Freedom: Suite, Suite, Sweet!

I've been toying with the idea of starting a blog for a while, and I kinda figure that now's the time. (Jazz pun not intended.) When I was casting about for something to call this blog, I realized that Freedom Suite fits perfectly for several different reasons. Of course, the idea of freedom resonates for black folks for lots of different reasons and is apropos now that I'm back to being a full-time freelancer. If you look at the definitions of suite, it can mean an actual physical space or a collection of creative ideas. I'll try and write about a bunch of things here and maybe I'll live up to the promise of the title.

It's funny. Freedom Suite is one of my favorite albums, mostly because of the title track (though all the cuts are all good). I listen to the first cut at least five to ten times a week. It can move me to bounce, to laugh and to get misty. "The Freedom Suite" is a song I put on when I want to be happy, when I want to get something done and when I want to feel like I've got a purpose on this planet.

All the things I love about Sonny's playing here still jump out me: angular bravado, supple lyricism, a sense of humor and a direct, unironic tenderness. Freedom Suite was one of the first jazz albums to be labeled "militant" or "protest". I think it's a misnomer because the song never strikes me as angry. The first movement sounds like a soundtrack to single-minded striving, the second echoes with a bluesy meditation on loss and the final third seems to channel a frantic yet joyous testing of boundaries. Sonny plays with bassist Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach on drums on this album and they're on some straight telepathy shit here. They sound so in sync that I wonder just how much music was written out and prepared ahead of time. Pettiford's bass solo in the first movement is one of my all-time favorites and Max's playing throughout is so complex and melodic that it changed the way I hear drums.



I probably heard Freedom Suite for the first time when I was around 16 or 17 and looking back, it's amazing how much I was able to intuit about Sonny during a time when I hardly knew anything about him. His gentleness, sentimentality and humanism all come through in his music and they were in evidence the few times I've met him in person. He's disproportionately humble and kind of shy, too (which I can definitely relate). His voice sounds like his playing, too. Google up some pictures of Sonny then and Sonny now and you'll see that he's got super-sharp style, too, but it doesn't clash with the quiet dignity that emanates from him. (And he's still really handsome!)


I was talking to a longtime buddy today and he asked "You still listen to jazz, huh?" I'll confess to being in love with the iconography surrounding jazz, especially from the hard bop era, but my fascination amounts to more than admiring Miles' suits and Blue Note albums covers in the late '50s . The fierce intelligence, masterful technique and the aspiration to something higher–all in a group dynamic–makes it the music that lives most vibrantly in my soul. It sonically sums up a mode of blackness that makes me feel empowered.

All those things go through my head when I think about Sonny Rollins in general and when I listen to "The Freedom Suite" in particular. So, I was really stunned when I rediscovered this quote that was part of the album's liner notes:

"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." –Sonny Rollins, 1958

His music has already inspired some of the things that I've written and, now his words will do the same for things that I will write.

Thank you, Sonny.