Politics & Power Quote by Archie Shepp

Shepp frames the Civil Rights Movement and jazz’s late-60s upheaval as something Europe didn’t just “admire” but consumed - “turned on” is deliberately charged, equal parts compliment and indictment. The phrase captures a moment when radical Black American struggle became cultural electricity overseas, lighting up galleries, clubs, and intellectual salons that could safely fetishize rebellion at a distance. He’s describing excitement, sure, but also the seduction of politics as style: Europe’s establishment could flirt with liberation through sound.

The context matters: Shepp comes out of the free jazz explosion, when the music wasn’t merely evolving harmonically but declaring independence from polite expectations. Calling it an “artistic revolution” insists that what was happening in jazz wasn’t niche experimentation; it was a parallel front in the same war over dignity, power, and representation. For Shepp, the saxophone isn’t background music to history - it’s a historical actor.

The subtext is the uneasy transaction between Black artists and European prestige. European institutions “turned on” by civil rights could book the bands, praise the daring, even fund the avant-garde - while remaining insulated from the material costs of American racism that produced that art. Shepp’s sentence holds both truths: the thrill of being heard and the discomfort of being consumed. Jazz becomes a passport and a mirror, reflecting Europe’s desire to be seen as enlightened without having to surrender much.