Max Roach We Insist!
AAA Mono Master / Sterling Sound cut by Ryan Smith
65th Anniversary VMP Exclusive
Text “JOIN” to (314) 300-9979 and use album code 995974
Members: text “SWAP” or “ADD” to (314) 300-9979
AAA Mono Master / Sterling Sound cut by Ryan Smith
65th Anniversary VMP Exclusive
Text “JOIN” to (314) 300-9979 and use album code 995974
Members: text “SWAP” or “ADD” to (314) 300-9979
She Was Called the Black Marilyn Monroe. She Had Other Ideas.
WORDS BY ASHAWNTA JACKSON
I.
Abbey Lincoln cut her hair. It was 1958 or 57, maybe. She was a hit on the supper club circuit, a “tan Venus,” according to a 1959 article in Jet Magazine. “Looking like a million dollars and determined to make as much as a singer in the world’s plushest nightclubs.” A beautiful vision of a kind of delicate womanhood, dazzling the crowds. A Black Marilyn Monroe, sex and song intertwined into an image. But the image was miles apart from the reality, a distance she felt every time she stepped off stage. “It never really worked inside,” she told Down Beat in 1961. “I was huffing and puffing, but nothing emotional was really happening.” The music wasn’t moving her, wasn’t challenging her. For nearly a year, she tried to make it work. Tried to connect the material to her voice, her soul. But it didn’t matter. The image of Abbey Lincoln wasn’t a real person. This Abbey was made up, created, posed and set on stage, “I didn’t have the confidence to find my own direction,” she told Down Beat. “So I was taking instruction from an entire entourage of people.” Though she was a star for the nightclub set, it didn’t take much for her to realize that those weren’t the people she wanted to reach. “Everywhere I went, I saw my people living in the slums [...]. They were the people I wanted to identify with when I sang, but they couldn’t even come to the places I was working most of the time.” As she would say in a 1985 interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, “I began asking questions that glamor girls weren’t supposed to ask.” And that question was, “Why?” Why were Black people relegated to such abysmal standards? Why couldn’t they come to see Lincoln shining on stage? “Black people everywhere [were living] in abject poverty,” Lincoln told an interviewer. “I wanted to know why.” But change was coming. It was coming in the streets and the schools. It was coming to lunch counters and bus stops. Big cities and small towns. And each person had a choice to make— let the change come and wash away the sins of the past, or fight against the waves, drowning as the world became brand new.
II.
“Driva Man,” the first track of We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite starts sparsely. Abbey Lincoln plays a lone tambourine accompanying her powerful voice. A heavy syncopation punctuating each line. “Driva’man the kind of boss” beat “Ride a man and lead a horse” beat “When his cat ‘o nine tail fly” beat “You’d be happy just to die” beat. The story of freedom beginning with the story of bondage. Two ideas that can’t exist without the other. The sparseness suddenly overtaken by a slow, bluesy drone as the instrumentation comes in, first the horns, including a solo by saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, then the bass, played by James Schenk, holding steady, a work song reformed, redesigned, reimagined for a changing time, a changing people.
III.
“My straightened hair was the last curse left on my body,” Lincoln told an interviewer in 1985. “I was determined to find my hair beautiful, to find myself and the people I was representing up there on the stage beautiful just as we were— even if no one else did.” And so, she cut it. She cut her hair along with the ties to who she used to be, emerging into her new world curious, fiery, and ready for progress. Lincoln, along with her then- partner, Max Roach, had long been discussing what change meant, not just as people, but as artists. Lincoln had mostly given up the smooth supper club music because it wasn’t reflecting who she was, who she was becoming. As she told the Jet in 1959, “I’m a black woman and I have to sing about things I feel and know about— jazz.” And whether that was about “no-good men” or an idyllic landscape where the real world never intruded, she needed to sing about the world she wanted to see, the world she did see, the world she was living in. As musicologist Ingrid Monson writes in her book Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa, “Bebop musicians and civil rights activists mobilized the language of merit, universal justice, and transcendence to demand entrée and recognition in mainstream American society, one in the language of art, the other in the language of politics.” For some musicians, there was little separation between art and activism. Art was activism.
IV.
Freedom Now Suite wasn’t just an album, live performances of the work were often done in support of the civil rights movement. One live performance at a 1961 benefit concert for the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), for example, featured dancers (including a young Maya Angelou), actress Ruby Dee as narrator, and a band led by Roach and featuring Booker Little, Marcus Belgrave, Julian Priester, Eric Dolphy, Walter Benton, Michael Olatunji, Larry Ridley, conga drummers, and Abbey Lincoln. The impetus for the project even came from a space of protest and change. Roach and singer Oscar Brown, Jr. (the pair was brought together via an introduction from Lincoln) wrote several pieces as part of a planned event marking the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963. But time and progress was moving too fast, and the work was too important to wait, and as Monson explains, “The rapidly developing political events of 1960 were offered as the reason for a change in direction that ultimately led to the recording of the work in late August and early September 1960.” Ultimately, Brown didn’t appear on the record due to conflicts with Roach and the direction of the project, but three of the album’s five songs list Brown as a co-writer. The second track of the album, “Freedom Day,” lives up to its name, and holds on to the roots of Brown and Roach’s original project. The horns— Booker Little on trumpet, Julian Priester on trombone, and Walter Benton on tenor saxophone — meet one another in complex harmonies that feel both tied to, what was then, the present of jazz, while stretching the form to explore its infinite possibilities. It’s free, but somehow, tight and constrained. A sort of regimented march leading into Lincoln’s vocals, which begin as a rapid-fire exclamation before smoothing out into a languid meditation. Marking the emancipation, the piece treads along these lines in a hopeful, but cautious, celebration. “Rumors flying must be lyin’/Can it really be?” In an interview with Monson, Roach explains, “We don’t really understand what it really is to be free. The last song we did, ‘Freedom Day,’ ended with a question mark.’’
V.
Soon after the album’s release, Roach told Down Beat “I will never again play anything that does not have social significance.” This album was as much a statement of purpose as it was a work of art. Even the cover, an homage to student lunch-counter sit-ins held throughout Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960, reflected that message. In his conversation with Monson, Roach reflected on a music critic asking him what politics had to do with music. In reply Roach asked, “What has breathing got to do with life?” Each moment, each note, is a breath. A deep inhale/exhale that says we are still here. Or maybe, as the piece “Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace” shows, it’s not as much of a breath as a scream. A call to the past, to the present, to the future, to whoever will hear, whoever is brave enough to listen. It aches and heals, the sounds of being broken and reborn over centuries. But it wasn’t an easy artistic choice to make. Roach’s collaborator Oscar Brown, disliked it, saying that he and Roach “were arguing about the screaming. We were arguing about the image he [Roach] wanted Abbey to have.’’ Even Abbey, who throughout this period, has stretched the boundaries of her art, telling Monson, “It wasn’t an approach to music that I would have chosen, but because I thought of [Roach] as a teacher— he preceded me— I did what I could to please him.” But as for Roach, he saw magic. As he later recalled of Lincoln, “When she opens her mouth to sing . . . it’s perhaps my imagination, [but] I literally have at times seen the sound that comes from her body. I see the sound. I’d not only hear it but see it. She’s phenomenal. . . She to me is in the realities of life.”
VI.
In a 1961 interview in Down Beat, Roach explained his work. At the time, it seemed a huge departure from what had earned him accolades in the preceding years. “Yes, I have changed,” Roach said. “But only in terms of content.” His playing was the same, it was his outlook and reason for playing that had changed. “We American jazz musicians of African descent have proved beyond all doubt that we’re master musicians of our instruments. Now what we have to do is employ our skill to tell the dramatic story of our people and what we’ve been through.” That’s ultimately what We Insist! was, a declaration of independence, a voice emerging— not new, but revolutionized. The closing pieces on the album represent that revolution. “All Africa,” featuring percussion and congas by Michael Olatunji, Raymond Mantilla, and Tomas du Vall, calls on the past. Lincoln chants the names of several African ethnic groups, as Olatunji, in a classic call-and-response, replies with, as Nat Hentoff explains in the original liner notes, “a saying of each tribe concerning freedom— generally in his own Yoruba dialect.” It is impossible to walk the road ahead without seeing the steps you have already taken, and walking resolutely into the ones you’ve yet to take. And the final two tracks, harkening to a stripped-away past while working toward a different future, honor that. They both contain elements of the past while still looking ahead, imagining all the spaces the music had yet to go. “All Africa” seamlessly transitions into the closing piece, a Roach composition called “Tears for Johannesburg.” The piece was dedicated to victims of South Africa’s Sharpesville massacre, which saw the deaths of an estimated ninety-one anti- apartheid protesters and injuries to over 200 more when police opened fire on them. As Hentoff writes, “There is still much to be won in America… [but] there will be no stopping the grasp for freedom everywhere.” Like the young Abbey who looked at her country and wondered why, We Insist! looked at the world and wondered the same thing. The fight for freedom was global, and music was just one of the weapons.
VII.
When Abbey Lincoln cut her hair, she let the past fall away a strand at a time. There was a future she wanted to be a part of, a person she wanted to be, and she couldn’t wait any longer. We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite and Straight Ahead, the Lincoln album that followed in 1961 featuring many of the same players (including Roach) and political energy, didn’t earn Lincoln and Roach many accolades. Monson notes the impact these albums had on their careers, “Lincoln did not record another album under her leadership until 1973, and Roach, who had recorded twenty-one albums under his own name between 1953 and 1960, recorded only eleven between 1961 and 1971.” As Lincoln told the Inquirer about the situation, “I was in plenty of trouble, but at least it was trouble of my own choosing.” Out of all the emotions this album conjures, from pride to sadness to hope to wistfulness to anger, one thing that doesn’t weigh it down is regret. It stands as both a powerful record of its time, and as a bold artistic leap for the genre. And as for Lincoln, she never regretted a single cut, telling Monson in 1995, “I look back at that time, and I think, well, I’m not sorry for anything. I did what was in my heart. And I was right, too.”
LABEL Candid Records
ORIGINAL RELEASE 1961
RELEASE TYPE 65th Anniversary VMP Exclusive
FORMAT 1xLP, 12 inch, 33 1/3 RPM
WEIGHT 180 gram
COLORWAY Black
JACKET Single pocket, tip-on
LACQUERS AAA from the mono master tapes, mastered at Sterling Sound by Ryan Smith
COVER PHOTO Kwame Brathwaite
CATALOG VMP-304
More releases: Promises Kept · Back to Vinyl Me, Please
WORDS BY ASHAWNTA JACKSON
I.
Abbey Lincoln cut her hair. It was 1958 or 57, maybe. She was a hit on the supper club circuit, a “tan Venus,” according to a 1959 article in Jet Magazine. “Looking like a million dollars and determined to make as much as a singer in the world’s plushest nightclubs.” A beautiful vision of a kind of delicate womanhood, dazzling the crowds. A Black Marilyn Monroe, sex and song intertwined into an image. But the image was miles apart from the reality, a distance she felt every time she stepped off stage. “It never really worked inside,” she told Down Beat in 1961. “I was huffing and puffing, but nothing emotional was really happening.” The music wasn’t moving her, wasn’t challenging her. For nearly a year, she tried to make it work. Tried to connect the material to her voice, her soul. But it didn’t matter. The image of Abbey Lincoln wasn’t a real person. This Abbey was made up, created, posed and set on stage, “I didn’t have the confidence to find my own direction,” she told Down Beat. “So I was taking instruction from an entire entourage of people.” Though she was a star for the nightclub set, it didn’t take much for her to realize that those weren’t the people she wanted to reach. “Everywhere I went, I saw my people living in the slums [...]. They were the people I wanted to identify with when I sang, but they couldn’t even come to the places I was working most of the time.” As she would say in a 1985 interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, “I began asking questions that glamor girls weren’t supposed to ask.” And that question was, “Why?” Why were Black people relegated to such abysmal standards? Why couldn’t they come to see Lincoln shining on stage? “Black people everywhere [were living] in abject poverty,” Lincoln told an interviewer. “I wanted to know why.” But change was coming. It was coming in the streets and the schools. It was coming to lunch counters and bus stops. Big cities and small towns. And each person had a choice to make— let the change come and wash away the sins of the past, or fight against the waves, drowning as the world became brand new.
II.
“Driva Man,” the first track of We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite starts sparsely. Abbey Lincoln plays a lone tambourine accompanying her powerful voice. A heavy syncopation punctuating each line. “Driva’man the kind of boss” beat “Ride a man and lead a horse” beat “When his cat ‘o nine tail fly” beat “You’d be happy just to die” beat. The story of freedom beginning with the story of bondage. Two ideas that can’t exist without the other. The sparseness suddenly overtaken by a slow, bluesy drone as the instrumentation comes in, first the horns, including a solo by saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, then the bass, played by James Schenk, holding steady, a work song reformed, redesigned, reimagined for a changing time, a changing people.
III.
“My straightened hair was the last curse left on my body,” Lincoln told an interviewer in 1985. “I was determined to find my hair beautiful, to find myself and the people I was representing up there on the stage beautiful just as we were— even if no one else did.” And so, she cut it. She cut her hair along with the ties to who she used to be, emerging into her new world curious, fiery, and ready for progress. Lincoln, along with her then- partner, Max Roach, had long been discussing what change meant, not just as people, but as artists. Lincoln had mostly given up the smooth supper club music because it wasn’t reflecting who she was, who she was becoming. As she told the Jet in 1959, “I’m a black woman and I have to sing about things I feel and know about— jazz.” And whether that was about “no-good men” or an idyllic landscape where the real world never intruded, she needed to sing about the world she wanted to see, the world she did see, the world she was living in. As musicologist Ingrid Monson writes in her book Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa, “Bebop musicians and civil rights activists mobilized the language of merit, universal justice, and transcendence to demand entrée and recognition in mainstream American society, one in the language of art, the other in the language of politics.” For some musicians, there was little separation between art and activism. Art was activism.
IV.
Freedom Now Suite wasn’t just an album, live performances of the work were often done in support of the civil rights movement. One live performance at a 1961 benefit concert for the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), for example, featured dancers (including a young Maya Angelou), actress Ruby Dee as narrator, and a band led by Roach and featuring Booker Little, Marcus Belgrave, Julian Priester, Eric Dolphy, Walter Benton, Michael Olatunji, Larry Ridley, conga drummers, and Abbey Lincoln. The impetus for the project even came from a space of protest and change. Roach and singer Oscar Brown, Jr. (the pair was brought together via an introduction from Lincoln) wrote several pieces as part of a planned event marking the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963. But time and progress was moving too fast, and the work was too important to wait, and as Monson explains, “The rapidly developing political events of 1960 were offered as the reason for a change in direction that ultimately led to the recording of the work in late August and early September 1960.” Ultimately, Brown didn’t appear on the record due to conflicts with Roach and the direction of the project, but three of the album’s five songs list Brown as a co-writer. The second track of the album, “Freedom Day,” lives up to its name, and holds on to the roots of Brown and Roach’s original project. The horns— Booker Little on trumpet, Julian Priester on trombone, and Walter Benton on tenor saxophone — meet one another in complex harmonies that feel both tied to, what was then, the present of jazz, while stretching the form to explore its infinite possibilities. It’s free, but somehow, tight and constrained. A sort of regimented march leading into Lincoln’s vocals, which begin as a rapid-fire exclamation before smoothing out into a languid meditation. Marking the emancipation, the piece treads along these lines in a hopeful, but cautious, celebration. “Rumors flying must be lyin’/Can it really be?” In an interview with Monson, Roach explains, “We don’t really understand what it really is to be free. The last song we did, ‘Freedom Day,’ ended with a question mark.’’
V.
Soon after the album’s release, Roach told Down Beat “I will never again play anything that does not have social significance.” This album was as much a statement of purpose as it was a work of art. Even the cover, an homage to student lunch-counter sit-ins held throughout Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960, reflected that message. In his conversation with Monson, Roach reflected on a music critic asking him what politics had to do with music. In reply Roach asked, “What has breathing got to do with life?” Each moment, each note, is a breath. A deep inhale/exhale that says we are still here. Or maybe, as the piece “Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace” shows, it’s not as much of a breath as a scream. A call to the past, to the present, to the future, to whoever will hear, whoever is brave enough to listen. It aches and heals, the sounds of being broken and reborn over centuries. But it wasn’t an easy artistic choice to make. Roach’s collaborator Oscar Brown, disliked it, saying that he and Roach “were arguing about the screaming. We were arguing about the image he [Roach] wanted Abbey to have.’’ Even Abbey, who throughout this period, has stretched the boundaries of her art, telling Monson, “It wasn’t an approach to music that I would have chosen, but because I thought of [Roach] as a teacher— he preceded me— I did what I could to please him.” But as for Roach, he saw magic. As he later recalled of Lincoln, “When she opens her mouth to sing . . . it’s perhaps my imagination, [but] I literally have at times seen the sound that comes from her body. I see the sound. I’d not only hear it but see it. She’s phenomenal. . . She to me is in the realities of life.”
VI.
In a 1961 interview in Down Beat, Roach explained his work. At the time, it seemed a huge departure from what had earned him accolades in the preceding years. “Yes, I have changed,” Roach said. “But only in terms of content.” His playing was the same, it was his outlook and reason for playing that had changed. “We American jazz musicians of African descent have proved beyond all doubt that we’re master musicians of our instruments. Now what we have to do is employ our skill to tell the dramatic story of our people and what we’ve been through.” That’s ultimately what We Insist! was, a declaration of independence, a voice emerging— not new, but revolutionized. The closing pieces on the album represent that revolution. “All Africa,” featuring percussion and congas by Michael Olatunji, Raymond Mantilla, and Tomas du Vall, calls on the past. Lincoln chants the names of several African ethnic groups, as Olatunji, in a classic call-and-response, replies with, as Nat Hentoff explains in the original liner notes, “a saying of each tribe concerning freedom— generally in his own Yoruba dialect.” It is impossible to walk the road ahead without seeing the steps you have already taken, and walking resolutely into the ones you’ve yet to take. And the final two tracks, harkening to a stripped-away past while working toward a different future, honor that. They both contain elements of the past while still looking ahead, imagining all the spaces the music had yet to go. “All Africa” seamlessly transitions into the closing piece, a Roach composition called “Tears for Johannesburg.” The piece was dedicated to victims of South Africa’s Sharpesville massacre, which saw the deaths of an estimated ninety-one anti- apartheid protesters and injuries to over 200 more when police opened fire on them. As Hentoff writes, “There is still much to be won in America… [but] there will be no stopping the grasp for freedom everywhere.” Like the young Abbey who looked at her country and wondered why, We Insist! looked at the world and wondered the same thing. The fight for freedom was global, and music was just one of the weapons.
VII.
When Abbey Lincoln cut her hair, she let the past fall away a strand at a time. There was a future she wanted to be a part of, a person she wanted to be, and she couldn’t wait any longer. We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite and Straight Ahead, the Lincoln album that followed in 1961 featuring many of the same players (including Roach) and political energy, didn’t earn Lincoln and Roach many accolades. Monson notes the impact these albums had on their careers, “Lincoln did not record another album under her leadership until 1973, and Roach, who had recorded twenty-one albums under his own name between 1953 and 1960, recorded only eleven between 1961 and 1971.” As Lincoln told the Inquirer about the situation, “I was in plenty of trouble, but at least it was trouble of my own choosing.” Out of all the emotions this album conjures, from pride to sadness to hope to wistfulness to anger, one thing that doesn’t weigh it down is regret. It stands as both a powerful record of its time, and as a bold artistic leap for the genre. And as for Lincoln, she never regretted a single cut, telling Monson in 1995, “I look back at that time, and I think, well, I’m not sorry for anything. I did what was in my heart. And I was right, too.”
LABEL Candid Records
ORIGINAL RELEASE 1961
RELEASE TYPE 65th Anniversary VMP Exclusive
FORMAT 1xLP, 12 inch, 33 1/3 RPM
WEIGHT 180 gram
COLORWAY Black
JACKET Single pocket, tip-on
LACQUERS AAA from the mono master tapes, mastered at Sterling Sound by Ryan Smith
COVER PHOTO Kwame Brathwaite
CATALOG VMP-304
More releases: Promises Kept · Back to Vinyl Me, Please