"We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite" is a landmark jazz album released on Candid Records in 1960. It contains a suite which Max Roach and lyricist Oscar Brown had begun to develop in 1959 with a view to its performance in 1963 on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. The cover references the sit-in movement of the Civil Rights Movement. The Penguin Guide to Jazz has awarded the album one of its rare 'crown' accolades, in addition to featuring it as part of its Core Collection of essential jazz recordings. The music consists of five selections concerning the Emancipation Proclamation and the growing African independence movements of the 1950s. Only Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln perform on all five tracks, and one track features a guest cameo by one of the inventors of jazz saxophone playing, Coleman Hawkins. In a chapter devoted to the album in his book "Digitopia Blues - Race, Technology and the American Voice", author John Sobol wrote: "If A Love Supreme is the record of one man's transformation from body to spirit, Freedom Now Suite is the record of a body that is all body, a record of transgressions against that body, of the anger, the hate, the sorrow, the dirt and the hope that body has known for four hundred years. Like A Love Supreme, the individuals, events, passion and context which created Freedom Now Suite form a whole with almost mythopoetical dimensions. That is to say the language, the music the performers and their lived history have a dramatic unity which lifts the suite beyond mere artistic expression to the realm of a revolutionary reordering of history. Freedom Now Suite is mythology, reality recast, reality recreated in the image of this diverse creative unit."(Wikipedia)
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