Snowy's Music Originals: augustus 2014

Written by Max Roach and Oscar Brown

O: Max Roach on Candid Records. The Album: We Insist! Subtitle: Max Roach's Freedom Suite

From Wikipedia:

We Insist! (subtitled Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite) is a jazz album released on Candid Records in 1960. It contains a suite which composer and drummer 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 awarded the album one of its rare crown accolades, in addition to featuring it as part of its Core Collection.

The music consists of five selections concerning the Emancipation Proclamation and the growing African independence movements of the 1950s. Only Roach and vocalist Abbey Lincoln perform on all five tracks, and one track features a guest appearance by saxophonist Coleman Hawkins.

"Driva' Man"

Written by Max Roach and Oscar Brown, "Driva Man" tells the explicit story of slavery through its lyrics and accompaniment. Nat Hentoff, who was present at the recording sessions of the album, writes that the Driva' Man "is a personification of the white overseer in slavery times who often forced women under his jurisdiction into sexual relations." Also in the lyrics are “pater ollers.” In Hentoff’s liner notes he includes a description of the patrollers by a former slave who says they are men “who would catch you from home and wear you out and send you back to your master...Most of them there patrollers was poor white folks...Poor white folks had to hustle round to make a living, so they hired out theirselves to slaveowners and rode the roads at night and whipped you if they catched you off their plantation without a pass.”

This track uses several tactics to evoke its images of slavery. Alisa White describes how the 5/4 time signature of the track adds an intense percussive hit, played either by a tambourine or as a rimshot, on the first beat of each measure. The track does not deviate from this pattern, which White writes, “conjures up images of forced labor,” specifically a cracked whip. Additionally, the track is played in a blues form that is only six bars long, however this is found in pairs, so that each chorus is actually twelve bars long. Abbey Lincoln is the first to enter the tune, singing the melody a cappella and accompanying herself with tambourine. Coleman Hawkins then enters with the tenor saxophone melody, along with the three horns supporting him. After a chorus of instrumental melody, Hawkins takes a 4 chorus solo. All the while, Roach maintains the unusual 5/4 time signature with the punching hit on the first beat of each measure. Melodically, Driva Man is the simplest tune on the album, based in a C minor pentatonic scale.

Coleman Hawkins makes an appearance here and “plays the male counterpart to Abbey Lincoln,” as Hentoff notes in his liner notes. Hawkins would stay far past his part in the recording, and he would turn to Max Roach in astonishment, asking, ‘“did you really write this, Max?”’In his liner notes, Hentoff writes of an interaction between Hawkins and Abbey Lincoln after a squeak in Abbey’s opening solo in Driva Man: “No, don’t splice,” said Hawkins. When it’s all perfect, especially in a piece like this, there’s something very wrong.”

Max Roach 1960