In addition to being one of the best jazz drummers of all time, Max Roach was a long-time civil rights activist.The cover art for the 1961 LP, ‘We Insist! Freedom Now Suite’, shows a photo of three black men at a lunch 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 does not 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.
