Jazz Listening Party: The Freedom Now Suite

About This Event

This listening event will focus on Max Roach and Oscar Brown’s groundbreaking composition We Insist!: The Freedom Now Suite as both a breathtaking piece of art and a window into jazz musicians’ broader involvement in the civil rights movement during the 1960s. We will discuss the Freedom Now Suite’s history and genesis and listen closely to its many striking features with a special emphasis on the work of singer Abbey Lincoln.

$20, $10 Students (25 & under w/ ID)

The Jazz Listening Party series is a new collaboration between The Nash and the Arizona State University School of Music.

“Christopher J. Wells is assistant professor of musicology at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute School of Music and managing editor of the Journal of Jazz Studies. They received their doctorate in 2014 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where their dissertation on drummer/bandleader Chick Webb and swing music in Harlem during the Great Depression received the Society for American Music’s Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award and UNC’s Glen Haydon Award for an Outstanding Dissertation in Musicology. A social jazz dancer for over a decade, Professor Wells is currently writing a book about the history of jazz music’s ever-shifting relationship with popular dance, and their published work appears in the journals Women & Music and Jazz & Culture and in the Oxford Handbooks of Dance and Ethnicity and of Improvisation in Dance.”