At the base level, music's purpose is to entertain. Some musicians go beyond mere entertainment and use their music to promote a point of view, provoke thought and kindle certain kinds of emotions. Hand in hand with those higher goals is the use of music as a vehicle to educate listeners.

On The Angola Project, jazz saxophonist/composer Howard Riley seeks to educate listeners, both about a piece of African-American history and the music that was formed by it. The subject matter here, prison spirituals of the Angola State Penitentiary of Louisiana, is obscure. But at the same time, it offers a glimpse of the more basic forms of music that later evolved into folks, blues, jazz, gospel...even New Orleans-style blues.

The Oakland, Calif.-born twenty something Wiley wasn't inclined at first to go back and delve into the spirituals of prisoners from 50 years ago half a continent away. But after some persistence by an ethnomusicologist friend, he found that much of the music resonated with him.

This eventually led to his visit of the prison a couple of years ago and the soaking in of recordings from the fifties by famous folk music archivist Alan Lomax, as well as Harry Oster. By that time, Wiley had decided it was time to put together an album inspired by these prison spirituals, the result of which came to fruition earlier this year with the release of The Angola Project.
If you look up Howard Wiley in the AllMusic website, you'll see him listed under the "soundtrack" genre.

That's an inaccurate characterization of him because as far as I can tell, he hadn't done movie soundtrack records.

But it's not that far off, either, as Wiley's music here does play like a soundtrack to an old, often downbeat black and white movie, with some new, unconventional twists thrown in. And that's probably just the imagery he wants the music to conjure up.

Many of the songs presents here were either drawn directly from the traditional spirituals from Lomax's recordings or Oster's Angola Prison Spirituals (1960), or inspired by them. Both "Rise And Fly" and "Twelve Gates To The City" are old spirituals that particularly struck Wiley as "some of the most powerful and original music I've ever heard."

The dramatic call and response of the various soloist to the band at large in "Rise And Fly" sounds oddly similar to the Cream's "White Room" and also suggests the influence that the earlier forms of African-American music had on such progressive jazz pioneers like Charles Mingus and John Coltrane.