist Horace Parlan left the United States and eventually settled in Denmark,^[3] where Shepp had signed to SteepleChase Records.^[4]

Shepp became interested in recording

I felt I represented everybody who'd ever sang those songs, and to make the meaning of those songs clear was up to me at that point. They should be truthful, they should have the same authenticity as when they were sung, because that's the nature of this type of folk song. They were created by people who were in deep sorrow; they're slave songs. And so it challenged my own ability as modern Negro black man to traverse that historical plain. Could I do that? And I felt I could, and the tears were proof of it - that perhaps my condition hadn't changed so completely that I can't still feel what they felt.[4]

"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"

Shepp plays tenor saxophone on the song,^[6] accompanied by Parlan's bluesy, rhapsodic piano.^[11]

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The album has a melodic

The result is a truly spiritual music — one which is tender, passionate, muscular, uplifting, sensual, fiery, heartfelt, and heaven-storming all at once ... you can hear the same cry heard in Mahalia Jackson, in Billie Holiday, in Lester Young, in Ornette's piercing wail, in Ayler's wide-eyed scream, in Mingus, in Coltrane. It is not a cry of lament or a cry of weakness — it is a cry of strength, of affirmation, of soul.^[15]

In a retrospective review for AllMusic, jazz critic Scott Yanow found the performances "compelling" and said listeners who are "only familiar with Shepp's earlier Fire Music" will see the album as a "revelation."^[7] Moon believed its tempoless mood "gives the themes an extra shot of majesty" and found it "supremely melodic", writing that both Shepp and Parlan "do whatever is necessary to bring the spirit to the forefront."^[1] JazzTimes cited Goin' Home as one of "the finest [albums] of his career",^[25] and Tom Hull of The Village Voice cited it as SteepleChase's best release.^[26] Phil Johnson of The Independent wrote that the album "can be listened to almost without cease."^[27] Jazz historian Eric Nisenson called it "one of the most moving albums of the Seventies", but qualified his praise by critiquing that Shepp, an iconic figure in free jazz, "was no longer the firebrand who had so frightened and unsettled some white critics and jazz fans." Nisenson felt that, like Pharoah Sanders, Shepp's "trial by fire at the heart of the Sixties avant-garde had made him an unusually expressive musician," and Goin' Home showed that he was "finding inspiration in the entire black musical tradition."^[2]

Track listing

All songs are traditional compositions, excepted where noted, and were arranged by Archie Shepp.^[5]

Personnel

Credits are adapted from the album's liner notes.^[5]

• Per Grunnet – design
• Freddy Hansson – engineer
• Horace Parlan – piano
• Flemming Rasmussen – assistant engineer
• Archie Shepp – arranger, soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone
• Gorm Valentin – photography
• Nils Winther – photographer, producer

References