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...according to our Brett on Thu 19 Nov, 2009.
We had the highly satisfying book of Freedom, Rhythm & Sound in a couple of weeks back, stuffed to the gills with amazing cover art from jazz with an apparently 'revolutionary' bent. How much of that actually comes through in the music, packaged by Soul Jazz as either one double CD set or as two double LP volumes, is probably debatable - especially since what's going on musically is often revolutionary enough in itself. As so often with a largely instrumental music (though a fair few vocal tracks appear here) any political emphasis comes purely from the titles (see also: 'No Education=No Future, Fuck the Curfew' and the like) so here we've got The Pharoahs' 'Freedom Time', Sun Ra's 'Nuclear War', Archie Shepp's superb 'Attica Blues' and many more, dating from the beginnings of a more widespread avant-garde in jazz to the back end of the fusion era. Some of these tracks I know and can very happily vouch for, others I'm hearing now and enjoying very much but listening to the entire thing would take far more time than we realistically have so I'll have to sum up by saying that Soul Jazz tend to do a pretty good, if sometimes a little inconsistent, job on these types of compilations and always at a very reasonable price so if you're curious it should be a nice spot to dip your toe in...This album features many of the major artists featured in a simultaneously released Soul Jazz book,
as well as many hidden gems made on very small run cottage-industry jazz labels from this period.
This album coincides with the release of the massive 200 plus page deluxe
hardback book, ‘Freedom, Rhythm & Sound: Revolutionary Jazz
Original Cover Art 1965-83’, compiled by Gilles Peterson and Stuart
Baker, on Soul Jazz Records, featuring the cover artwork of many
seminal revolutionary jazz albums.
· Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and the civil rights movement of the 1960s
loom large as self-determination, economic power and musical freedom
led to revolutionary jazz artists finding new paths – both musical and
economic. Concurrent with the emergence of the counter culture and
underground rock movement in the 1960s and years before the DIY
cultural revolution of punk in the 1970s, Sun Ra, John Coltrane,
Pharoah Sanders, Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, The Art
Ensemble Of Chicago and others ‘took control’ of their own work by
recording, releasing and distributing their own music themselves. The
record sleeves of this era are as iconic and historically unique as the music
itself and a striking reflection of the time; pre-desktop publishing, preinternet,
these small-run (sometimes as low as 500 copies), self-made
sleeves are graphically bold and radical.
· The album comes with extensive sleevenotes and photos and comes
on double CD or two volumes of luxurious double vinyl.
· ‘Freedom, Rhythm & Sound’ will feature tracks from The Art Ensemble Of
Chicago, Sun Ra, Steve Reid, Oliver Lake, Stanton Davis, Horace
Tapscott, Lloyd McNeill, Joe Henderson, Gary Bartz, The
Pharoahs, Errol Parker, Alice Coltrane and Larry Gordon, amongst
others.
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