Let Freedom Ring

Jackie McLean | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (July 1, 1991)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Blue Note Records
• ASIN: B000005H58
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Audio Cassette  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #498,418 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars one of the best jazz records of the sixties., November 16, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Let Freedom Ring (Audio CD)

this is one of jackie mclean's best records. the music is a mixture of bebop and some free jazz elements, and was influenced by ornette coleman. however, the emotions underlying the music are less disturbing than in coleman's case, and mclean does not go too far from it's bebop roots, so the record is quite listenable. this is one of the best blue notes of the sixties.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Classic postbop jazz, June 8, 2002

By 

N. Dorward "obsessive reviewer" (Toronto, ON Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Let Freedom Ring (Audio CD)

This album represents Jackie McLean's attempt to assimilate the "new thing" into his music. It's not a free jazz album by any means but it does escape the constricting confines of changes-based bop playing for a more pared-down kind of playing. It's basically a very personal hybrid of modal jazz & the more intuitive, directly emotional playing of Ornette Coleman. The compositions are all connected to people in McLean's life: "Melody for Melonae" & "Rene" concern his children, "Omega" is the middle name of his mother, & "I'll Keep Loving You" is a ballad by Bud Powell, whom McLean had worked with & who was in the middle of his final decline which led to his death a few years later. McLean's tone & playing have never been better caught on tape: the enormous biting sound with its idiosyncratic pitching, the hard-swinging, buttonholing solo lines, occasionally decorated with freak whistle notes; the ability to sustain extremely long solos without a falling-off of invention or power; the extraordinary out-of-tempo setpieces. Indeed, the completely out-of-tempo "I'll Keep Loving You" actually anticipates the kind of force Albert Ayler would put into a ballad, years before Ayler cut his first ESP disc. The other three tracks are (once the heads are stated) uptempo & mostly upbeat in feel, with "Rene" a particularly joyous performance.

The other reason to get this disc is the late Billy Higgins--this is possibly the best performance of his I've heard on disc, & perhaps not even on the classic Ornette Coleman sides does he play as well as this. -- Herbie Lewis is very good on bass, not a player I've encountered elsewhere. Walter Davis is usually thought of as a mainstream bop pianist of the 2nd rank; he plays very well here, though is perhaps slightly superfluous. (McLean even in his most adventurous mode usually liked to keep the piano, which gives his music a more grounded feel than Coleman's had, or Coltrane's for that matter [Tyner usually comped only minimally or laid out during Coltrane's extended solos].)

A marvellous album, which belongs in any serious collection of postwar jazz.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Liberating sounds from stunning saxophonist, June 2, 2001

By 

Ricard Giner ([e-mail]) (Brighton, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Let Freedom Ring (Audio CD)

Let Freedom Ring might be Jackie McLean's single most important recording. "Melody For Melonae", written for his daughter, builds on urgent, intense saxohone statements that draw more on the sweeping power of Sonny Rollins' tenor than on the melodic mannerisms of Charlie Parker's alto. Not very far into his explorations, the influence of Ornette Coleman begins to make itsef felt.

Arguably, Ornette Coleman may be the most pervasive influence on the album. Let Freedom Ring was recorded just a year after the remarkable series of albums for Contemporary and Atlantic that Coleman had made between 1958 and 1961. McLean explores extreme tonalities and fractured post-bop scales associated with the so-called "free jazz" that Coleman had almost self-consciously founded. The often frenzied -but never excessive- interplay between Herbie Lewis and Billy Higgins is reminiscent of the role Higgins himself and Charlie Haden played on Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come.

But McLean's own voice is so distinctive and charismatic that it anticipates the ideas of sound that musicians such as Archie Shepp, Roscoe Mitchell and Albert Ayler would explore a few years later during the brief life of the "New Thing". There are moments when McLean stretches his notes so passionately that his cries could be mistaken for the possessed, squeaking, screeching wails of Albert Ayler.

There are four tracks, including a searing rendition of Bud Powell's "I'll Keep Loving You". The others are all McLean originals. The real achievement is probably the closing piece, "Omega", which McLean dedicates to his mother. It combines a swing as vigorous as that of the previous piece, "René", with an ardent search for the essence of the theme, expressed in inflexions that subtly modulate from anger to joy, from pain to ecstasy, from hasty expectation to grateful liberation.