Bay Area jazz saxophonist Howard Wiley has discovered that great works of art sometimes are born of the direst circumstances. Wiley has put together a program based on music found at Louisiana’s notorious Angola State Penitentiary, where gospel songs dating back to the 1930s have been preserved. Spark checks in as Wiley and his ensemble rehearse for a concert at San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts.

Angola State Penitentiary is one of the largest prisons in the country, holding about 5,000 prisoners and maintaining a staff of 1,000. The facility sits on an 18,000-acre expanse that was originally four separate slave plantations. In 1880, Samuel Lawrence James joined these plantations to form the Angola plantation and contracted convicts from the state to work on it. Louisiana took full control of the plantation in 1901.

Over the course of the 20th century, Angola developed a reputation for violence and abuse. Still a working farm, the prison became known as a holdover from the days of slavery, where the predominantly black inmates were forced to spend life sentences laboring under dehumanizing conditions. In 1952, 31 inmates, who came to be known as the Heel String Gang, severed their own Achilles tendons in protest of the brutal work routine. In 1972, the federal courts finally interceded and ordered a crackdown on the abuse at Angola.

Daniel Atkinson, an ethnomusicologist who studies African American folk traditions of the South, introduced Wiley to the music of Angola. In part because Angola remained a functioning plantation, inmates retained and handed down some of the spirituals and work songs of the slave era, traditions that became mingled with secular performance practices when populations began migrating north and west in the 1920s. This legacy, which Wiley is featuring in his Angola program, was crucial to the development of American music, eventually giving rise to a number of genres, including blues, gospel and jazz.

For Wiley, uncovering the music of Angola State Penitentiary has opened a window onto the musical origins of the South. He has put together the Angola Project, which he describes as a “soul chamber ensemble.” The ensemble combines two vocalists with violins, bass, saxophone, trombone, trumpet and drums. His interpretations of the songs from Angola are based on the call-and-response interplay between leader and congregation in churches. The style adds a stirring, haunting tone to the compositions.

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