Sweet Freedom - Now What?

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Sweet Freedom - Now What?
Sweet Freedom - Now What.jpg
Studio album by
Joe McPhee
Released1995
RecordedJuly 27 & 28, 1994
Venue Radio DRS Zurich, Switzerland
Genre Jazz
Length72:31
Label HatHut hat ART CD 6162
Producer Pia & Werner X. Uehlinger
Joe McPhee chronology
Impressions of Jimmy Giuffre
(1991)		Sweet Freedom - Now What?
(1995)		 McPhee/Parker/Lazro
(1995)

Sweet Freedom - Now What? is an album by multi-instrumentalist and composer Joe McPhee, recorded in 1994 and first released on the Swiss HatHut label. [1]

Joe McPhee American musician

Joe McPhee is an American jazz multi-instrumentalist born in Miami, Florida, a player of tenor, alto, and soprano saxophone, the trumpet, flugelhorn and valve trombone. McPhee grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York, and is most notable for his free jazz work done from the late 1960s to the present day.

Hathut Records is a Swiss record company and label founded by Werner Xavier Uehlinger in 1974 that specializes in jazz and classical music. The name of the label comes from the artwork of Klaus Baumgartner. Huthut encompasses the labels hat ART, hatOLOGY, and hat NOIR.

Contents

Reception

Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
Allmusic Star full.svgStar full.svgStar half.svgStar empty.svgStar empty.svg [2]

Allmusic reviewer Alex Henderson states "In 1994, Joe McPhee entered a studio in Zurich, Switzerland and recorded this thoughtful yet chance-taking response to Max Roach's ambitious Freedom Now Suite of 1960 ... McPhee doesn't treat Roach's compositions like museum pieces; instead, he embraces them on his own terms and brings many of his own ideas to the table ... the element of surprise is exactly what McPhee is going for on this rewarding, AACM-influenced inside/outside date". [2]

Max Roach American jazz percussionist, drummer, and composer

Maxwell Lemuel Roach was an American jazz drummer and composer. A pioneer of bebop, he worked in many other styles of music, and is generally considered alongside the most important drummers in history. He worked with many famous jazz musicians, including Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Abbey Lincoln, Dinah Washington, Charles Mingus, Billy Eckstine, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, Eric Dolphy, and Booker Little. He was inducted into the DownBeat Hall of Fame in 1980 and the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1992.

<i>We Insist!</i> 1960 studio album by Max Roach

We Insist! is a jazz album released on Candid Records in 1960. It contains a suite which composer and drummer Max Roach and lyricist Oscar Brown had begun to develop in 1959 with a view to its performance in 1963 on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. The cover references the sit-in movement of the Civil Rights Movement. The Penguin Guide to Jazz awarded the album one of its rare crown accolades, in addition to featuring it as part of its Core Collection.

Track listing

All compositions by Max Roach except as indicated

  1. "Mendacity (slow)" (Roach, C. Bayen) - 4:34
  2. "Driva Man" (Roach, Oscar Brown, Jr.) - 4:21
  3. "Roost 2" (Lisle Ellis) - 4:27
  4. "Self Portrait/Lift Every Voice and Sing" (Roach/James Weldon Johnson, J. Rosamond Johnson) - 9:50
  5. "Singing With a Sword in My Hand" (Traditional) - 1:23
  6. "Roost 1" (Ellis) - 2:25
  7. "Garvey's Ghost" - 12:45
  8. "Approaching the Smoke That Thunders" (Ellis) - 4:53
  9. "Triptych: (Prayer, Protest)/Prolepsis" (Max Roach/Paul Plimley) - 7:54
  10. "Mendacity (fast)" (Roach, Bayen) - 6:02
  11. "A Head of the Heartbeat" (Paul Plimley) - 3:38
  12. "The Persistence of Rosewood" (Joe McPhee) - 9:39
  13. "Roost (Coda)" (Ellis) - 0:40

Personnel

Tenor saxophone type of saxophone

The tenor saxophone is a medium-sized member of the saxophone family, a group of instruments invented by Adolphe Sax in the 1840s. The tenor and the alto are the two most commonly used saxophones. The tenor is pitched in the key of B♭ (while the Alto is pitched in the key of E♭), and written as a transposing instrument in the treble clef, sounding an octave and a major second lower than the written pitch. Modern tenor saxophones which have a high F♯ key have a range from A♭2 to E5 (concert) and are therefore pitched one octave below the soprano saxophone. People who play the tenor saxophone are known as "tenor saxophonists", "tenor sax players", or "saxophonists".

Soprano clarinet

The term soprano clarinet is used occasionally to refer to those instruments from the clarinet family that occupy a higher position, both in pitch and in popularity than subsequent additions to the family such as the basset horns and bass clarinets. The B♭ clarinet is by far the most common type of clarinet and the unmodified word "clarinet" usually refers to this instrument. However, due to a tendency for writers and historians to imitate the terms used to denote instruments in other instrumental 'family groups' the term soprano is sometimes used to apply not only to the B♭ clarinet but also to the clarinets in A and C, sounding respectively a semitone lower and a whole tone higher than the B♭ instrument, and even the low G clarinet—rare in Western music but popular in the folk music of Turkey—sounding a whole tone lower than the A. While some writers reserve a separate category of sopranino clarinets for the E♭ and D clarinets, these are more usually regarded as soprano clarinets as well. All have a written range from the E below middle C to about the C three octaves above middle C, with the sounding pitches determined by the particular instrument's transposition.

The alto clarinet is a woodwind instrument of the clarinet family. It is a transposing instrument pitched in the key of E♭, though instruments in F have been made. In Europe it is sometimes called a tenor clarinet. In size it lies between the soprano clarinet and the bass clarinet, to which it bears a greater resemblance in that it typically has a straight body, but a curved neck and bell made of metal. All-metal alto clarinets also exist. In appearance it strongly resembles the basset horn, but usually differs in three respects: it is pitched a tone lower, it lacks an extended lower range, and it has a wider bore than many basset horns.

References

  1. ↑ Joe McPhee discography accessed April 22, 2015
  2. 1 2 Henderson, Alex. Sweet Freedom - Now What? – Review at AllMusic . Retrieved April 21, 2015.
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