ARCHIE SHEPP — A Sea of Faces (review)

ARCHIE SHEPP — A Sea of Faces album cover Album · 1975 · Avant-Garde Jazz Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Sean Trane
Released in late 75, this is more or less the first album I’m aware of that is not on the Impulse! label outside that white cover series with those extremist or alternative recordings. Anyway, the line-up features some of the usual suspects, like Burrell (piano), Harris (drums) and Brown (bass), but in this case singer Foy and trombonist Greenlee are also present. Don’t get fooled too much by the unusual artwork for a jazz album, though

Clearly the album’s centrepiece is the 26+ mins aptly-titled Hipnosis (sic), a very repetitive riff that gets repeated endlessly and tends to overstay its welcome by a good 10 minutes (at least). Yes it sounds rather great groove at first, but the novelty soon wears off and buy the 7th minute, we’re just left with an overlong showboat for Shepp’s endless improvs - however good they may be, as he doesn’t go much into dissonance – sometimes helped by Greenlee’s trombone and at one point, even a piano doodling.

On the flipside, Mozambique starts quite interestingly, with Shepp’s high-pitched sax over Brown’s bowed-contrabass for maximum dramatic effects, and Foy’s near a capela vocals are quite charming, until it segues into the Sea Of Faces poem, where Shepp delivers slowly the verses, but clearly when brown bass and Foy’s charming vocals come back and the whole group go into erupting vocal harmonies, you just know you’ve hit the album’s climax. Rounding it up, the crooning I Know About The Life (with Bunny Foy behind the microphone) is really completely out of the musical context of the album, and ruins its cohesiveness, something rather recurrent on Shepp releases. The further the loss of direction, the closing Looking For Someone is (what I call) a hard bop piece that also sticks out like a sore thumb when listening to the first two tracks.

Not really Shepp’s most consistent album, all decades considered, Sea Of Faces is also fairly accessible to everyone, and gives an interesting idea of Archie’s musical spectrum, so it might serve as a fitting Shepp intro without resorting to a stinky “best-of” compilation album
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