Attica Blues Big Band, the project - Planete-Aurora

Attica Big Band, the project
Attica Blues, born in 1971, is on the one hand a Big Band in it’s fourth incarnation, and on
the other hand a music collection that has been accumulated for years.
The artwork of Archie Shepp is at a crossroad, a meeting point between politic and art, where
Black Musics meet their «sophisticated» cousins and descendants - a gap that Attica Blues
overcomes. It’s a collision between all the rhythms, the swings and the grooves of the Great
Black Music through the years.
It’s an expression of the black identity, political and artistic, that never stopped and has been
reinvented all along it’s history. Giving birth again to this project in Europe makes sens
because it’s still really modern. Because the fight and the music of blacks deeply influenced
world culture, and because it has been led since it’s creation by a musician and an activist,
who was situated precisely at this crossroad, all along it’s 55 years old career.
Archie Shepp embodies in a unique and powerful way the African-American experience. His
music, his songs, his voice, and even the way he walks are representative of Blues music. He
was born in a time of segregation, in the black ghetto of Fort Lauderdale, a short time after
Rubin Stacey was beaten to death because he was black. He witnessed the Civil Right movement,
the Black Power - and got actively involved in New York at the age of twenty - the
revolutions, the repressions and the deceptions.
He is one of the leaders of Free Jazz, a very radical music because it is close to the roots of
black music and is influenced by it’s history, ( collective improvisation, commitment, narrative
dimension, folk form, souvenirs of the African past...) and at the same time deeply new,
even revolutionary.
On September 13th 1971, the state governor of New York, Nemson Rockefeller, put and
end to the negotiations with the mutinies of Attica Detention Centre and decided to take it
by force. It turned out that 9 out of 10 hostages got killed by the police. During weeks after
the uprising, the guardians, all white, got revenge - humiliations, tortures - on the prisoners.
60% of them were black. The prison authorities knew and didn’t do anything to stop it.
As a reaction, a short time after, Archie Shepp composed and recorded Attica Blues. This
music is a patchwork of spiritual music, blues music, ellingtonian orchestrations or funk. The
whole project in also influenced by free music... From anger to joy, from sadness to hope ...
It is deeply one.
Beyond their diversity, it expresses the unity of the African Americans, their history, their
aesthetic creations and political ideas. In 1979, during a concert to be remembered at the
Palais des Glaces, that was recorded live, Archi Sheep set Attica Blues Big Band up again and
added new tracks, always aiming at the same goal.
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