In the long decade between the mid-fifties and the late sixties, jazz was changing more than its sound. The age of Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, and Charles Mingus's The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady
was a time when jazz became both newly militant and newly seductive,
its example powerfully shaping the social dramas of the Civil Rights
movement, the Black Power movement, and the counterculture. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't
is the first book to tell the broader story of this period in jazz--and
American--history. The story's central figures are jazz musicians like
Coltrane and Mingus, who rewrote the conventions governing improvisation
and composition as they sought to infuse jazz with that gritty
exuberance known as "soul." Scott Saul describes how these and other
jazz musicians of the period engaged in a complex cultural balancing
act: utopian and skeptical, race-affirming and cosmopolitan, they tried
to create an art that would make uplift into something forceful,
undeniable in its conviction, and experimental in its search for new
possibilities. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't
considers these musicians and their allies as a cultural front of the
Civil Rights movement, a constellation of artists and intellectuals
whose ideas of freedom pushed against a cold-war consensus that stressed
rational administration and collective security. Capturing the social
resonance of the music's marriage of discipline and play, the book
conveys the artistic and historical significance of the jazz culture at
the start, and the heart, of the sixties.
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