ABOUT THE ALBUM

On Let Freedom Swing, the latest release from Blue Engine Records, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis celebrates the charismatic leaders who gave voice to the struggle for freedom. Originally recorded live during a 2004 concert, the album features six stunning, sprawling musical commissions that paint a backdrop for inspirational oratory on liberty by Václav Havel, Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Desmond Tutu. Delivering these leaders’ inspirational words are modern icons including Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, Patricia Clarkson, Glenn Close, Keith David, Mario Van Peebles, and Alfre Woodard.

Let Freedom Swing is a stirring statement of purpose on behalf of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s ongoing JazzCall for Freedom campaign, which also includes the JLCO’s recently released record We the People. Both albums encourage listeners to stand up for unity and civil liberties during this crucial moment in our nation’s history. So, answer the call and immerse yourself in Let Freedom Swing, a record that will restore your faith in democracy and remind you of jazz’s power to reanimate our nobler sentiments.

LINER NOTES

When I was eight years old, my mother took us to the Cabildo, a museum in New Orleans that displayed coarse clothing, heavy chains, and other definitive 19th-century artifacts of American slavery. Upon leaving, we were given an informative comic book rendition of the life of Frederick Douglass. It taught us that WE were ultimately responsible for pursuing our own freedom. It challenged us to rise to respond to the intention and intensity of our opposition. We came to understand that every stand in favor of liberty—no matter how small, distant, or quiet—is representative of every other stand.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra stands for the most sacred, fundamental values that give substance to the meaning of our democracy. Integrity, when and wherever it shows up, comes with a price. These speeches and this music, inspired by their purpose, bear witness to the human toll paid by those who looked directly into the glaring spotlight of corruption without blinking. They sacrificed mightily to reclaim our collective soul from the relentless forces of exploitation, subjugation, and mayhem… some paid with their lives.

Frederick Douglass told us this in 1857, and it’s yet still true:

“The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle…

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation…want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its mighty waters.

“The struggle may be a moral one or it may be a physical one, or it may both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”