01 Backwater Blues       play
02 Trouble In Mind 
03 Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out 
04 Careless Love Blues   play
05 How Long Blues 
06 Blues In Thirds 
07 When Things Go Wrong 
08 Goin' Down Slow 
09 Courthouse Blues 
10 C. C. Rider 
11 Make Me A Pallet On The Floor 
12 St. James Infirmary

Credits: 
Piano - Horace Parlan 
Tenor Sax & Soprano Sax - Archie Shepp 

Notes: Recorded February 6, 1980 at Sweet Silence Studios, Copenhagen

Three years after the sensational spiritual recording by this duo Goin Home [ASCS 1079] producer Nils Winther had Archie and Horace in the studio again. The theme this time was traditional blues. Once again the Shepp-Parlan duo made one of the best selling SteepleChase releases. Englands Gramophone magazine called the duo "a powerful and ultimately inspirational collaborarion." This recording was awarded the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis for Modern Und Jazz-Rock of 1982 by the prestigious Deutsche Phono Akademie. The recording is so clear that you can hear the saxophone-flaps like a real concert. Bluesy ballads played with deep feeling.

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1. Little Blue Girl
2. More Than You Know
3. Blue In Green
4. Blue And Sentimental
5. Cry Me A River
6. If I Should Lose You
7. Alone Together

Musicians:
Archie Shepp - Tenor Saxophone, Soprano Saxophone, Vocals
John Hicks  -Piano
George Mraz - Bass
Idris Muhammad – Drums

Recorded in November 1995, saxophonist Archie Shepp's Blue Ballads is a counterpart to True Ballads and Something to Live For, which date from the same period. All three albums feature pianist John Hicks, bassist George Mraz, and drummer Idris Muhammad. These intimate studies in shared introspection, along with Black Ballads and True Blue, document Shepp's astute exploration of the ballad form during the 1990s. On Blue Ballads Shepp mingled time-honored standards such as Rodgers & Hart's "Little Girl Blue," Arthur Schwartz's "Alone Together," and Vincent Youmans' "More Than You Know" with the Miles Davis-Bill Evans masterpiece "Blue in Green" and "Blue and Sentimental," which had served as the feature number for Count Basie's star tenor saxophonist Herschel Evans some 60 years earlier. Once again and in all the best ways, Shepp shines in parallel with his contemporary Pharoah Sanders. Both are skilled balladeers as well as free spirits who simply cannot be bottled or pigeonholed. --- arwulf arwulf, Rovi

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A1 Hambone 12:05
A2 Los Olvidados 8:36
B1 Malcom, Malcom, Semper Malcom 4:40
B2 Prelude To A Kiss 4:41
B3 The Girl From Ipanema 8:18
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C1 Hambone (live version)	11:53 

Alto Saxophone – Marion Brown
Bass – Reggie Johnson (tracks: A1, A2, B2, B3)
Drums – Joe Chambers (tracks: A1, A2, B2, B3)
Tenor Saxophone – Archie Shepp
Trombone – Joseph Orange
Trumpet – Ted Curson

Some of the most exciting jazz albums to listen to are those that try to strike a middle ground between the mainstream and the Avant-garde. One such example is Archie Shepp’s Fire Music : an often-fascinating album, rich in compositional and improvisational prowess. Employing a sextet including drummer Joe Chambers and alto saxophonist Marion Brown, Shepp puts together a record that is both challenging and accessible to most listeners.

Fire Music ’s masterpiece is undoubtedly “Hambone.” A multi-part composition, the song’s highlights are the opening theme, Ted Curson’s complex trumpet musings and a bluesy section featuring a tough and funky solo by Brown. The track’s momentum is maintained with the thematically dense “Los Olvidados” which features another sterling contribution by Curson. The spoken word piece “Malcolm, Malcolm-Semper Malcolm” is a tribute to Malcolm X and features bassist David Izenzon and drummer J.C. Moses. Concluding the album is a bizarre version of “The Girl from Ipanema,” with an solo by Shepp that is frankly, quite boring. Regardless, Fire Music is an album that belongs in any serious jazz fan’s collection. ---Robert Gilbert, allaboutjazz.com

One of forward-looking tenor man Archie Shepp's definitive early albums, 1965's Fire Music set the tone for much of what was to come over the next several years, both in Shepp's own career and in the jazz scene as a whole. Moving far beyond bebop toward more avant-garde realms, Fire Music was simultaneously a central document of the mid-'60s "New Thing" school of jazz and an arrow that pointed towards the subsequent explorations of Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, et al. The title refers to an African ceremony, and there's an urgency here that's fueled by the civil rights unrest of the day and aimed towards the burgeoning Black Power movement, both of which would remain key jazz subtexts for some time. Fire Music is far from the first free jazz album; Coleman and others had already experimented with free-form improvisation before this. But it subverts the conventions of the bebop generation thoroughly, turning melodies and harmonies both inward and outward upon themselves, throwing open the doors to open-ended structures and tonal experimentation. Even the "straight" tunes interpreted here are given a funhouse-mirror treatment, stretching them beyond expectations. Just as psychedelia expanded rock's palette in the '60s, so Shepp's Fire Music helped broaden the possibilities of jazz. ---Jim Allen, AllMusic Review

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