In addition to being one of the best jazz drummers of all time, Max Roach was a longtime civil rights activist. The cover art for the 1961 LP, We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, shows a photo of three black men at alunch counter with a white man in a soda jerk's uniform attending them. It was an incendiary image directed at a still-segregated country. But the album doesn't stop at its cover. The music is superb, and includes an array of jazz stars, including singer Abbey Lincoln, tenor saxophonists Coleman Hawkins and Walter Benton, trumpeter Booker Little, trombonist Julian Priester, and conguero Michael Babatunde Olatunji. This was (and still is) both a brilliant piece of music, and a political and social statement, which received a crown in the Penguin Guide to Jazz and a 5-star rating in Down Beat. 180-gram VIRGIN VINYL LIMITED EDITION. The Complete Album + 1 Bonus Track.
