Album Reviews

Never mind the much-vilified Marine and ex-Obama pastor Reverend Wright, if you want to hear the unvarnished, angry, hurtful truth of an era not so long past, listen to this stark, musical reminder of race relations in early ‘60s America.

The sit-ins of that era, which were non-violent confrontations intended to challenge and overthrow segregated Jim Crow America strongly affected Black artists who normally kept their distance from commenting on race relations in America—at least when addressing the white audiences attracted to their music.

This simmering suite, recorded during the summer of 1960, contains part of a longer work that drummer Max Roach and Oscar Brown, Jr. had planned to debut in 1963 for the Centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. Civil Rights activity, particularly by college students, NAACP members and of course Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Leadership Conference forced their hand.

Roach, who died in August of 2007 at the age of 83, was the last of a breed of jazz musicians, including Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, and of course Charlie Parker, who challenged and changed jazz during and after WWII. The always-adventurous Roach attacked the music’s rhythmic underpinnings, adding waltz and Afro-Cuban time to the mix.

This audacious piece, featuring vocalist (and future Roach spouse) Abbey Lincoln, Coleman Hawkins, Michael Olatunji, Booker Little, trombonist Julian Priester and others, covers the brutality of slavery and plantation life (“Driva’ Man”), the excitement and anticipation of the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of slavery, the disappointment and rage created by the new form of oppression and the awakening on the part of American blacks of their African connection, particularly in what was happening to their brethren in South Africa.

The music is angry, turbulent, insistent, tinged with joy and liberation (“All Africa”) and at times, theatrical and polemical. With Roach at the helm, it is at all times rhythmically charged and packed with energy and forward propulsion. Lincoln’s performance is particularly evocative and at times painfully searing, though her expressions of hope offer a cathartic counterbalance.

When it was first released, WE INSIST! was greeted by mixed reviews, with many finding it too controversial, confrontational and disturbing. Listen to Ms. Lincoln’s anguished cries during “Triptych” and you’ll understand that reaction.

Listen to the whole record, though, and you will be moved in every emotional direction, propelled by Roach’s percussion and the committed contributions of the others. History and the passage of time have added luster to this recording. Rather than sounding dated, given the current political scene and the attempt by a racially mixed candidate to become America’s first black President, and given white America’s reaction both overt and covert, this record is very up to date and has a lot to say about race relations in America then and now.

But more importantly, it’s musically worthwhile and marked a turning point in Max Roach’s career. After the experience, he dedicated himself to an uncompromising musical career, which didn’t exactly broaden his commercial success but surely provided him with greater satisfaction and inner peace.

Sonically, the record offers everything great that one has come to expect from the Candid productions produced by Hentoff and recorded at Nola Penthouse Sound Studio and engineered by Bob d’Orleans. Crank it up and you’re there. The ending of side two is odd though: there is a series of ‘bleeps’ that sound too modern for the time followed by a mechanical sound and then it just ends. Can that really be right?