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Lincoln’s 1862 Emancipation Proclamation. However, fueled by the 1960 student sit-ins, Roach created a shorter version to express solidarity with the civil rights movement. First recorded in the fall of 1960, the album featured the Nigerian drummer Michael Olatunji and the tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, in addition to Roach, Brown, and Lincoln. The group publicly performed the suite for the ‹rst time at New York’s Village Gate in 1961, sponsored by the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE).89 In this performance, Lincoln exploded expectations regarding “song” and conventional comportment for the female “singer,” screaming and wailing rather than merely singing lyrics. Her experimentation with vocal range reached an unprecedented dynamism in “Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace,” a duet for Lincoln and Roach that constitutes the powerful middle section of the ‹ve-part Freedom Now Suite. Even recordings of “Triptych” can be harrowing, pulling the listener through the arc of the work. Although “Prayer” begins with sparse, steady runs of a snare drum, Lincoln’s voice then emerges, projecting a wordless spiritual over and around Roach’s accompaniment. Her voice pushes out in deeply resonant tones, emitting round sounds, full of undulation. Direct, purposeful wails waft out from deep cavities. “Protest” then pierces this resonant prayer as Lincoln begins to scream. The drumming picks up with crashing symbols and furious rolls. Again and again, she screams. Shrill, urgent sounds shoot through her throat, like there is not enough space. But they extend outward, piercing everything in their path. Each shriek evokes rape, witness , passage, horror, murder, protest, song. But Lincoln’s voice returns to a lower register in “Peace.” With deep sighs and ample breath, the work concludes as Lincoln’s lilting voice streams over a steady rhythmic pulse. Roach describes this ‹nal section as “the feeling of relaxed exhaustion after you’ve done everything you can to assert yourself. You can rest now because you’ve worked to be free.”90 The Freedom Now Suite offers a keen articulation of protest, inseparable from Lincoln’s screams. Lincoln maintains that screaming “freed her up,” attributing this to the male musicians with whom she worked, most notably Max Roach, whom she married in 1962 and divorced in 1970. Their relationship , however, was both inspiring and frequently brutal. Moreover, both formal and social constraints remained well after Lincoln learned how to scream. “Freedom” is not a destination one reaches once and for all. Lincoln recalls, “[Roach] was willing to give me everything as long as I did what he We Insist! 83 said.”91 Elsewhere, she recalls, “Max and I were divorced in 1970 and I was like a wounded animal.” She then checked herself into a psychiatric hospital for ‹ve weeks.92 As much as Lincoln’s screams exorcised pain and projected urgent protest, they doubled back and took a psychic and bodily toll. Lincoln damaged her vocal chords in the performance of “Protest.”93 It hurts to scream like that. The more one listens, the more one realizes that there’s no easy division between art and life in The Freedom Now Suite. Although one could talk about screaming in musical terms, its signi‹cance is inextricable from the social world and its various constraints. This becomes particularly clear in Fred Moten’s improvised notes, taken during a Jazz Study Group interview with Abbey Lincoln in 1999: I was born the tenth of twelve children. . . . / I visited a psychiatric hospital ’cause Roach said there was madness in the house. He said it wasn’t him, so I ‹gured it must be me / they had me hollering and screaming like a crazy person; I ain’t hollering and screaming for my freedom. The women I come from will take something and knock you. . . . / Monk whispered in my ear, “Don’t be so perfect.” He meant make a mistake; reach for something / I didn’t think a scream was part of the music / We were riding in the car with my nephew who was eight years old and who said “The reason I can scream louder than Aunt Abbey is ’cause I’m a little boy” / Went all over the world hollering and screaming. . . . I got rid of a taboo and screamed in everybody’s face / We had to go to court; somebody thought Roach was killing me in the studio / My instrument is deepening and widening. . . . It’s holy work and it’s dangerous not to know that ’cause you could die like an animal down here.94 Moten explains...

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