Archie Shepp was born in 1937 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He was 7 years old when his family moved to Philadelphia, in the black neighborhood of "Brick Yard".

He started playing the banjo with his father, then he studied piano and saxophone at the same time as he did his secondary studies at Germantown College. He entered university, got into theatre, frequented novelists and poets like Leroy Jones, and wrote his first play "The Communist", an allegory on the situation of black Americans. At the end of the 50s, Archie Shepp met the most radical musicians of the time: Lee Morgan, Bobby Timmons, Jimmy Garrisson, Ted Curson, Beaver Harris... During this period, his political conscience found expression in plays and theatrical productions that only allowed him to survive.

It was at the beginning of the 60s that he met Cécil Taylor and made two recordings with him that would be decisive. In 1962, he signed his first album as co-leader with Bill Dixon. The following year, he founded the New York Contemporary Five with John Tchicaï, recorded four albums for the Fontana, Storyville and Savoy labels and discovered Europe with the same group.

From August 1964, he worked with Impulse: 17 albums were recorded including Four for Trane, Fire Music, Mama too Tight, which are among the classics of Free music. His collaboration with John Coltrane took shape in Ascension in 1965 and marked a turning point in avant-garde music. His participation in the creation of the Composers Guild with Paul and Carla Bley, Sun RA, Roswell Rudd, Cecil Taylor, reflects his militant commitment.

In July 1969, he went to Africa for the first time to the Pan-African Festival in Algiers, a city that was home to many black American opponents at the time. On this occasion, he recorded live for the Byg label, the first of six albums in the Actuel series and he played on stage with a group of Tuaregs. From then on, Archie Shepp would multiply the musical encounters "world" with Gwoka from Guadeloupe, Hungarians (CD Hungarian bebop with Mihaly Dresch) and many others.

From 1969, he taught ethnomusicology at the University of Amherst, Massachusetts); he continued to perform around the world, asserting his identity as an African American musician.

Francis Marmande wrote about him in the Dictionnaire du Jazz (published by Robert Laffont): "An artistic and intellectual personality of the highest order, Archie Shepp, a leading musician of the free avant-garde, was able to join, without abandoning the essential of this aesthetic, the "royal road" of jazz art. By developing a broad poly-instrumentality: a former viola player, he has also played the soprano since 1969, the piano since 1975, and, more recently, sings, on occasion, blues and standards. By populating his musical universe, whose substance asserts itself in continual expansion, with themes and stylistic elements provided by the greatest voices of jazz: from Ellington to Monk and Mingus, from Parker to Horace Silver and Albert Taylor. By giving himself the technical and emotional capacity to integrate into his saxophone playing various effects and tricks inherited from the masters of the tenor, from Webster to Coltrane, according to a combination that is unique to him. Which intensifies the specific features of his style: wild hoarseness of attacks, massive sound sculpted by a vibrato mastered in all its amplitudes, carrying away of the phrase until the end of the breath, abrupt changes in height, intensities and tempos, but also velvet tenderness woven on such a ballad. By deepening the spirit and the letter of the two sides of the song originating from Negro-American music: the blues and the spiritual. Of which he never ceases, through classical pieces or composed by him (Black Water Blues by Bessie Smith or Mama Rose, etc.) to reanimate the force of strangeness in the face of European music, in a unique mixture of wounded violence and immemorial nostalgia. From then on, the magnitude of his work [To date he has recorded more than 150 CDs] testifies that Archie Shepp is also, with Sonny Rollins, one of the best interpreters of the Babel memory of jazz, having, for his part, disposed his libertarian sensitivity to the collection and the appearance of the whole of this music, as much as to its invention. "

In recent years Archie Shepp has multiplied daring encounters without ever fearing to take risks. Latest projects on stage: Archie Shepp 4tet and the Dar Gnawa of Tangier, Born Free (with among others Jalal, Cheikh Tidiane Seck, Rocé), Phat Jam (with the beat boxer Napoleon Maddox, Hamid Drake, Oliver Lake …), Archie Shepp and Joachim Kühn duo, the new Attica Blues big band, or his collaboration with Jason Moran, in duo or for a tribute to John Coltrane, with Amir ElSaffar, Nasheet Waits, Marion Rampal and Darryl Hall.