We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite

Album Notes & Community Reviews

Accelerated by the urgency of the 1960s sit-in movement, 'We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite' stands as one of jazz's most direct and uncompromising political statements. The work fuses an avant-garde compositional approach with a historical narrative tracing the Black struggle from slavery in America to the contemporaneous fight against apartheid in South Africa. Its thesis is delivered through radical musical forms, most notably Abbey Lincoln's wordless, cathartic screaming on the central "Protest" movement, cementing the album as a seminal moment of artistic activism.