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"Yes, the audience is so important to Negro music, especially the element of call and response."
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"Music reveals the deepest beauty of the soul."

"If I had the choice, I would sing only love songs."

"Music made me kinder. Music made me a lover."
Explore more quotes by Archie Shepp

"So, rap has that quality, for youth anyway; it's a kind of blues element. It's physical, almost gymnastic. It speaks to you organically. Rap grows out of what young people really are today, not only black youth, but white - everybody."

"Yes, the audience is so important to Negro music, especially the element of call and response."

"Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade, a musical idea, no matter how innovative, is threatened."

"I find that here in the States, audiences are generally less knowledgeable, from the cognitive point of view, though they are emotionally more receptive."

"Rap actually took root in the Negro community, and then in the Hispanic community, long before it impacted on the larger American community as a whole."

"So, I was just a young guy, maybe with an idea, and Cecil Taylor, himself a rebel, would take a chance on a guy like me. It turned out to be a very symbiotic partnership. I learned a lot from him."

"You get a show where people are jumping up and dancing, but it's not a critical event in the sense of profound catharsis. Essentially it's celebratory."

"It was a particularly interesting and exciting time, and the European political and artistic establishment was turned on by the Civil Rights Movement and the artistic revolution that was becoming a part of jazz."
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