The music of Max Roach has been in focus already in recent years with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s best album in years. It was released during the centennial of Roach’s birth that fell in 2024.
This message music of civil rights for African Americans, wider tolerance and human rights couldn’t be more needed at a time when America is being extraordinarily badly led.
Roach inspires a far more nimble sound both in terms of the smaller scale of the group than the nevertheless stirring JALCO treatment and also stylistically, it’s fundamentally far more rhythmic and radical – this album is less about grandiloquent statement but still has a gravity to it – tunes are drawn from Roach and Oscar Brown Jr’s important 1961 album We Insist! and Carrington’s own work that sits aptly intermingling.
Last we heard from the drummer-composer-academic was the excellent New Standards Vol 1 lit up by the presence of Kris Davis and Linda May Han Oh. It won the 2023 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album.
This new album taps the zeitgeist at a time when the populist far right in America has friends in the White House.
Carrington, 59, is a professor at Berklee, America’s top jazz college, in Boston and A&Rs at Candid founded not long before the inspirational Max Roach album was released. It’s an imprint that has undergone a resurgence since it changed hands in recent years after for many years being run by legendary UK records man Alan Bates when it championed singers like early period Jamie Cullum on albums like Pointless Nostalgic before he was signed to Universal and like Stacey Kent 1997 classic, Close Your Eyes.
Vocalist Christie Dashiell plays a big role on the album. There’s an authority to her voice.
Carrington says of Dashiell speaking to the Los Angeles Times: “I just feel like she perfectly embodies all these different areas of Black music traditions. That was really important, so I started there. What is the voice that’s going to work with this idea?”
Personnel on the new album includes not only newer artists to emerge but also a veteran like trombonist Julian Priester who was on the Roach album and is now 89. Priester was also on classic John Coltrane album Africa/Brass released the same year as We Insist.
There’s a humility to the record represented most in the spoken word and rhythm message music of ‘Boom Chick’ where the mission of the album is most directly expressed. And Freedom, what does the album say about that ultimate goal of jazz everywhere? It’s “no walls and no cages and no glass ceilings”. All this and a whole lot more eloquently expressed delivered with a lot of verve, groove and conviction. Out today.
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