Terri Lyne Carrington led the world premiere of her tribute We Insist! 2025 at South Jazz Kitchen last fall, on an evening approaching the end of Max Roach’s centenary, barely 48 hours after the presidential election. Among some deft, intricate new arrangements of Roach’s landmark work, there came a moment to exhale: a slow-simmering R&B arrangement of “Freedom Day,” featuring vocalist Christie Dashiell.
Candid Records — which originally put out We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite in 1960 — has just released a studio version of that track, titled “Freedom Day (Part 1).” Credited to Carrington and Dashiell, it also features Milena Casado on trumpet and electronics, Simon Moullier on vibraphone, Matthew Stevens on guitar, Morgan Guerin on electric bass and woodwinds, and Weedie Braimah on djembe.
Carrington, an NEA Jazz Master, Doris Duke Artist and four-time Grammy winner, approached this music both as a nod to Max Roach and a modern reflection on his political message.
“There has been a gradual expansion in the kinds of freedoms that are appropriate in today’s society,” she tells WRTI, “though we are now experiencing a return to some of the freedom struggles of the past, as well in the position to carefully guard — or fight for — the freedoms our not-so-distant predecessors brought into fruition with their blood, sweat, tears and many sacrifices.”
Dashiell, who was among the most recent slate of Grammy nominees for Best Jazz Vocal Album, places “Freedom Day” in a similar context of self-reflection. “Having to dive into this song made me examine my own freedom and how I choose to walk in it,” she says. “It’s also made me wonder what freedom in our current world really means.”
On the original recording of We Insist!, Roach corralled an all-star group with his wife, Abbey Lincoln, in the pivotal vocal spotlight, singing lyrics by Oscar Brown, Jr. “Freedom Day,” which imagines the fraught elation and disbelief that greeted news of Emancipation, begins with the pomp of a fanfare but quickly shifts into a brisk, slippery 4/4 double time; trumpeter Booker Little, tenor saxophonist Walter Benton and trombonist Julian Priester each contribute an edge-of-the-seat improvisation.
“Our version of ‘Freedom Day’ acknowledges the expansion of what it means to be free in current times,” explains Carrington, who among other things is the Founder and Artistic Director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. “While there is still overlap concerning racial justice, we acknowledge freedom from a woman’s perspective. We recognize the demand for freedom in regard to sex, gender, physical autonomy — and we acknowledge that toxicity and oppression of any kind have no place in our freedom journey and dreams. This is why the music is approached differently, allowing for the lyric to have new meaning.”
In her later years, Lincoln talked openly about the adverse effect that the Freedom Now Suite had on her performing career — an effect hardly suffered by Roach and the other men involved. (She and Roach divorced in 1970.) “I don’t feel Black women’s voices were heard completely during the Civil Rights Era,” Carrington says, responding to more than this particular inequity. “Sure, there were many Black women in the movement, but so much of their work was through male leadership, and so much of the documenting of that was through the male gaze.”
She adds: “There are many more women leaders now, and naturally how we teach — or fight, organize or lead — is different. So approaching this song like a ballad gives it more space for interpretation and for expressing the feminine aesthetic. There is also a melancholy feeling to our version, which symbolizes the hurt and pain of the past and present, as well a sadness that starts to evaporate toward the end of the piece with the key change. That’s where more light and hope and resolution comes shining through, representing our participation and agency in the kind of intersectional social activism that lifts everyone.”
Terri Lyne Carrington & Christie Dashiell's "Freedom Day (Part 1)" is available now on streaming services.
