Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties

by Scott Saul

In the long decade between the mid-1950s and the late ’60s, 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 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.

Genres: Music, Jazz

408 pages, Paperback

First published November 24, 2003

Reviews

[Siavash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scott Saul brilliantly delivers what the book promises to be (i.e. Jazz and the Making of the Sixties). Through various in depth analyses of various works of art and life, history of the 60s America moves from the margins to the center and the back...Great book for anyone who is interested in hostory of jazz beyond Ken Burn.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost too detailed and intense to read from cover to cover. There's just a lot of information, and it flows fast, and it flows detailed.

I read Scott Saul's biography of Richard Pryor and I really liked it, so I bought this book. The Richard Pryor book used a calm and natural voice. This book used a voice that was really close to being academic, and I found it fatiguing at times.

Having said that, I still "Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't" four stars because it was obviously well researched and the author is insanely literate. It's just, at times, he comes off as talks-to-much-about-Jazz kind of guy. I guess if you're gonna be "that guy," then this is the place to do it. Kudoz to him for that.

Peace!

Also, I know I'll reread parts later, once I have a little more background.

Spoiler Alert:
Jazz Pretty Much Dies.

[cheeseblab · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fine piece of academic writing by an author whose belletristic skills make me eager to read his first novel, or at least his first piece of nonfiction free of endnotes.