Archie Vernon Shepp was born May 24, 1937, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He started on banjo, taught by his father, then moved to piano and saxophone while at Germantown High School. From 1955 to 1959 he studied drama at Goddard College in Vermont, a choice that shaped his later double career as a playwright as much as a saxophonist. After graduating he worked in a Latin jazz band before moving toward the emerging New York avant-garde.

He joined pianist Cecil Taylor's group in the early 1960s, appearing on the October 1960 session issued as The World of Cecil Taylor (Candid, 1961). In 1962 he began performing with trumpeter Bill Dixon, including an appearance together at the 8th World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki, and the two co-led his first record under his own name, the Archie Shepp-Bill Dixon Quartet (Savoy, recorded 1962). The following year he co-founded the New York Contemporary Five with alto saxophonist John Tchicai and trumpeter Don Cherry, filled out by bassist Don Moore and drummer J.C. Moses; the group played a celebrated residency at Copenhagen's Jazzhus Montmartre that November before dissolving in the spring of 1964.

John Coltrane's public admiration opened the door to a contract with Impulse! Records, where Shepp recorded through the rest of the 1960s. Four for Trane (recorded August 10, 1964, released January 1965, Impulse! A-71) reworked four Coltrane compositions in arrangements co-written with trombonist Roswell Rudd, alongside Tchicai, Alan Shorter, Reggie Workman, and Charles Moffett. Shepp himself joined John Coltrane's eleven-piece band for the Ascension session on June 28, 1965, alongside saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, and that July Shepp and Coltrane shared the LP New Thing at Newport, each leading one side of the album from the Newport Jazz Festival stage. Fire Music (1965) included "Malcolm, Malcolm - Semper Malcolm," an elegy for Malcolm X written days after his assassination, and marked the sharpening of the political consciousness that would define the rest of the decade. That August 12, drummer Rashied Ali sat in on three tracks of the session that became On This Night (Impulse!, 1965), the record that gave Ali his first significant recording date before Coltrane brought him into his own band later that year.

Shepp's late-1960s records leaned further into Afrocentric material and ensemble color: Mama Too Tight (recorded August 1966, Impulse!) and The Magic of Ju-Ju (recorded April 26, 1967, Impulse!) built extended pieces over African percussion, with Beaver Harris, Norman Connors, and multiple hand-drummers alongside a conventional rhythm section. He was writing for the stage in parallel: his play The Communist was produced in 1965, and Lady Day: A Musical Tragedy, about Billie Holiday, followed in 1972, both staged by Robert Kalfin at the Chelsea Theater Center in Brooklyn. He also began an academic career in the late 1960s, teaching African-American studies at SUNY Buffalo before Randolph Bromery recruited him to the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1971, where he taught for three decades, starting with courses titled "Revolutionary Concepts in African-American Music" and "The Black Musician in the Theater."

The early 1970s brought Shepp's most ambitious studio project, Attica Blues (recorded January 24-26, 1972, Impulse! AS-9222), a big-band and vocal response to the 1971 Attica Prison uprising built largely on compositions co-written with trumpeter and longtime collaborator Cal Massey. A period recording in Paris for the BYG Actuel label (Yasmina, A Black Woman, Blasé, Poem for Malcolm, all 1969) and further Impulse! dates (The Cry of My People, 1973; Kwanza, 1974) rounded out his most overtly political decade. In 1977 he turned toward the American songbook of spirituals and blues on Goin' Home (recorded April 25, 1977, Copenhagen, SteepleChase), a duo record with pianist Horace Parlan that became one of his best-reviewed albums and the first of several duo collaborations. Two years later he recorded The Long March (live, Willisau Jazz Festival, August 30, 1979) with drummer Max Roach, following an earlier duo encounter documented on Force - Sweet Mao - Suid Afrika 76 (1976); Roach and Shepp, a generation apart, found common ground in their shared political convictions as much as their music.

Shepp spent much of the 1980s and 1990s dividing his time between the United States and Europe, recording tribute records to Charlie Parker and Sidney Bechet, further duo and ballad albums, and continuing to tour internationally while teaching at UMass Amherst until his retirement in the early 2000s. In 2004 he founded his own label, Archieball, in Paris with Monette Berthomier, through which he has continued to release new recordings. He received honorary doctorates from the University of Liège (2009) and Paris 8 University (2014), and in 2016 was named an NEA Jazz Master alongside Pharoah Sanders, Gary Burton, and Wendy Oxenhorn. Shepp continues to compose, perform, and record into his late eighties.

Shepp's tenor sound carries the huge, breathy tone of the swing-era tenor tradition, Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins by way of Sonny Rollins, pushed into the harmonic and textural extremes of free jazz; critics have long noted the tension in his playing between that rooted, vocalized tone and the "energy music" abrasiveness he helped pioneer alongside John Coltrane and Albert Ayler. His drama training shows directly in the music: extended suites built around spoken word, poetry recitation, and theatrical pacing, most explicitly on Fire Music and Attica Blues, made him one of the most overtly political voices to emerge from the 1960s avant-garde and a central figure of the Black Arts Movement. That combination of tradition and confrontation drew mixed contemporary criticism, some listeners hearing it as a betrayal of "pure" free jazz and others as its natural extension, but it proved widely influential on the generation of politically engaged improvisers, loft-jazz musicians, and saxophonists such as David Murray and Frank Lowe who followed him. His parallel career as a playwright and, later, a three-decade tenure as a professor of African-American studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst reinforced a reputation as jazz's most explicitly intellectual and pedagogical voice of his generation, one recognized in 2016 with an NEA Jazz Masters fellowship.