condition (record/cover): EX / EX- (minimal wear)

Gatefold sleeve with original innersleeve.

The 1964 debut for Impulse!, produced with Coltrane's personal blessing - Trane essentially walked Shepp through the label's front door, one of the great acts of patronage in jazz history. Archie Shepp repays it by refusing to imitate: four Coltrane compositions rearranged with Roswell Rudd, John Tchicai and Alan Shorter, bent into his own gritty, vocalized, brass-heavy world. "Cousin Mary" and "Naima" emerge transformed - tougher, stranger, completely Shepp. One of the great tribute records precisely because it honors the source by arguing with it. US pressing of an essential debut, and the start of one of the label's defining runs.