[Sixty years ago, a pathbreaking jazz album from Max Roach, Abbey
Lincoln, and Oscar Brown, Jr., fused politics and art in the fight for
Black liberation. Today many Black artists—women at the
forefront—are taking similar strides.] [[link removed]]

THE SOUNDS OF STRUGGLE  
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Michael Reagan
July 7, 2021
Boston Review
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_ Sixty years ago, a pathbreaking jazz album from Max Roach, Abbey
Lincoln, and Oscar Brown, Jr., fused politics and art in the fight for
Black liberation. Today many Black artists—women at the
forefront—are taking similar strides. _

The pioneering jazz album We Insist!, released by Candid in 1960,
with cover designed by Frank Guana.,

 

“A revolution is unfurling—America’s unfinished revolution.”
These words of A. Philip Randolph are the first you read in Nat
Hentoff’s liner notes to the legendary 1960 jazz album _We Insist!:
The Freedom Now Suite_ featuring drummer Max Roach and singer Abbey
Lincoln with lyrics by Oscar Brown, Jr. The Black revolution,
Randolph’s epigraph went on, was “unfurling in lunch counters,
buses, libraries and schools—wherever the dignity and position of
men are denied. Youth and idealism are unfurling. Masses of Negroes
are marching onto the stage of history and demanding their freedom
now!” The album, a seminal work in what has been called “civil
rights jazz,” typified this moment: bold, militant, insisting on new
directions—both musically and politically.

A seminal work of civil rights jazz, _We Insist! _tied Black arts
to the Black freedom struggle.

Randolph, a union leader and towering figure in the mid-century Black
freedom struggle, emphasized the political content of the album, but
he just as easily could have been talking about the music. Roach and
his collaborators—including several others besides Lincoln and
Brown, among them saxophonist Coleman Hawkins—pushed the boundaries
of “straight-ahead” jazz into the “new thing,” developing an
early use of modes in place of familiar tonal centers, compositions
without harmonic structure, and an emphasis on rhythm and African
drumming. Released the same year seventeen countries in Africa gained
their independence, the work also expressed the increasing
radicalization and internationalization of the Black freedom struggle.
The cover of the album featured three Black men at a lunch counter, a
reference to the explosion of lunch counter sit-ins from earlier that
year, where thousands of young Black civil rights activists occupied
segregated public facilities and demanded to be treated as equals.
Freedom now, their actions called; we insist, the album echoed.

The album pushed the revolutionary elements of Black arts forward in
two directions. On the one hand, Roach and his collaborators picked up
the power of the imagery—of the movement “unfurling” all around
them, of the radicalization of movement activists—to produce a
musical composition that remains an indelible contribution to both the
politics of Black freedom and the expansion of musical horizons in
mainstream jazz. On the other hand, they refused the choice between
great art and political art, embracing a new unity of social context,
personal expression, and artistic experimentation. _We Insist! _thus
established itself as simultaneously a great work of art and a
political one, and it has become a lasting testament to the expansive
horizon of Black freedom.

At the same time, Roach and his ensemble faced considerable backlash
for this achievement, and it was the lone Black woman on the project,
Abbey Lincoln, who bore the brunt of the response. Listening to this
album again today has a great deal to tell us about art, politics, and
expression. In 2021 we face similar conditions: the same “unfinished
revolution,” and similar reactionary backlash at efforts to complete
it. Indeed, as Black Lives Matter movement politics builds its way
into Black arts and entertainment, current struggles resemble those
experienced by Lincoln, Roach, and others. Once again it is Black
women artists and movement leaders who are pushing forward, taking us
in new directions.

♦

_We Insist! _was rooted in struggle: produced and released at the
height of the first wave of civil rights activism, coming on the heels
of the Little Rock Nine, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the student
lunch counter sit-ins in the months and years before. Roach was no
stranger to civil rights activism. The same year the album was
released, along with bassist Charles Mingus, Roach and others
organized a protest of the Newport Jazz Festival, one of the premier
jazz events in the country. The festival paid higher rates to big-name
acts, often disproportionately white, while prestige artists, mostly
Black, were paid less. Mingus and Roach hosted a competing festival
called the “Newport Rebels Festival” in protest, one moment of
many in an expanding field of movement inspired civil rights jazz.

The legacy linking jazz to political structure began decades earlier.
From Duke Ellington’s 1943 _Black, Brown and Beige _suite to
Charlie Parker’s 1945 record _Now’s the Time,_ some postwar jazz
artists had conscientiously explored the variety of Black experience
in America. Later, in the years immediately preceding Roach’s work,
several artists released explicitly political records. Mingus was one;
his 1959 _Fables of Faubus_ mounted a mocking and macabre response
to Arkansas governor Orval Faubus’s attempts to block integration in
his state. In 1958 tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins released his
own _Freedom Suite_, a paean to the unfolding struggle for Black
liberation which featured Roach as the drummer. The structures of
white supremacy imposed on Black music and American society writ large
were increasingly the subject of jazz compositions, performances, and
recordings.

The “freedom” of free jazz hinted at the Black freedom movement,
the open expanse of struggle, the boundless horizon of liberation.

Indeed, the impact of white supremacy was felt all over the jazz
world, even for those who chose not to express their experiences
artistically. Trumpeter Miles Davis, for example—arguably the
largest figure in jazz—was beaten and arrested by a New York City
cop for standing on a street corner outside his own show in 1959.
Although Davis did not respond to the assault in his work, his
experience with police violence was just one incident of many visited
upon Black jazz artists. Just the year before, pianist Thelonious Monk
had been dragged from his car and severely beaten by state troopers
for asking for a glass of water at a Delaware hotel. In 1943 pianist
Bud Powell was hospitalized after being beaten by Philadelphia police,
a tragedy that preceded mental health crisis, experimental
electro-shock therapy, and his early death from tuberculosis in 1966.
For Black artists in a profoundly segregated society, with separate
circuits for Black and white musicians, discriminatory pay, and
constant exposure and threat of white supremist violence in the North
and South alike, the feelings of political immediacy were growing.

It was in this climate that _We Insist! _was born. Growing out of a
collaboration originally intended to be performed at the centennial of
the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963 but released early for Candid
Records amidst the growing political crisis, the album moved listeners
through Black history, away and back again to Africa, slavery,
liberation, civil rights, and decolonial movements. As musicologist
Ingrid Monson notes in her book _Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call
Out to Jazz and Africa
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the exact origin story is unclear. Roach recalled receiving a
commission from the NAACP, whereas Brown thought it originated in a
large choral work to be called _The Beat_, an exploration of the
trajectory of African diasporic musical traditions with an emphasis on
rhythm—perfect for drummer Roach. However the project came together,
three of the five tracks released on the 1960 album had been
originally conceived for this other work, beginning in Africa and
ending in America: “All Africa,” “Driva’ Man,” and
“Freedom Day.”

Over time this original design morphed under Roach’s influence. As
Monson explains, Brown recalls a falling out over the substance of the
work:

I was preaching love. Max thought that Malcolm X had a better solution
than Martin Luther King. That was the end of our dispute at the time,
which was a very serious one. So that whole collaboration was aborted,
and at that point it was never completed—although it was pretty near
completion when we fell out.

In Roach’s recollection, the problem had been to “understand what
it _really_ is to be free.” The disagreement was so consequential
that Roach proceeded with the recording for Candid in late August 1960
without telling Brown, who learned of the album only from Hentoff’s
request for biographical material for the liner notes. As they
appeared on the album, the three tracks—rearranged from their
earliest conception, with Africa at the end rather than the
beginning—take on a more direct political valence, reflecting
internationalism, Black power, and militancy in the face of
oppression. Despite all this, Monson observes, “Brown stressed that
he and Roach were in basic agreement over the need to dedicate one’s
artistic work to social justice.” While they mostly agreed, the
artists diverged in the expression and specific political direction of
their work.

Nowhere was this disagreement sharper than in the album’s third
track, “Triptych: Prayer, Protest, Peace,” its artistic
centerpiece. The wordless song traces the psychological process of
struggle against white supremacy in a spare instrumentation featuring
only Roach’s drums and Lincoln’s voice. (The two were in a
relationship at the time and married in 1962.) It is an arresting
work: a cry, a plea, a kind of expressive outburst of frustration,
preparation, and exhaustion from struggle, a moving synthesis of
artistry and politics. The song opens with “prayer,” a subdued
improvised spiritual, with singing from Lincoln expressing pensive
resignation, Roach’s sparse but dramatic playing building a sense of
expectation. The middle of the song, “protest,” explodes as
Lincoln begins to scream into the microphone—at times in wincing
pain and panic—while Roach beats out a wild and raucous rhythm to
match. Finally, the song collapses into exhaustion, “peace,” as
Lincoln and Roach return to a more subdued, breathy, and recognizably
metered section for the musical resolution.

This was politics of different kind—expressive, emotive, personal,
uncompromising and uncontrollable.

The track was instantly controversial, both for its politics and its
music. The artists did not shy away from the affective aspects of
political struggle—the anger, outrage, excesses, and violence that
come from injustice. Hentoff’s liner notes made this explicit.
“Protest,” he wrote, “is a final, uncontrollable unleashing of
rage and anger that have been compressed in fear for so long that the
only catharsis can be the extremely painful tearing out of all the
accumulated fury and hurt and blinding bitterness.” This was not the
pacificist politics of the mainstream civil rights movement, the
patient but persistent and strategic work to upend white supremacy.
This was politics of different kind—expressive, emotive, personal,
uncompromising and uncontrollable. The difference filtered into the
dispute between Roach and Brown. In an interview with Monson, Brown
recalls: “during that whole period we were not estranged. We were
together in a sense; we were arguing. We were arguing about the
screaming. We were arguing about the image he wanted Abbey to have.”

In his own interviews
[[link removed]], Roach
explained that for him, the song wasn’t one of uplift, progress, and
eventual redemption but one of struggle, and without clear resolution.
Regarding the final section, he said, “it was a prayer not of
supplication, but a prayer of preparation. And the protest section
followed the preparation section, which meant that then you went out,
and you, if you will, you _screamed_ . . . Your pain, you just
expressed your pain in the protest.” That expression ended in
“peace,” but it “was a peace that you get from just exhausting
yourself.” And, Roach concluded, “there was no peace.”

♦

Roach called “Triptych” the most abstract work of his career, and
it can rightly be called a masterwork because the meaning, the
politics, and the artistic form are so closely matched. Breaking the
standards of Western harmonic music was one element of a growing
movement in the early 1960s that was pushing the boundaries of jazz.
At the time this new force was referred to variously as the “new
thing,” “free jazz,” or the “avant-garde,” and contrasted
with “straight-ahead” jazz, the kind of Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck,
and the leading figures of jazz modernism. Just three months after
Roach and company recorded _We Insist!_, Ornette Coleman
recorded _Free Jazz_. Soon after, John Coltrane and others pushed
jazz even further, experimenting with modes that had been introduced
on _We Insist!_ and delivering outrageous performances in New York
jazz clubs, some of which began to appear on recordings.

Many jazz critics, especially of the left, saw the new music as
intrinsically imbued with the politics of Black struggle. As the Black
freedom movement pushed the boundaries of respectability politics and
liberal integration narratives of progress and “racial uplift,”
they argued, so too did the new thing push the limits of Western
music. As many artists emphasized eastern and African instrumentation,
particularly the drum, and modal or harmonically loose structure,
critics saw a greater awakening of pan-African and internationalist
sentiments in the music. Even the “freedom” of free jazz, as it
came to be known, hinted at the Black freedom movement, the open
expanse of struggle, the boundless horizon of liberation.

But at the same time, many artists themselves rejected this link
between music and politics, going even further than Brown’s
disagreements over the exact form that link should take. Monk, for
one—the “high priest” of modernist jazz—once told a reporter
that his music “is not a social comment on discrimination or poverty
or the like.” Coltrane was particularly strong on this point. For
him, his music was political, but it was also something more: a way to
experience or communicate or meditate with the divine. When his work
was more overtly political, as with his composition “Alabama”
(1963), it took the form of lament, carrying the deep grief and
persistence that came from bearing witness to white supremacist
violence. Coleman and others of the new thing movement also eschewed
an overtly political stance with their music. While the musical
freedom of free jazz spoke to politics of liberation, its leading
practitioners shied away from these associations.

Roach, Lincoln, and Brown did not. They embraced the Black radical,
internationalist, and liberatory meaning of the artistry, and though
the album itself mostly got positive reviews, they still took shit for
it, especially the lone woman on the album. Lincoln viewed _We
Insist!_ as springboard for her artistic, personal, and political
development. Early in her career she worked as a supper club performer
before she was picked up by Hollywood and featured in hits like the
Marilyn Monroe film _The Girl Can’t Help It_ (1956) and the
variety program _The Steve Allen Show_. In the late 1950s she had
released several albums, and by 1958 was wearing her hair in a
“natural” close cut style. But _We Insist!_ made a statement,
and her performance was key to the overall success of the work.

On her follow-up album, _Straight Ahead _(1961), Lincoln extended
these themes of musical exploration and radical Black politics. Her
solo album put to music the famous Paul Lawrence Dunbar poem “When
Malindy Sings,” added lyrics to Monk’s composition “Blue
Monk,” and explored race and class in the dissonant “In the
Red.” In the title track, “Straight Ahead,” she sang that the
straight road “can lead nowhere” and goes “oh so slow,” when
it takes a “trusting soul astray.” They words plainly resonate as
a metaphor for Black struggle, her career, and her politics all at
once, all of which she was recalibrating in the early 1960s. The title
track was itself a clever double entendre: the “straight ahead”
path in jazz, as in politics, was not moving fast enough. Most
provocatively, the closing refrain of album, from the song
“Retribution,” capped the dissonant sound and militant politics of
Lincoln’s work: “Let the retribution / match the contribution,”
she sang.

Once again it is Black women artists and movement leaders who are
pushing forward, taking us in new directions.

For any of these advances, or simply the talent assembled on her
tracks (the album featured Roach, Hawkins, and Eric Dolphy),
Lincoln’s work was significant. But, as Monson notes, the album
received a harsh review in the jazz magazine _DownBeat_. The
reviewer, Ira Gitler, one of the leading figures in jazz commentary,
dismissed the album, lamenting Lincoln’s political awakening and
calling her a “professional Negro” for dispensing work
increasingly focused on Black politics for Black audiences. “Now
that Abbey Lincoln has found herself as a Negro,” he wrote, “I
hope that she can find herself as a militant but less one-sided
American negro.” Gitler’s stance was part of a broader backlash in
jazz criticism. In 1962 _Time _also published
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feature article on Black music in which they claimed jazz was subject
to “Crow Jim” reverse racism whereby white musicians faced
discrimination in Black musical spaces. “The white man has no civil
rights when it comes to jazz,” the magazine wrote. Never mind that
jazz originated in Black musical idioms, that leading earners in the
jazz world were white performers like Brubeck, or that white players
like pianist Bill Evans achieved the height professional and artistic
acclaim. In _DownBeat_ and _Time _the backlash came from leading
liberal and progressive voices upset with the direction of Black
politics and music.

Lincoln responded to such claims at a symposium on Gitler’s review
organized by _DownBeat_ that featured Roach, Gitler, herself, and
others. “There was a time when I was _really_ a professional
Negro,” she said, referring to her period as supper club singer and
Hollywood star. “I was capitalizing on the fact that I was a
Negro,” she said, “and I looked the way western people expect you
to look. I was a professional Negro. I was not an artist. I had
nothing to say. I used inane stupid material on the stage.” By
contrast, her latest period of artistic expression, self-development,
and political exploration, she insisted, was something different. And
it was not merely political, but part of a process of self-discovery
and maturation. Despite this artistic growth, Lincoln suffered
professional consequences; she did not record another album until
1973, a dozen years after _Straight Ahead_ was issued.

This episode, the claims of reverse racism, and the growing backlash
against Black political artists from mainstream white critics, led
poet and essayist Amiri Baraka, then writing as Leroi Jones, to pen
one of his most famous essays, “Jazz and the White Critic,”
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1963. “Most jazz critics have been white Americans, but most
important jazz musicians have not been,” the essay began. The
arrangement mattered because “it strips the music too ingenuously of
its social and cultural intent.” “To be fully understood,”
Baraka wrote, “the blues and jazz aesthetic . . . must be seen in as
nearly its complete human context as possible”—which meant
attention to class, race, and the “socio-cultural philosophy” out
of which art was born.

♦

Some six decades later, we are in a new era of militant Black politics
and political art. The movement and artistic call and response
continue with familiar echoes, but also with its own distinctive
“socio-cultural philosophy.” After the Black Lives Matter movement
gained national recognition in 2014, political songs like Childish
Gambino’s “This is America” and YG and Nipsey Hussle’s
“FDT” were inescapable during the Trump presidency. The 2018
Grammy awards included a performance from rapper Kendrick Lamar that
featured Black men getting picked off one-by-one, symbolically killed,
as he listed structural impediments to Black freedom. Yet as the
movement progresses, so too does the backlash; the 2018 Grammy’s
were criticized by U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley and others for being
“too political.” And again, it is Black women artists that face
the brunt of the reaction.

It is up to all of us—creators, listeners, activists, critics,
fans—to choose to embrace this moment and to recognize the many
tones of struggle.

In 2020 a flurry of right-wing media attacks targeted rappers Megan
Thee Stallion and Cardi B—who is outspoken on political issues and
shot an ad for Bernie Sanders
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their sexually explicit song “WAP.” Meanwhile, Chicago-based
rapper Noname has taken a political stance in music while pursuing
a book club [[link removed]], other political projects, and
extensive social media commentary [[link removed]] on
political issues, which has elicited public criticism
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fellow musicians. A song from Grammy-winning rapper J. Cole in the
summer of 2020, “Snow on tha Bluff,” included oblique references
to Noname and called for
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slower, more deferential attitude from “queen tone” activists.
Within a week Noname responded with “Song 33,” her statement on
Black arts and political music, a reckoning with the stakes of
political inaction for Black life. The song calls other rappers to
account for failing to take a public stand against anti-Black
violence. Her work asks listeners, how do we understand ourselves and
our moment? What are we going to do about the conditions we find
ourselves in? Noname pushes us forward: “I dream all Black,” she
raps, “We burn down borders / This is the new vanguard / I’m the
new vanguard.” Militant, unapologetic, movement-focused, personally
expressive, Noname’s work echoes Lincoln’s in its directness and
self-possession.

Sadly, Lincoln, Roach, Brown, and the other contributors to _We
Insist! _would recognize 2021 all too well, but with revived
movements for Black liberation we are seeing revived artistic and
political expression as well. Whether in music with Noname and Cardi
B, visual art with Kara Walker, Ebony G. Patterson, and Mickalene
Thomas, or community organizing under movement leaders such as Nikkita
Oliver, Robin Wonsley Worlobah, and Patrisse Cullors, Black women are
pushing artistic and political horizons forward. It is up to all of
us—creators, listeners, activists, critics, fans—to choose to
embrace this moment and to recognize the many tones of struggle. As
Black artists and activists move forward for liberation and artistic
expression, we all have to choose to move with them—to create
movement, to take steps toward personal, political, and collective
liberation. With these voices beside and before us, we must insist on
it.

_Michael Reagan [[link removed]] is a historian and activist
living in Seattle, Washington. He is the author of Intersectional
Class Struggle: Theory and Practice, published AK Press and IAS. Find
him on Twitter @reaganrevoltion
[[link removed]]._

_BOSTON REVIEW aims to foster a flourishing democracy with an engaged
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