FREEDOM SUITE
REVISITED
by Marshall Bowden
Read
the Jazzitude review of Sonny Rollins/Without a Song: The
9/11 Concert
In 1956 Sonny Rollins was one of the best-known
tenor saxophonists in jazz, having recorded and released
two wonderful and classic jazz albums, Saxophone Colossus
and Tenor Madness, the latter being a tenor standoff
with John Coltrane. In the following two years, freed from
his Prestige Records contract, Rollins set about making
some great records that were released on a variety of labels,
including Riverside, Contemporary, and Period. He released
Way Out West and worked with Thelonious Monk. Yet,
even as his career ascended he was faced with the specter
of racism when he attempted to rent an apartment in New
York City. “Here I had all these reviews, newspaper
articles and pictures,” Rollins later said. “At
the time it struck me, what did it all mean if you were
still a nigger, so to speak? This is the reason I wrote
the suite.” “The suite” refers to the
famous composition “Freedom Suite”, a nineteen
minute piece that featured Rollins, accompanied only by
bass and drums. It was jazz music’s first explicit
instrumental protest piece, and its intentions were signaled
in the original liner notes written by Rollins: “America
is deeply rooted in Negro culture: its colloquialisms; its
humor; its music. How ironic that the Negro, who more than
any other people can claim America's culture as his own,
is being persecuted and repressed; that the Negro, who has
exemplified the humanities in his very existence, is being
rewarded with inhumanity."
The piece, a series of variations on fairly
simple melodic material, caused a sensation, but Riverside
Records decided it was too incendiary and pulled the recording,
reissuing it under the title Shadow Waltz, the
name of another track on the recording. Orrin Keepnews,
the producer and part-owner of Riverside Records, wrote
a new set of liner notes that stated Rollins’ intentions
much less succinctly:
“This suite, then is ‘about’
Sonny Rollins: more precisely, it is about freedom as Sonny
is equipped to perceive it. He is a creative artist living
in New York City in the 1950s; he is a jazz musician who,
partly by absorbing elements of Bird and Monk and many others,
has evolved his own personal music; he is a Negro. Thus
the meaning of freedom to Rollins is compounded of all this,
and, undoubtedly, much more. In one sense, then, the reference
is to the musical freedom of this unusual combination of
composition and improvisation; in another it is to physical
and moral freedom, to the presence and absence of it in
Sonny’s own life and in the way of life of other Americans
to whom he feels a relationship.”
Keepnews is certainly not altogether wrong
in his assessment, but he certainly pulls back some of what
Rollins made very specific in his statement. Rollins’
statement that “America is deeply rooted in Negro
culture” was, in 1958, a bold statement, to say the
least. Yet he demonstrates it quite ably in his themes and
the improvisations he unfurls during the course of the suite.
Thelonious Monk, who was extremely influential in Rollins’
development, told the saxophonist to “play the melody,
not the changes,” and Rollins seems to have followed
that advice well. He never gives the impression that improvisation
is a mechanical or mathematical process based on the chord
changes, instead following his melodic inspiration wherever
it may lead. On “Freedom Suite” he plays with
his various themes until the listener becomes aware, slowly
over the course of the work, that they are interconnected.
This attention to the melodic structure of improvisation
as well as its harmonic structure has made Rollins one of
jazz music’s most celebrated improvisers. Indeed,
Rollins provides the complete melodic content of “Freedom
Suite,” accompanied only by the bass work of Oscar
Pettiford and the powerful drumming of Max Roach, who would
go on to record the equally important (though currently
available only as an import) We Insist: Freedom Now
Suite with then-wife Abbey Lincoln, Oscar Brown, Jr.
and saxophonist Coleman Hawkins.
Things were tense at the time of Freedom
Suite’s release, and one can perhaps understand
the forces that made Keepnews soften Rollins’ verbal
argument. What Rollins was saying, that African Americans
represented the essence of American culture but were oppressed
by a group (white Europeans) that had essentially seized
that culture for their own purposes, was pretty radical.
1957’s Little Rock school integration incident was
fresh in people’s minds, and there was more civil
rights turmoil to come. Still, Keepnews’ assertion
that “Freedom Suite” “is not a piece about
Emmett Till, or Little Rock, or Harlem, or the peculiar
locatl election laws of Georgia or Louisiana, no more than
it is about the artistic freedom of jazz”
seems designed to divert attention from Rollins’ message,
even as it reminds the reader of a laundry list of grievances
about which African Americans increasingly refused to be
silent. Make no mistake, “The Freedom Suite”
is a cry of protest against America’s treatment of
African Americans from the days of slavery right up to the
day of its recording, but it is the cry of a profoundly
introspective and intelligent man who expresses himself
chiefly through the exercise of his art. As such, it may
not appear terribly radical or groundbreaking today, but
its power is clear from the fact that Rollins’ brief
statement about his work was, for all intents and purposes,
subject to censorship at the time of its release.
Fast forward to 2002. Tenor saxophonist David
S. Ware and his quartet, comprised of pianist Matthew Shipp,
bassist William Parker, and drummer Guillermo E. Brown,
convene in July in Brooklyn’s Systems Two Studio to
record a new version of Rollins’masterpiece. Their
version honors the spirit and the basic structure of the
original, but also takes chances and explores some additional
territory hinted at but not explicitly examined in the original.
The piece is now nearly twice its original length, but this
additional length does not come from merely allowing the
players to spend more time blowing within the piece’s
harmonic structure. No, instead Ward builds on the piece,
adding a free interlude between the first and second parts,
and integrating the whole into a beautifully conceived,
epic piece.
One interesting aspect is the addition of
piano to the composition. Since the original was recorded
with only tenor sax, bass, and drums, this already requires
a serious re-imagining of the work. Shipp has already proven
himself very adept at fitting into pretty much any musical
situation, and he does not disappoint here. He adds a foundation
that functions as a well from which all other members of
the quartet draw energy and inspiration, never really drawing
attention to himself, but allowing a great deal of expansiveness
in Ware’s conception of the piece.
For his part, Ware utilizes a greater variety
of sounds on his version of the Suite than Rollins did.
Not long after the release of the original Freedom Suite
Rollins retired for a time from performing and recording.
When he emerged in 1962, he was playing in a much more unambiguously
free style and working with a group of avant-garde musicians.
It is clear that Rollins was working on incorporating a
wider variety of sounds and improvisational elements usually
associated with free jazz, and he had spent the time since
the release of Freedom Suite reinventing his approach.
Ware, whom Rollins took under his wing in his early years,
makes Rollins’ free jazz leanings much more overt
in his version of the piece, and I don’t doubt that
the piece might have leaned much more toward free jazz had
Rollins recorded it a couple of years later. That said,
the piece never becomes a free jazz blowing session, at
least in part because Shipp’s playing allows the others
more freedom while simultaneously maintaining a clear base
of operations.
The question that cannot help be asked by
listeners to this piece would be “Why has Ware chosen
to record Freedom Suite, and why now?” First,
the piece is a very influential piece of tenor saxophone
music, and for anyone playing the instrument it is a real
yardstick, much like Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.
To record Rollins’s composition and put one’s
own stamp upon it is clearly a rite of passage for an adventurous
tenor player. Branford Marsalis chose to record a version
of the piece on his 2002 album Footsteps of Our Fathers.
Marsalis’s version is much closer to Rollins’s
version, but it is well performed and offers a combination
of swing and sly wit. Still, one cannot help but feel that
Ware comes closer to expressing the original feelings and
content that Rollins intended, and his realization definitely
adds something to the work.
Ware’s other reasons for recording
Freedom Suite remain more personal. No doubt he
also wished to express his musical debt to Rollins. "This
is a perfect opportunity to show the link between me and
Sonny,” explained Ware in an interview earlier this
year, "an opportune time to show how one generation
is built upon another and how the relationships work in
the whole stream of music that's called jazz." One
is also tempted to remember the story of Rollins’
censorship upon the release of the original album and see
a parallel with the possible erosion of civil liberties
in the wake of 9/11. That, of course, takes a piece that
is very clearly about the liberation of African Americans
and expands its context beyond what the composer intended.
If should also be pointed out that Ware has made no statement
that would support such an interpretation. It really doesn’t
matter, though: Freedom Suite stands as a vibrant
and original piece of music.
