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Rating: Sweat. Cotton fields. Sweat on ebony skin, bent over, feline eyes lift furiously at the master, who takes one of them into his house, violates her, yanks her, and the white dress tears, the eye that sees, slick and sweaty, the heat that blinds, a yellow sun turning silver gray. And a woman, a bony and shiny mammy tells, in the evening, in the light of the sun, a dark story to the sound of tambourines. Laughing.
It is the day of freedom. It's a day of freedom, yet it seems that someone has been shot, that Martin Luther is falling to the ground under deadly blows like in the whirl of "Vertigo," that it is a dream of a delirious madman, immersed, submerged, and swallowed by a metropolis, the brass playing deafening and too rapid and sharp to be considered merely frenetic, painting along with the drums a picture that seems to close around you like a three-dimensional cell. Freedom day. Yet, there seems to be a vague escape route, somewhere, after the drums have echoed the theme of the piece, rumours flyin', they must be lyin', it’s true what they say? The voice of Abbey Lincoln is exactly what you are imagining in your head.
Triptych. I’d rather leave it be. It is made to be listened to with your eyes closed, it is made to make your wrists tremble, to remind even the white man what, in fact, the heart of Africa is. Goes right to the heart? No, something further down, to the balls, the stomach, the guts. Bliss, dog's broth, hammer of the gods. Liturgy. Delirium that seems like St. Vitus's dance, chorea. Death. The scream of one who has gained freedom and has been buried alive in slavery, a scream that is a call to war. But even they, the slaves, will one day rise again...
A velvet voice, alright, but it’s a good meter-thick velvet, with someone smacking you in the face with it, a bit caress, a bit punch, in this chilling African Hymn, one nation under Max Roach’s groove, which is then the groove of the fathers, which is absolutely not groove, in the modern sense, but is pure hypnosis, necessary to endure the blood that, rest assured, will once again flow in rivers through deserts only dreamed of. This track can be fatal, like certain rites from which there is no return, like certain rivers stretched like a "serpent with its head in the sea and (...) its tail lost deep in that land."
Apartheid. The new slaves, keeping a country running and feeling rejected by it, indeed, being sold, undersold, ghettoized, suspected, killed, made ignorant, and thus weak, concentrated as the Nazis so liked in the bantustans. Bantu. No rights. Can you imagine? Waiting to be served in a store, a white person enters and cuts in front of you as if nothing happened. And it’s just the beginning... The brass create a long take through these miseries, through dust and machinery, through hatred and glances, hateful glances, hate, only hate, hate everywhere. The bass pulses and rises. There will be a day. Oh yes, there will be a day.
What do you want me to say? A masterpiece of that anti-racist political movement of which jazz became the standard-bearer at the end of the '50s, akin to "Free Jazz" by Ornette Coleman, powerful and fluid (forty minutes rarely have passed so quickly) like an uppercut of a raging bull, with Max Roach being a devil hitting his drums in a way only he could, an instrument that found in this performer rare emotional charge. His wife, Abbey Lincoln, gives the vocal performance of a career. Coleman Hawkins and the crew do the rest for the brass.
Buy it, gift it, download it, distribute it.
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