On January 26, 1972, Archie Shepp packed up his tenor and soprano saxophones and headed to A&R Recording in New York for the third and final session of an album he was planning to call Attica Blues. If he happened to flip through a newspaper that morning, Shepp would have seen a few articles relevant to his cause: the Attica Prison uprising, which had transpired four months earlier but still amounted to an unfolding story.
In its aftermath, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller appointed a bipartisan commission on penal reform, which was just issuing its first report. “We are profoundly troubled that the present correctional system reflects an anachronistic, bastille‐like philosophy,” the committee chairman told The New York Times. “We doubt that there is any real hope that it can accomplish society’s objectives today.” The quote appeared in the paper on Jan. 26, below a separate article with the headline, “Impeach Rockefeller Over Attica, A Buffalo Assemblyman Demands.”
Shepp probably wouldn’t have been surprised, or much impressed, by these indictments. What happened at Attica Correctional Facility, in upstate New York, amounted to one of the deadliest confrontations on American soil since the Civil War. On the morning of Sept. 13, 1971, state troopers opened fire on the prison in a siege-like effort to end a four-day rebellion in protest of inhumane conditions. According to a stark racial calculus, the protesting prisoners were mostly black and the assaulting troopers were mostly white. The savagery of the attack—39 people, inmates and hostages, were slain by police gunfire, with more than twice as many wounded—registered as an instant scandal and an unspeakable horror. As investigative journalist Tom Robbins characterized it several years ago, in an article for The Marshall Project, the assault on Attica was “a massive bloodletting marked by spasms of sadism.”
So it was a bold stroke for Shepp to respond to this moment with Attica Blues. It was also totally in character for him: A leading provocateur of jazz’s radical “New Thing,” he had titled his previous album Things Have Got to Change. The same Afrocentric and revolutionary energies pulse through Attica Blues, with resolute conviction but a shifting center of gravity. The album is a sociopolitical statement shaded with human complexity. There is protest in it, but also tenderness and wistfulness and hopeful rumination. It’s a landmark in part because it refuses the stoical clarity of a broadside, just as it wriggles free of the parameters that typically apply to a so-called jazz album.