Max Roach's "We Insist! Freedom Now Suite" Intelligent but Puzzling

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The last thing my husband Charles and I istened to was the extraordinary but also frustrating 1960 album We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, an awkward title forced on Roach because two years earlier Sonny Rollins had recorded an instrumental album called Freedom Suite on which Roach had played as a sideman. We Insist! Freedom Now Suite was among the first records n which major jazz musicians addressed the nascent civil-rights movement of Black Americans – though as early as the 1930’s musicians like Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday had written, played and/or sung songs dealing with racial intolerance. We Insist! Freedom Now Suite opens with its most powerful track, “Driva Man” (“driva” as in “slavedriver,” the man at the otner end of the whip used to beat recalcitrant slaves and bludgeon them into submission), with a powerful vocal by Lincoln (her last name is all too appropriate here!) and a scorching tenor sax solo by Coleman Hawkins. Hawkins was a veteran of the 1920’s jazz scene who had embraced the new bebop style; unlike most of his contemporaries, he had not only praised bop, he played it! It was Hawkins who gave such major bop players as Roach and Thelonious Monk their first opportunities to record – in Roach’s case for Apollo Records, whose owner, Bess Berman, got her label up and running and kept it in business quite a while despite the twin handicaps of being Black and female.

Alas, the second song on the suite, “Freedom Day,” is an attempt to depict musically the excitement the slaves must have felt when they received word of the Emancipation Proclamation; it’s good but Duke Ellngton’s depiction of the same scene in “Emancipation Celebration” from his symphonic masterpiece Black, Brown and Beige, though a lot shorter, is better. There follow three movements in which Lincoln’s voice is used wordlessly and she comes off as an odd combination of Yma Sumac and Yoko Ono, and Roach not only brings in a conga drummer (Michael Olatunji, who became something of a star in his own right and wrote “Jingo,” later Santana’s first big hit) but appears to be playing hand drums himself. The effect is oddly like one of those pseudo-”exotica” records Les Baxter was churning out throughout the 1950’s, a strange sound indeed for an album supposedly part of a concept record dealing with civil rights. The last track on this album is called “Tears for Johannesburg” and it was obviously intended as an anticipation of the struggle against South African apartheid – which actually ended more definitively and with less racial animus than the similar bitter-enders in the United States have managed.

The MS-NBC shows last night featured a UCSD professor named Barbara Walter (note the absence of an “s” at the end of her last name) who’d written a book called How Civil Wars Start, who among other things was surprised she was when South Africa managed the so-called “transition to Black rule” without massive bloodshed, and said that was really the responsibility of South Africa’s white business community for realizing that the game was over and if they wanted to keep making profits – which of course they did – it was time to end apartheid. I haven’t always supported what the African National Congress has done with their power since (does the name “Jacob Zuma” mean anything to you?), but they deserve a ton of credit for negotiating a peaceful end to South Africa’s racism while that task remains elusive in our own country.