John Tchicai — Archie Shepp Quartet
Rufus (Cool music 2044772)
The New York Art Quartet
Mohawk (Cool Music 2044774)

RUFUS (Swung, his face to the wind, then his neck snapped) is an Archie Shepp tune which grew from the very gut of the US civil rights movement. Originally recorded on this album in 1963, its context of racist terror and lynching has never gone away. Remember the nine black citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, gunned down in June 2015 at a church prayer meeting, not by white-hooded murderers of the Ku Klux Klan, but by a young white man who wore adoring emblems of the Confederacy, racist South Africa and Ian Smith’s Rhodesia? How much has changed, and how much has not changed.

So the reappearance of this long-unavailable album is terrifyingly apt. Its co-leaders are Shepp and the Danish-Congolese tenor Saxophonist John Tchicai (pictured), who formed two of the horns (with Don Cherry on pocket trumpet) of the New York Contempory Five, and both were to re-record Rufus on the much better-known Impulse! album Four for Trane in August 1964. With them on the 1963 session are drummer J C Moses and the bassist Don Moore.