Max Roach – We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite (Remastered)

180-gram vinyl

Remastered by Bernie Grundman

Tip-on jacket

Early ’60s improv jazz and blues titles on Candid return to print!

Reissue program starts with five expertly remastered albums of jazz and blues

The original Candid record label lasted a mere four years, from 1960 to ’64, and its 30-some LPs played a worthy role in fusing the period’s music — mainly modern jazz but also blues — with the burgeoning civil rights movement.

The label’s catalog has been acquired by Exceleration Music, whose reissue program starts with five expertly remastered albums: We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite (featuring Coleman Hawkins, Olatunji, and Roach’s wife, Abbey Lincoln), Lincoln’s Straight Ahead, and Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus plus, from the blues, Lightnin’ Hopkins in New York and Otis Spann Is the Blues. The reissues include prescient notes by the original label’s producer and A&R man, noted critic and author Nat Hentoff.

The American Candid label has achieved a near legendary status among the critics and the International jazz and blues public. The series was born in 1960 when Archie Bleyer, owner of the Cadence label decided to indulge his love of jazz and blues and create his own line — called Candid. Bleyer recruited Hentoff to produce the series.

A tour de force among the initial five reissues released for this series is drummer/writer Max Roach’s We Insist! spotlighting tenor saxman Hawkins, Nigerian drummer Michael Olatunji, and Lincoln on vocals. The lunch-counter cover photo — reflecting the early-’60s sit-ins to protest segregated restaurants — captures the suite’s intent: to present the Black experience from Africa to slavery in America to the present and onward with a look to Mother Africa. Set in 1863, “Freedom Day” refers to President Abe Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, whose centennial was approaching.

Throughout the suite’s five tracks (including “Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace”) Lincoln’s arresting vocals extend to wordless vocalese as well as chanting African tribes’ names in a duet with Olatunji, whose three drums include one carved from a tree trunk. Spontaneity was a key. Coleman’s response to possibly editing out a squeak in his playing (back in the day of manual editing a session’s magnetic tapes) was “No, don’t splice. When it’s all perfect, especially in a piece like this, there’s something very wrong.” Sixty-plus years after these sessions, their power is still overwhelming.

In the late 1980s, Black Lion Records in England bought the Candid catalog, subsequently selling it to U.S.-based Exceleration Music, where jazz drummer Terri Lynne Carrington is involved with A&R.

Format : Vinyl Record

1 Lp