One For Archie begins with an absence. A duo concert between Moor Mother and Archie Shepp, planned for October 19, 2023 at Enjoy Jazz, had been announced as a major encounter between two generations of radical Black music. When a spinal disc operation forced the then 86‑year‑old saxophone legend to cancel, the disappointment was real - but so was the sense that such a moment could not simply be allowed to vanish. In response, festival director Rainer Kern convened a small, heavy ensemble in Shepp’s honour: Moor Mother on spoken word, Nicole Mitchell on flute, and Nduduzo Makhathini on piano. What emerged, captured spontaneously during the festival, is not a substitute for the lost concert but a different kind of premiere: a tribute that sounds like a conversation with Shepp’s spirit, his catalogue and his politics.
The title track, “One For Archie,” openly signals its lineage. It nods to Shepp’s 1964 Impulse! debut Four For Trane, the album that announced him as both Coltrane’s heir and his own uncompromising force, later ranked by Jazzwise among the “100 Jazz Albums That Shook The World.” Moor Mother’s text builds on that history by treating Shepp’s classic record titles as a kind of vocabulary: she doesn’t imitate his horn, but she speaks through the architecture of his discography, folding in shards of Attica Blues, Fire Music, The Magic of Ju‑Ju and other milestones as if they were phrases in a shared language. Instead of the dialogue that would have taken place on stage, the piece becomes an invocation, a roll call and a coded love letter, acknowledging Shepp’s sonic radicalism while foregrounding his lifelong commitment to Black liberation struggles, anti‑imperial critique and the social role of improvising art.
Musically, the trio finds a way to echo Shepp’s balance of abrasion and tenderness without ever lapsing into pastiche. Makhathini’s piano lays out a shifting ground of modal colours and gospel‑tinted harmonies, sometimes sparse, sometimes surging, suggesting both the liturgical gravity of Shepp’s ballad playing and the restless undercurrent of his more turbulent sides. Mitchell, described here as “the most important flutist in the history of jazz,” threads a second current through that landscape: breathy low tones, sharp upper‑register cries, lines that dance between blues inflection and avant‑garde contour, tracing the emotional arc of the poem in a timbral register Shepp himself has explored via voice, growl and split tone. Moor Mother, for her part, picks up on the elder’s rhythmic and rhetorical grain: the way he could pivot from rugged clarity to deep humanity in a single phrase. Her delivery swerves between chant, incantation and near‑shouted declaration, building to dramatic spikes that feel less like performance technique and more like lived rupture, the kind of peaks that give listeners chills because they don’t sound “acted” at all.
If the A‑side is anchored in lineage and tribute, the B‑side, “They’ve Got A Plan,” fires straight into the future tense. Here the focus pivots to “Agenda 2063,” the African Union’s long‑range blueprint for social, economic and political transformation across the continent. Rather than offering dry commentary, the piece operates as a kind of sonic beacon: part warning siren, part rallying cry, part speculative hymn. Moor Mother’s words weave between critique and possibility, attentive to the gap between visionary documents and lived realities, while Mitchell and Makhathini carve out a setting that is tense, luminous and open-ended, more invocation than illustration. The music insists that agendas are not abstract; they are felt in bodies, streets, classrooms, ports, and it lets that insistence ring.
