Marion Brown - Three For Shepp (1967 US Impulse! Stereo First Pressing Gatefold Vinyl LP)

Marion Brown - Three for Shepp | Vinyl LP - 1967 US Impulse! Stereo (AS-9139, black-ring labels, gatefold)

Three for Shepp is a record built on gratitude. By late 1966 Marion Brown was one of the most promising alto players in the New York avant-garde, already heard on John Coltrane's Ascension and Archie Shepp's Fire Music, and for this Impulse! date he turned the compliment back on Shepp. The title works like Shepp's own Four for Trane had two years earlier: side one is three Brown originals, side two is three Shepp compositions, a younger musician honouring an older one in the same currency they both dealt in. The band is a snapshot of the scene at its most fertile. Grachan Moncur III's trombone runs through the whole record, Sirone holds down the bass, and the piano and drum chairs change between sides, Dave Burrell and Bobby Kapp for Brown's tunes, Stanley Cowell and Beaver Harris for Shepp's. The Shepp side is the stronger, its looser structures giving the group room to move, and "The Shadow Knows" on Brown's side is the moment where everything ignites. It is free jazz played with real control, more conversation than chaos.

Brown's path ran through the most interesting corners of the music. He had come up around Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra, he would go on to make the pastoral Afternoon of a Georgia Faun for ECM, and the players around him here fanned out into the era's key movements: Stanley Cowell would co-found Strata-East, Dave Burrell would record for BYG-Actuel, Sirone would join the Revolutionary Ensemble. Frank Kofsky, the critic who did most to frame this music as a political act, wrote the original notes.

This copy is the 1967 US first pressing on Impulse!, catalogue number AS-9139, with the original black-ring labels and gatefold sleeve, and it carries a Japanese insert, marking it as a US copy that was exported to Japan.