- published: 01 Jan 2016
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Roswell Rudd (born Roswell Hopkins Rudd, Jr. in Sharon, Connecticut, on November 17, 1935) is a Grammy Award-nominated American jazz trombonist and composer.
Although skilled in a variety of genres of jazz (including dixieland, which he performed while in college) and other genres of music, he is known primarily for his work in free and avant-garde jazz. Since 1962 Rudd has worked extensively with saxophonist Archie Shepp.
Rudd graduated from Yale University where he had played with Eli's Chosen Six, a dixieland band of Yale students that Rudd joined in the mid-'50s. The sextet played the boisterous trad jazz style of the day and recorded two albums, including one for Columbia. His landmark collaborations with Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, John Tchicai and Steve Lacy grew out of the lessons learned while playing rags and stomps for drunken college kids in Connecticut.
Rudd later taught ethnomusicology at Bard College and the University of Maine. On and off for a period of three decades, Roswell Rudd assisted Alan Lomax with his world music song style (Cantometrics) and Global Jukebox projects, and the wealth of information on the music of this planet that he absorbed inspired him to collaborate beyond the periphery of jazz or even of western music.
Archie Shepp (born May 24, 1937) is a prominent African-American jazz saxophonist. Shepp is best known for his passionately Afrocentric music of the late 1960s, which focused on highlighting the injustices faced by the African-Americans, as well as for his work with the New York Contemporary Five, Horace Parlan, and his collaborations with his "New Thing" contemporaries, most notably Cecil Taylor and John Coltrane.
Shepp was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, but raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he studied piano, clarinet and alto saxophone before focusing on tenor saxophone (he occasionally plays soprano saxophone and piano). Shepp studied drama at Goddard College from 1955 to 1959, but he eventually turned to music professionally.He played in a Latin jazz band for a short time before joining the band of avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor. Shepp's first recording under his own name, Archie Shepp - Bill Dixon Quartet, was released on Savoy Records in 1962, and featured a composition by Ornette Coleman. Further links to Coleman came with the establishment of the New York Contemporary Five, which included Don Cherry. John Coltrane's admiration led to recordings for Impulse Records, the first of which was Four for Trane in 1964, an album of mainly Coltrane compositions on which he was sided by his long-time friend, trombonist Roswell Rudd, bassist Reggie Workman and alto player John Tchicai. The album Giant Steps had been one of Coltrane's best-known.