As posted by me back in February, I've been on an Impulse! tear, and this record was very hard to find until a couple of days ago. Yeah, I got rent and a shitload of bills to pay but as Curtis Armstrong said, "Sometimes you just gotta say fuck it, and take your chances." Plus my woman told me that if I didn't get it, I would've been more miserable than I would've been if it was just rent and bills.This record was recorded in 1972 after the massacre at Attica prison in upstate New York, after (drummer) Beaver Harris suggested to Shepp that they do a protest album, and Shepp agreed. He wrote music to a poem that Harris wrote and "Attica Blues" was born.The writer Trevor MacLaren wrote in '04: "In a post-9/11 world the masses have become paranoid, tense and angry. At the forefront is George W. Bush's foreign policy. Thirty years ago artists found themselves in a similar plight with Richard M. Nixon's home and foreign policies as well. With the push of attack in Vietnam, the murders at Kent State and violence in urban areas and prisons, many felt the same disillusion that we feel now." No shit.The album itself is a change in style for Shepp, because he was considered at the time one of the leaders of the avant-garde movement in jazz. He recorded for the Chicago based Delmark label before being signed to Impulse! (at the insistence of John Coltrane) in 1964. He was famous for free-jazz than any other style, but in the early 70's he started to experiment w/ more traditional jazz, blues, african/pan african and a little bit of funk, and "Attica Blues" takes all these styles and puts 'em all together. The record itself has political songs "Attica Blues," "Blues For Brother George Jackson, "Invocation To Mr. Parker," and non political sons like "Steam" and "Quiet Dawn" just to name a couple. Jazz names like Marion Brown, Beaver Harris and Jimmy Garrison are the familiar names along with arrangements my Cal Massey (who gets his (then) 12 year old daughter, Waheeda to sing "Quiet Dawn.") Henry Hull contributes his James Brown style vocals for the title track and the late radical lawyer William Kunstler (who tried to negotiate for the prisoners in Attica) reads lyrics by drummer Beaver Harris. Overall, this album is a monster, mixing soul, classical, jazz and and a bit of free jazz in the mix, this album screams for a change in the system. Just like we need now.