Billboard : 01/23/1961

Roach group is joined for this striking suite by singer Abbey Lincoln, tenor saxist Coleman Hawkins, and Nigerian drummer Micheal Baba Olatunji. The music and the art work of the album go hand-in-hand in that they both are framed in the fight for racial equality. The playing is superb and Miss Lincoln’s vocal obligato on the Prayer, Protest and Peace segment is truly moving.

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Cashbox : 01/28/1961

Roach’s Freedom Now Suite is an intense, hard-hitting, compelling composition that tells musically of the Negro pride in the American integration drive and the African independence movement. Its pertinency is further heightened by the sit-ins and the current Congo strife. A score in five movements, it is played with passion and fire by Roach, Hawkins, Lincoln, Olatunji, Walter Benton, Booker Little and others. Can become a jazz classic.

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Audio
Charles A. Robertson : March, 1961

An original work and a new jazz label, both of which show great spirit and promise, are launched with this release. Promising seems to be the correct way to describe Freedom Now Suite, a collaboration between Max Roach and lyricist Oscar Brown Jr. begun two years ago and intended for the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963, as it is still unfinished. The final draft will enlist a choral group and corps of dancers, but each section introduced here is complete in itself and contains a full quota of aural excitement. As the preliminaries match Roach, a leading exponent of American jazz drumming, with African drummer Michael Olatunji, besides drawing on the services of Coleman Hawkins and Abbey Lincoln, the main event will require thoughtful planning to be of surpassing interest.

The man behind Candid is Archie Bleyer, president of Cadence Records, who contemplated entering the jazz field for several years before taking the step. His plans materialized when jazz critic Nat Hentoff consented to supervise sessions and act as musical advisor to the new subsidiary. Bob Altschuler left a job as publicity director of United Artists Records to accept the post of general manager. All three united in formulating a policy that bodes well for both the company and jazz collectors.

Altschuler, whose career also includes publicity stints with Prestige and Riverside, in summing up some of the main points said, “Archie Bleyer’s only concern is that we put out a quality product. We intend to record important jazz, regardless of period, and will touch all bases, from country blues singers to the more advanced modernists. We believe a good jazz record can sell over the years, and our promotion will be geared accordingly. United Artists was disappointed because initial jazz sales were below those of popular names and filmscores, but their jazz LP’s are the ones still being reordered two years later.
We hope to introduce many of our artists to a wider audience through concerts at schools and colleges. Several are interested in having Max Roach perform the Suite.”

Albums produced by members of the newly formed Jazz Artists Guild are to be distributed under the Candid label, and an early release will unite Roy Eldridge with the Charlie Mingus group. Also in prospect is Mack McCormick’s “Treasury of Field Recordings,” which was first released in England to great critical acclaim when no company in this country would touch it. Other projects will feature such artists as Lightnin’ Hopkins, Memphis Slim, Benny Bailey, Booker Ervin, and the Toshiko-Mariano Quartet.

Candid began holding sessions at just the right time to take advantage of the opening of a new studio a few doors away on West 57th Street. Tommy Nola’s Penthouse Sound Studio was ready for business in March, 1960, having moved to the 17-story roof of Steinway Hall. Nearly all Candid LP’s are engineered by Bob d’Orleans, who joined Nola in August after spending two and one half years at Bell Sound Studios. While there he handled jazz dates for Warner Bros. and Roulette, including the Monday Night at Birdland series on location. As such leading lights of the teenage world as Fabian and Frankie Avalon were also entrusted to his care, it was only natural that he be asked about the experience.

“Dealing with rock-and-roll singers,” d’Orleans commented, “requires an altogether different approach than a jazz date. Lots of expensive equipment and all an engineer’s skill are directed at making a voice sound in a way that will make youngsters want to buy the record. The singer always goes into a vocalist’s booth, and the voice is spread out on top of the recording. The musicians never get a chance to feel any great empathy toward the singer, even the drummer who, if the truth were known, is often the most important personage on the date. A recording will not sell unless teenagers feel the beat, and a mere singer’s whim never causes a drummer to change a beat he knows is right.

“For Candid, however, I recorded both Abbey Lincoln and Nancy Harrow without a vocalist’s booth. It meant more work for me, but the singers and musicians liked the idea and were willing to move around until I got the balance I wanted. I wouldn’t try it otherwise, but then I probably wouldn’t even think of it on a pop date. The difference was quite noticeable in the studio, and I think listeners will hear something in Max’s drumming during his duet with Abbey that wasn’t there before. I never heard anything like the way they blend together on the record and practically become one voice.”

After starting out as an assistant film editor at M-G-M in Hollywood, d’Orleans drifted into audio because, in his opinion at least, it seemed to be “more creative.” Besides working at 20th Century-Fox and other film studios, he helped out after hours at a small independent record company and handled Chico Hamilton’s first date, before Dick Bock discovered the drummer for Pacific Jazz. He also held jobs in Dallas, Texas, and at Olmsted Sound Studios previous to arriving at his present post at Nola’s. Clients other than Candid include Verve, Argo and various advertising firms. The studio is associated with Warne Jenkins in the operation of Plaza Sound Studios, which are used to record Gerry Mulligan’s Concert Band and other large units.

When asked to comment on the changes wrought by stereo, d’Orleans expressed satisfaction at the amount of new equipment studios have acquired and added, “I find that it helps if the musicians understand stereo and some of the problems it presents. I always explain the effect I want, and usually aim at a completely natural one that seats the listener right in front of the band at a comfortable distance. Jazz fans are less interested in trick effects than in hearing what each supporting musician is doing every minute of the time. Stereo separation makes this easier to achieve, but I like to tie things together by putting the featured soloist or main rhythm instrument in the middle. Four drummers surrounded Abbey and three microphones were on Olatunji’s drums in one part of the “Suite,” still I picked out her voice. Jazz dates are enjoyable because everyone becomes so involved, including me, when Mingus passes out compliments, which I understand are hard to come by. It was typical of Coleman Hawkins to stay on after his part was finished and lend encouragement to the others.”

Whether releasing a work before completion is justified or not is best answered by the fact that the sections of Freedom Now Suite as presented here, make an important and rewarding document. Furthermore, it becomes the first of the current spate of Civil War Centennial albums to deal with problems of slavery, and those of racial equality that still exist, rather than the glories of war. Also worth noting is the emergence of Abbey Lincoln as a vocalist of stature, especially after her wordless pyrotechnics on Triptych. When dueling with Coleman Hawkins on Driva’ Man, she parries his attack in a cold fury that only Odetta among today’s singers can match. Hawkins’ power could be duplicated by no other soloist, which explains why he was picked for the part and still reigns over fellow tenor saxists.

Recent events in Africa prompted the addition of two sections uniting Olatunji and a pair of Afro-Cuban drummers with Roach’s regular quintet. They combine brilliantly on rhythmic patterns of mounting intensity, distributing crisp transients and deep bass notes across the width of All Africa, or roaring unrestrainedly on Tears For Johannesburg.

Because of insurmountable odds against public

performance, jazz works of a serious nature often fail to fulfill early expectations and live only in recorded form. Max Roach plans to hurdle this obstacle by delivering his message wherever possible, even though his own pocketbook suffers. Besides various colleges, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Congress of Racial Equality are interested in sponsoring concerts.

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Berkshire Eagle (Pittsfield, MA)
Milton R. Bass : 03/23/1961

It makes you shiver when you think of the courage it must take, the raw guts, for Negroes to participate in sit-ins down South. Or how it must be for the little children who go to school through mobs of screaming, shoving adults. Or for the parents who decide they will not be cowed by the mob into sending their children to segregated schools; and who have to go through the long day wondering if their children are in dangeof harm. It’s the kind of heroism that doesn’t win medals, but it does affect the course of history.

Nearly all the young Negro jazz musicians of my acquaintance are desperately aware not only of what is taking place in the South, but of the turmoil in the Congo and its repercussions. They cannot help but take pride as the Western nations and the Communist nations go all out to woo the new African nations to their orbits. The respect accorded the Negro envoys in the United Nations and by high U.S. officials is in marked contrast to the way American Negroes are treated in this country. Progress is being made, but impatience can be understood. How can you ask human beings to be patient about getting something that belongs to them in the first place? They are not asking to get into the country clubs at this time, but they do want equal education, voting and job rights.

Nearly all musicians have only one way of expressing themselves: Through their music. And a good many of the jazz compositions turned out in the past year have been based on Congo themes or oriented toward the recent integration events in this country.

The best thing I have heard along these lines is Max Roach and Oscar Brown Jr.’s Freedom Now Suite, which is available on an album titled We Insist! (Candid Records). Drummer Roach is familiar in this area for his concert work at the Music Barn and his teaching at the Jazz School. Brown, a folk singer-lyricist, is the writer of a satirical musical, “Kicks and Co.,” which is going to get an unprecedented two-hour preview on the Dave Garroway television show next Tuesday morning from 7 to 9.

Composer Roach and lyrieist Brown began collaborating on the Freedom Now Suite back in 1959 for an expected performance in 1963 in honor of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. However, political and social events caught up with the composers, reshaping
their creations, and the excerpts on this album were the result.

This is moving music, emotional music, music that expresses feelings beyond the scope of words. On this album it is played and sung in a way that fulfills the talents of its creators. By comparison it makes the fusions of the so-called “Third Stream” jazz school pale artifacts without life or meaning.

There are five Roach compositions on the album, three with lyrics by Brown. Driva’ Man tells the story of the cruel white overseer in slave times; Freedom Day communicates the vibrant expectancy and wonderment and nagging disbelief in the period immediately following the Emancipation Proclamation; Tryptich divided into Prayer/Protest/Peace, reflects the cry of an oppressed people, the unleashing of rage and anger, and the feeling of relaxed exhaustion after you’ve done everything you can to assert yourself; All Africa is a chant listing the various tribes of Africa; and Tears for Johannesburg sums up the bloody cruelty against Negroes in Africa, pinpointed by the Sharpeville massacre just one year ago.

The most notable performer on the record is composer Roach himself. He is undoubtedly one of the great jazz drummers, and his ability to perform lyrically on the drums, to work “inside” a performer he is backing and to lead a group with his instrument without dominating the proceedings is masterful. Singer Abbey Lincoln projects powerfully throughout the entire album. The solo work by Coleman Hawkins on tenor saxophone, Walter Benton on tenor, Booker Little on trumpet, Julian Priester on trombone and James Schenk on bass is outstanding.

The drive and mood of All Africa and Tears for Johannesburg are greatly enhanced by the drum work of Olatunji, the Nigerian student who also bas performed at Music Inn, and Afro-Cuban players Raymond Mantillo and Tomas DuVall. This is one of the most exciting and moving records I have heard in a long, long time. It is a forerunner of come – musically, politically, and socially. It tells of good things and bad things. It insists on being heard, and it is incapable of being forgotten.

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Boston Traveler
John McLellan : 02/02/1961
That Big, Rich Sound is ‘The Hawk’

“A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins makes him nervous. Man, I told him Hawkins was supposed to make him nervous. Hawkins has been making other sax players nervous for 40 years.”

This comment by Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, currently at Storyville opposite Gloria Lynne, was quoted recently in “The Jazz Review.” It appears originally in a New York World Telegram interview.

Hawkins’ pre-eminent position in his field has not always been reflected in the respect of fans and musicians. His has been a bumpy road.

Because of the restless nature of musicians and the fickly allegiance of fans, Hawkins has moved in and out of the printed page, the popularity polls and the recording sessions in cyclical fashion. Right now, he’s “in” again.

There’s been a steady procession of albums on Prestige. Thee was his spoken four-part documentary on Riverside. And, just this week, he appears on We Insist, Max Roach and Oscar Brown Jr.’s “Freedom Now Suite” on Candid.

It Was Always Thus With Hawk

To register surprise at finding Hawkins in the company of such modernists as Roach, Booker Little, Julian Priester et. al. is really not being fair to Hawk. It was always thus. As we sat chatting between he reminisced about the old Savoy in Boston, predecessor to today’s ConnolIy’s, at which he was appearing as a single with the Jimmy Tyler Trio. The band he fronted back then included Thelonious Monk and Don Byas.

“That was before Dixie,” he added of the club that finally became a traditionalist stronghold before finally folding a few years ago.

Hawkins, I believe, has little sympathy for Dixieland or anything else that reminds him of the past. On a TV show we taped for future broadcast, he specifically enjoined me from going into any “biographical” survey.

Just As Soon Forget Past

He finds the memory of his early slap tongue tenor technique embarrassing and simply doesn’t want to talk about it. Duke Ellington is the same way; he’d just as soon have you believe his early records were made by his father.

Hawkins professes to learn something new every day. That would be hard to prove since his playing would indicate he’s well within what is generally called “mainstream” or Swing Era jazz.

But, that doesn’t make it a whit less valid. I think what shakes up the young tenor players when they hear him in person is the vigor and authority with which he plays.

The big rich sound. The swing! It gets them right where they live. I stood backstage at a concert in Lynn one night next to a young musician hearing Hawk – really hearing him – for the first time. He stood there in slack jawed amazement as the un-hurried veteran he’d met in the dressing room suddenly came alive and took charge on stage, hammering home his themes and variations with the power of some awesome giant.

Adderley is right. And Coleman Hawkins is going to go right on making sax players nervous for quite a few more years before he racks up his horn and retires.

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Cedar Rapids Gazette
Les Zacheis : 03/12/1961

This is the year we are fighting the Civil War all over again. Below the Mason-Dixon line they do it with play-acting. Here we do it with music.

Those who have the stomach for such fare can buy the Songs of Billy Yank and Johnny Reb played and strummed by Jimmie Driftwood (RCA-Victor).

On the other side of the picture is a violent musical protest of our colored citizenry to imposed conditions in Max Roach’s We Insist, Freedom Now Suite. This is on the ambitious Candid label.

The finest facet of this record is the great tenoring of the grand old men of jazz, Coleman Hawkins. The worst development is the raucous vocalizing of Abbey Lincoln, who has the listener hurrying back for his Bessie Smith and Billy Holiday 78s.

Nevertheless, the work is fine documentary music, even though overburdened with a message.

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Hartford Courant
Harold Stern : 01/27/1961

Abbey Lincoln, who appears on an exciting new album, We Insist, Max Roach and Oscar Brown Jr.’s “Freedom Now Suite” on the brand new and equally exciting Candid Jazz label, was almost on a television recently.

The vocalist, who’s a real looker, was supposedly set for the show and, preliminary to signing her contract, was called in for a discussion with the producer, ostensibly to to determine what she would do on the program. Abbey was unpleasantly surprised to learn the producer had other things in mind, which “would have to precede any appearance on his show.”

Needless to say, Abbey, who’s a star performer, stalked out of the office indignantly. But it does make one realize what someone who’s not as well known as Abbey must be exposed to in order to get a break. The producer in question, incidentally, is no stranger to payoffs, having had a small participatory interest in one of the discredited quiz shows of a couple of years ago.

The album, which has nothing to do with television at the moment, is an exciting musical testament to the emerging nations of Africa and features, among others (i.e. Max Roach and Coleman Hawkins), the drummer Olatunji who supplied the drum background to last Sunday’s ABC-TV “Closeup” (“The Red And The Black”).

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Harper’s Magazine
Eric Larrabee : July, 1961

On the jacket cover of We Insist! three young Southern Negroes, sitins at a lunch counter, stare back over their shoulders at the camera, their eyes defiant and blank with the long-learned expectation of being hurt. It is the mood of the album, and of Max Roach’s and Oscar Brown Jr.’s Freedom Now Suite. Stirred by the growing Negro intransigence in the South and increasing independence in Africa, Negro jazz musicians have begun to emerge from their indifference to politics, and this record is one of the results.

It recalls slavery, recalls Africa. It says that the Negro, in rage and anger, will no longer wait patiently for freedom someday, but wants it now. These are themes that no Negro musician can take up without a sense of deep personal involvement, and every note in the Freedom Now Suite is imprinted with the intensity of the players’ feeling. One hesitates to criticize them, therefore, since criticism of the music is bound to be interpreted as criticism of the emotions behind it; but I will have to risk that, because I feel that something is seriously going wrong here.

At one point in a section called “All Africa,” Miss Abbey Lincoln, a supper-club singer who has turned more seriously to jazz, finds herself chanting the names of various African tribes, “Bantu … Zulu … Watusi … Ashanti,” but she sings them without any real sense of their meaning. We are not in Africa, we are back in the 1930s; and this is the Whitmanesque roll call of the rivers from Pare Lorentz’s film, or the embarrassing faux-naïf rhetoric — “… and that’s what Abe Lincoln said! …” of “Ballad for Americans.”

Miss Lincoln, especially in Triptych, makes a sophisticated attempt to simulate savagery, but it will not do. It is an effort to whip up an emotional state of mind which is not naturally hers, much as she may wish to believe that it is. No one can deny the right of American Negroes now, after so many years of near-obliviousness to Africa, to cultivate their sense of Africanism. But they will do themselves a great disservice if they begin to treat it as a myth, as a ritualized background to their own nobility and dignity, and the outcome will be not art but propaganda.

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HiFi / Stereo Review
Peter J. Welding : May, 1961
Recording of Special Merit

Interest: Provocative Afro-jazz
Performance: Earnest
Recording: Excellent

Drummer Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite is, aside from a certain pretentiousness in the Oscar Brown Jr. lyrics, a passionate and arresting poem of protest and appeal. Begun in 1959 and intended for performance in 1963, on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, the suite is not yet completed. In the excerpts presented here, Roach’s themes are bold and clear. His percussion work throughout is little short of fantastic, and Abbey Lincoln turns in vocal performances of searing intensity. Veteran tenorist Coleman Hawkins’ acidly insinuating tenor sax highlights the slavery sequence, Driva’ Man. His is the major solo work on the disc; the other numbers are primarily orchestral, with the fiercely insistent polyrhythms of Olatunji’s drums pulsing beneath.

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New Pittsburgh Courier
Unknown : 02/25/1961

A jazz record may well provide the nation’s sit-in movement with musical impetus in the face of the manner with which it is being welcomed on the market.

We Insist, an album inspired by drummer Max Roach, has been termed “one of the best jazz sellers to turn up in a long, long while” by Bob Altschuler, general manager of Candid Records.

Mr. Altschuler told The Courier that the disc’s brutally frank cover, which depicts three sit-ins at a typical lunch counter scene has been one of the major selling points of the promotion.

He said “We’ve been getting good action from this one. We’ve received an enormous amount of enthusiastic comments from newspapers all over the country.”

Mr. Altschuler revealed CORE (Congress for Racial Equality) and the NAACP have also endorsed the record. In fact, plans are afoot to have CORE mail out at least 25,000 copies of the record all over the country.

Mr. Roach is making contacts in an effort to have the performance put on film and hopes to take the entire package which made an auspicious debut in New York City recently on a national tour.

We Insist consists of Freedom Now Suite which features Abbey Lincoln backed by Coleman Hawkins, the Nigerian drummer Michael Olatunji, Walter Benton, Booker Little, Julian Priester, James Schenck, Raymond Mantillo, and Tomas DuVall.

One of the highlights of the album is a three-sectioned movement labelled Prayer, Protest, Peace. Also, one section of the disc is devoted to South Africa with a selection entitled Tears for Johannesburg.

Basically, We Insist is an album of protest music and is bound to have an attraction for jazz-conscious participants in the sit-in movement.

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Oakland Tribune
Russ Wilson : 01/29/1961

Candid Records entered the jazz market this week with six power-packed albums that represent a wide cross-section of music. If the level set by these is sustained by subsequent releases, the new label will be among the front runners in the world of recorded jazz. Among artists featured on the six initial LPs are Charles Mingus, Max Roach and Cecil Taylor, plus traditional blues pianist-singer Otis Spann and a fresh jazz vocalist, Nancy Harrow.

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We Insist! consists largely of selections from the Freedom Now Suite by Max Roach and lyricist Oscar Brown Jr.. The album’s message is announced by the cover, a stark photo taken at a southern lunch counter during a sit-in. Roach’s compositions are strong, bold melodies. Abbey Lincoln’s vocals prove her a fiery, communicative singer, particularly on the number on which she is accompanied only by Roach. The others are played by the drummer’s quintet with Coleman Hawkins added on one track. Another adds Nigerian Michael Olatunji on conga drums along with two Afro-Cuban percussionists. This is a powerful, serious production.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 03/12/1961

It is a remarkable fact that jazz, though it has grown up in the veritable shadow of social injustice, has had almost nothing to say about the grave blot on our social structure which has made most jazzmen second class citizens and, in some sections of the Nation, deprived them even of the right to be human beings.

Aside from Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” there is virtually nothing in the experience of jazz, from New Orleans to Lennox, to make one aware that most jazz musicians are Negroes. Nearly a century after the Emancipation, these people still find themselves treated with contempt in almost any town or hamlet in the land, solely on the basis of their race.

True, in recent years a few jazzmen have become somewhat more daring. One went so far as to honor a new African nation by giving its name -spelled backwards – to one of his tunes.

And it is a more or less open secret in the jazz world that all the furor about “soul” is code for “the brotherhood of Negroes for Negroes.” And “soul music” is a musical assertion of the validity of the Negro’s social, cultural and musical heritage.

It is against this somewhat negative background that Candid Records – a new jazz label but already a major force in the jazz world – has issued We Insist – Max Roach’s Freedom Suite (Candid 8002).

Originally designed for performance during the Emancipation Celebration in 1963, the suite was rushed into performance early this year as part of the drive for racial equality which made such gains in 1960.

It is an album which may prove to be the most controversial jazz album ever issued.

It starts rationally enough with Driva Man, a musical reminder of the days of slavery with Abbey Lincoln singing the bitter – but not too bitter – lyrics in front of Coleman Hawkins, Walter Benton, Julian Priester, James Schenck and Max Roach. Then Freedom Day reminds one of the joy which was to have come (calling attention at the same time vaguely of Ellington’s Emancipation Proclamation).

A triptych opens not surprisingly, with Prayer. And then, without warning, one is thrown into Protest – an experience somewhat comparable to that of strolling on a lovely afternoon through a peaceful Southern wood to come upon a lynching, the victim’s feet still kicking gently, his slayers vanished.

Miss Lincoln’s performance will be attacked upon both esthetic and social grounds.

It will be said that she does not sing but screams – and that is true.

It will be said that the function of art is, as Aristotle saw it, “by imitation, to purge the soul of pity and terror,” not to make you want to run home and hide your pale-faced head in terror and shame.

And that may be true.

But two other things must also be said: That having heard Miss Lincoln, you will never forget it; and that if even a moderate proportion of Americans today feel this way about other Americans then this Nation had very well look to itself for it will not be Russians who destroy it.

After Protest, then Peace, aptly described by Roach to Miss Lincoln as “the feeling of relaxed exhaustion after you’ve done everything you can to assert yourself.”

The final two movements employ the drums and voice of Olatunji, the African drummer and Miss Lincoln. In Africa she chants the names of African tribes and he responds with a proverb of each about Freedom. Tears for Johannesburg is a beautiful and moving dirge for the victims of the Johannesburg massacres.

Do not rush out to buy this record upon my recommendation. It will remain on my shelf; I may not be a man of courage but I doubt that I will play it once a year for the next ten years. But if I could not replace it, I would not take $500 for it.

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Saturday Review
Wilder Hobson : 03/25/1961

The movement of jazz toward or into modern music in general, which this department has felt to be inevitable, has been proceeding at such a pace that my turntable has recently been filled with examples. So far as I know, I have not heard any jazz works built on tone-row principles, but virtually every other tendency in international composition is being reflected in the jazz world. There is any amount of hybrid music (I do not use the word invidiously). Critics, record reviewers, and blurb writers for the record companies (very often they are the same fellow) are faced with knotty problems of exposition. Sometimes they give up and, with what may be laudable modesty as well as deep sagacity, simply declare: “The music speaks for itself.”

I think it may be said that in this developing jazz three general directions are conspicuous: A) intense experimentalism, often in the polytonal and atonal areas; B) the sophisticated treatment of basically simple ideas strongly derived from folk roots; C) a coloristic, chromatic music that might be said to be the jazz counterpart of modern music prior to the advent of the tone-row.

Asking indulgence for what seems to me to be the necessary generality of any such statement, I now offer notes that may help to guide the reader to specimens of A, B, and C.

Type B. We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite (Candid 8002) is a work for singer, small jazz band, and percussion ensemble, composed by the remarkable drummer Max Roach, with text by Oscar Brown Jr. Its programmatic basis is the world crisis in Negro life. Sometimes its program is vocally expressed, as in accompanied songs and an episode of shrieks of protest delivered with a percussion background; sometimes the instrumentalists take over entirely. The expressive values range between the theatrical and the musical. Of the theatrical passages I will say that I have seldom found the representation of white-hot emotion theatrically effective, save in the finest drama, and that I do not do so here. The musical passages, on the other hand, afford some superb moments. I would call special attention to Coleman Hawkins’ tenor sax improvising in Driva’ Man to Roach’s lovely ensembles in Tears for Johannesburg and the improvising on this theme by Booker Little, trumpet, Walter Benton, tenor sax, and Julian Priester, trombone. The personnel throughout could scarcely be bettered, including the beautiful and moving voice of Abbey Lincoln.

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Washington Afro American
Louise D. Stone : 04/15/1961
Four Stars (Like, it swings nicely)

Max Roach, a musician of excellence, has long been emotionally involved in the movement for integration in American and national autonomy in Africa. He collaborated with Oscar Brown Jr., a talented lyricist and performer, on the writing of this suite. Actuallhy this work is not a suite, but a series of dramatic situations using Jazz, dance and narration, with the “sit-in” movement as a catalyst.

Jazz is appropriate for the message of this powerful and exciting album. The suite gets a little hysterical in parts, but those folks who dig their sociology on records won’t fuss.

Max Roach’s drumming is particularly absorbing and especially in moments of interplay with Michael Olatunji, Raymond Mantillo, and Tomas DuVall. Abbey Lincoln is ideally suited for her role.

A blow-by blow description on paper is not adequate to communicate the fine points of this album, the listener must spend some time on this timely Freedom Now Suite.

An interesting outcome of this record – actress Ruby Dee and actor Ossie Davis got the idea of producting a film after hearing the Freedom Now Suite. This twenty-five minute film, “Uhuru” (means “Freedom” in Swahiti) will be a Visual and musical collaboration of the Jazz idiom and African folk music. Sidney Poitier is to direct. Filming started in March.

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Down Beat : 03/30/1961
Don DeMichael : 5 stars

I do not know if all this is jazz or not. It makes little difference. I do know that this is magnificent music, powerful music, vital music. Oscar Brown, Jr. and Roach have constructed a work (whether it is a suite or not is beside the point) that is roughly a history of the escape from oppression in both this county and Africa. The message is potent.

As strong as the political and psychosocial overtones are, the music can stand on its own. Roach, who had much to do with the introduction of 3/4 into jazz, has conceived three of the composition’s parts in 5/4 (Driva’ Man, the Triptych‘s Peace, and Tears).

Brown’s words in Driva’ Man tell of the exploitation of female slaves by white overseers. Miss Lincoln conveys the bitterness, hate, and helplessness inherent in the situation. Hawkins’ long solo following the vocal is a bit rough, and at first listening, he seemed uncomfortable in the time signature. But consequent listenings convinced me what I took for discomfort was deep emotion. The searching, upward phrases of the first part of his solo are especially moving. It is a haunting performance. I only wish Hawkins had been on the other tracks.

Emancipation and seeming triumph are the themes of Freedom Day. But there is an uneasiness in the new-found freedom. Again Miss Lincoln (she is excellent throughout the album) catches the spirit and meaning of Brown’s lyrics. Even the horns in their solos convey the feeling of apprehensive joy. Much of the uneasiness is the result of Roach’s stabbing punctuations behind both the solos and the vocal.

Triptych is a startling performance. Only Miss Lincoln and Roach are present on this track. If any other instruments had been added, the impact would have been lessened.

The drummer originally conceived Triptych as a ballet (he has performed it with the Ruth Walton dancers, according to the notes), but I doubt if choreography could enhance the beauty of the wordless singing of Miss Lincoln. Her performance of Prayer is touching in its simplicity; Roach’s drums provide sensitive accompaniment.

The wildly exciting Protest is almost frightening – Miss Lincoln’s “vocal” consists of screams and yells, with Roach playing frantically, more in the foreground than the background. There is nothing passive about this protest; violence and hate are its ingredients.

Miss Lincoln’s voice reaches its artistic height on Peace. Combining happiness and placidity, she moans and sighs like a woman who has just enjoyed an emotional climax of some sort. She ends her vocal with an almost-sexual sigh of utter relief. Roach closes the performance peacefully.

The first side of the LP (tracks 1-3) deals with the struggle in this country, at least that’s my interpretation of it. The remaining tracks are concerned with the struggle for freedom in Africa. Of course, there are interrelations between the two struggles – all struggles – and there are interrelations in the music.

The other percussion instruments are featured on All Africa, although Miss Lincoln sings Brown’s lyrics in the first part of the track (his weakest work of the album) and chants the names of various Africa tribes, answered with short phrases in the dialects of these tribes by Olatunji. But the real star of this track is Olatunji. While the other percussionists provide an exciting 6/8 background, he “speaks.” And it is like speech, with vocal inflections and cadences transformed into percussive pitch variations and figures. Roach also “solos,” but it is Olatunji who returns to end the track forcefully.

The closing track is notable for several reasons: Miss Lincoln’s clear, almost sweet but sorrow-tinged vocal; the contrast between the slow-moving ensemble and the urgent, insisting rhythm; Little’s lyrical solo; Benton’s excellently constructed, crying solo.

This album is the most devastating thing of its kind that I’ve heard. Sure, it’s protest. It’s also violent, in part. Some may object to the message it contains – and this is one album definitely with a message – but the sensitive listener cannot deny that it is a vibrant social statement and an artistic triumph.

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Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff

“A revolution is unfurling – America’s unfinished revolution. It is unfurling in lunch counters, buses, libraries and schools – wherever the dignity and potential of men are denied. Youth and idealism are unfurling. Masses of Negroes are marching onto the stage of history and demanding their freedom now!” – A. Philip Randolph

The sit-in demonstrations by Negro students in the South began in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960. Although the initial sit-ins were spontaneous, the rapidly spreading movement soon received help and guidance from Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and CORE (The Congress of Racial Equality). Negroes throughout the country – and many whites – were surprised and stimulated by the effectiveness of these direct, mass action, nonviolent techniques.

Jazz musicians, normally apolitical and relatively unmindful of specific social movements, were also unprecedentedly stimulated. Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Max Roach, Art Blakey and several others declared public support for the sit-ins. During the same period, there was also increasing press coverage of the emerging, newly independent nations of Africa. Negro students in the South had been particularly aware of the impetus to their own campaigns for freedom given by the African examples because of the presence of African students on their campuses. Jazzmen too had been becoming conscious and prideful of the African wave of independence. Several new original compositions were titled with the names of African nations, and some jazzmen began to know more about Nkrumah than about their local Congressman.

One of the jazzmen who had long been strongly involved emotionally in the movements for integration in America and national autonomy in Africa was Max Roach. In 1959, Roach had begun collaborating with a Chicago writer-singer, Oscar Brown, Jr. on a long work to be performed in 1963 on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. Events in 1960 affected the content and the direction of the composition, sections of which are presented for the first time in this album. Driva’ Man, Freedom Day, and All Africa were originally written to be performed as sections of a large choral work, and this label hopes eventually to record the piece as originally conceived.

Brown, 34, is a uniquely diversified performer-lyricist. He has been a newscaster, actor, program coordinator for the Packinghouse Workers in Chicago, and more recently, the writer of a pungently satirical musical, Mr. Kicks and Co.. His Driva’ Man is a personification of the white overseer in slavery times who often forced women under his jurisdiction into sexual relations. Many overseers were also relentlessly brutal. In Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History Of Slavery (The University of Chicago Press), one former slave said: “They whupped the women and they whupped the mens. I used to work some in the tannery, and we make the whups. They’d tie them down to a stob, and give’em the whupping… They‘d better not leave a blade of grass in the rows… Or they’d whup ‘m for running away, but not so hard if they come back of their own ‘cordance when they got hungry and sick in the swamps. But when they had to run ’em down with the… dogs, they’d git in bad trouble.”

The “paterollers” (patrollers) that figure in the lyrics to Driva’ Man were described by another former slave as men “who would catch you from home and wear you out and send you back to your master… Most of them there patrollers was poor white folks… Poor white folks had to hustle round to make a living, so they hired out theirselves to slaveowners and rode the roads at night and whipped you if they catched you off their plantation without a pass.”

In this intensely expressive performance, Coleman Hawkins plays the male counterpart to Abbey Lincoln. Hawkins was intrigued by the work as a whole and stayed long after his own part was finished. He kept turning to Max Roach, commenting on the strong, bold melodies. “Did you really write this, Max?” Hawkins kept asking. “My, my!” Abbey Lincoln’s fiery strength and hard clarity were a revelation to me after having heard her on several albums which lacked definition. “I feel this,” she explained, “and I’ve also learned a lot from Max Roach in recent months about being me when I sing.” It is Coleman Hawkins who solos after Abbey’s opening. There was a squeak in this, his best take. “No, don’t splice,” said Hawkins. “When it’s all perfect, especially in a piece like this, there’s something very wrong.”

Freedom Day, another collaboration of Brown and Roach, communicates the vibrant expectancy and wonderment and nagging disbelief in the period immediately following the Emancipation Proclamation. The song, particularly in Abbey Lincoln’s surging performance, projects a bursting impatience. The celebratory instrumental solos are by Booker Little (trumpet); Walter Benton (tenor saxophone) in one of his best performances so far on record; Julian Priester (trombone); and Max Roach. Roach arranged the backgrounds throughout the record as well as having composed the melodies.

Triptych: Prayer, Protest, Peace was originally conceived by Roach as a ballet, and has been performed by him with the Ruth Walton Dancers. The choreography by Roach and Walton is largely improvisatory within a general framework. The demands this piece makes on a singer are fierce and exhausting. Prayer is the cry of an oppressed people, any and all oppressed peoples of whatever color or combinations of colors. Protest is a final, uncontrollable unleashing of rage and anger that have been compressed in fear for so long that the only catharsis can be the extremely painful tearing out of all the accumulated fury and hurt and blinding bitterness. It is all forms of protest, certainly including violence. Peace, as Max explained to Abbey before the take, “is the feeling of relaxed exhaustion after you’ve done everything you can to assert yourself. You can rest now because you’ve worked to be free. It’s a realistic feeling of peacefulness. You know what you’ve been through.” Worth noting is how aptly Max complements Abbey in the three sections.

All Africa connotes both the growing interest of American Negroes in the present and future of Africa and also their new pride in Africa’s past and their own pre-American heritage. In this collaboration between American jazz drummer, Roach, Afro-Cuban players Mantillo and Du Vall, and Nigerian Michael Olatunji, it was Olatunji who set the polyrhythmic directions. It is his voice answering Abbey Lincoln in the introduction. She chants the names of African tribes. In answer, Olatunji relates a saying of each tribe concerning freedom – generally in his own Yoruba dialect. His is also the leading drum voice (he’s actually playing three, the basic drum being an Apesi from Nigeria, a whole drum carved from the trunk of a tree.) The resultant interplay gathers in tension and complexity until Tears For Johannesburg is introduced by an insistent motif played by bassist James Schenck.

Tears For Johannesburg sums up, in large sense, what the players and singers on this album are trying to communicate. There is still incredible and bloody cruelty against Africans, as in the Sharpeville massacres of South Africa. There is still much to be won in America. But, as the soloists indicate after Abbey’s wounding threnody, there will be no stopping the grasp for freedom everywhere. In order, the solos are by Booker Little, Walter Benton, Julian Priester, and the drummers.

What this album is saying is that Freedom Day is coming in many places, and those working for it mean to make it stick. In 1937, a Negro who still remembered slavery spoke of what it was like in 1865. “Hallelujah broke out… Everybody went wild. We all felt like heroes, and nobody had make us that way but ourselves.” It’s happening again.