2007
The Angola Project
About This Album
It's hard not to appreciate the unique creative muse of 27-year-old saxophonist Howard Wiley, a longtime member of hip-hop queen Lauryn Hill's band who's also a well decorated young jazz vet; his accolades from the Thelonious Monk Institute include MVP honors for the Grammy All-American Jazz Band, and the Berklee College of Music Scholarship award. A lot of young lions explore the catalogs of jazz greats from the '50s, but Wiley goes further on this eclectic date, extrapolating inspiration from the legendary recordings produced by Alan Lomax and Harry Oster -- most notably their Angola Prison Spirituals. If this uneven but ultimately fascinating (if not always pleasurable to listen to) disc drives crazy those contemporary jazz fans looking to latch onto something cool, they can blame Wiley's friend, ethnomusicologist Daniel Atkinson, who introduced the saxman to the rich music of the prison. Following a visit to there in 2005, Atkinson played Wiley a recording he'd made there of "12 Gates to the City," and that inspired the easy swinging, brassy, and soul-jazzy opening track. From there the disc gets haunting or depressing, depending how you want to look at it.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6 and 7)

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