10 Essential Protest Jazz Albums

Remember when we heard that punk will be “good” again, whatever that means? Well, perhaps those who’ve been disappointed with a musical response to repressive leadership were simply looking in the wrong place. For as long as it’s existed, jazz has been intertwined with protest and politics. Nina Simone said that “an artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times,” and the record bears that out over the years in jazz. From Max Roach’s meditations on civil rights in the early 1960s to Charlie Haden’s parallels between the Spanish Civil War and Vietnam, on up to Sons of Kemet’s pointed critique of colonial Britain. As Giovanni Russonello wrote in the New York Times in 2020, “jazz remained a resistance music precisely because it was the sound of Black Americans building something together, in the face of repression.” This week, we look at some of the best protest jazz albums over the past 65 years, carrying on a long tradition of defiance through musical freedom.

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Max Roach – We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite (1960)

We Insist!, released in 1960, is credited to drummer and bandleader Max Roach, but it’s as much Abbey Lincoln’s as it is his. Only Roach himself and Lincoln perform on all five tracks, and in most of them, she’s the centerpiece. To wit: the eight-minute “Triptych: Prayer, Protest, Peace,” which is, in fact, just the two of them—first in a mellifluous and understated kind of wordless gospel, followed by a frantic rhythmic upsurge and Lincoln’s frenzied screams, then back to serenity. That eruption of intense emotion, of anger and mourning, is central to We Insist!, an avant garde suite of meditations on civil rights that was written to coincide with the Emancipation Proclamation yet which spoke to a contemporary struggle—its cover art referencing the Greensboro sit-in from earlier that year. We Insist! is emotional and intense, and vital in its message of liberation, but its musical inventiveness isn’t to be overlooked either, whether through the incorporation of Babatunde Olatunji’s Yoruba drums or the off-kilter blues of “Driva Man.”

Listen/Buy: Spotify | Rough Trade (vinyl)

Nina Simone – In Concert (1964)

“Vocal jazz” feels too limiting a way to describe Nina Simone’s music, which also merged the emotional power of gospel with the raw poignancy of blues. Nonetheless, Nina Simone’s In Concert, recorded at Carnegie Hall, remains one of the greatest of the genre, entertaining as it is pointed. Simone tackles standards like “I Loves You Porgy” and “Don’t Smoke In Bed” with more explicit protest material like “Old Jim Crow” and, the most humorous piece here, “Go Limp,” a satirical critique of political passivity that includes both audience participation and Simone forgetting the words. With “Pirate Jenny,” however, Simone takes a turn toward the sinister, offering one of her most harrowing performances in this Weill/Brecht piece from Threepenny Opera, a song of revenge that she recontextualizes in a “crummy southern town.” But Simone saves one of her greatest recorded moments for the finale, “Mississippi Goddam,” written in response to the murders of Medgar Evers and Emmett Till and the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing, a song of fury, frustration and conviction that remains one of her most affecting songs more than 60 years later. 

Listen/Buy: Spotify | Rough Trade (vinyl)

Eddie Gale – Ghetto Music (1969)

A trumpeter whose performances can be heard on essential jazz recordings by the likes of Sun Ra, Larry Young and Cecil Taylor, Eddie Gale made his most indelible impact as a bandleader on 1968’s Ghetto Music, a groundbreaking work whose influence still ripples through jazz today. Released in the aftermath of a year of turmoil and political violence that included the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., it’s inextricable from the chaos of the moment, both mournful and defiant. Backed by a choir whose voices rise up in unison to demand “Stop the rain!” in the spectacular opening track, “The Rain,” Gale expands the possibilities of what a jazz ensemble can be—two drummers, two bassists, a gospel-inspired choir—while responding to the moment. Yet Ghetto Music is foremost a case of the personal being political, a powerful statement of Black identity that likewise celebrates Gale’s own Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood (“Fulton Street”) and offers a ceremony of protection for the birth of his own son (“The Coming of Gwilu”). 

Listen: Spotify

Charlie Haden – Liberation Music Orchestra (1970)

A fascinating blend of historical references intertwined with contemporary revolutionaries and the protest movement against the Vietnam War, Liberation Music Orchestra is a work of art that connects past and present in stunning ways. Its centerpiece is the 21-minute “El Quinto Regimento; Los Quatro Generales; Viva La Quince Brigada,” a suite that dates back to the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, which when paired with Bertolt Brecht’s “Song of the United Front,” comprises the “past” half of the record on side one. Yet side two speaks to a more urgent message of liberation, from the elegy for revolutionary Che Guevara in “Song for Che” to the haunting take on Ornette Coleman’s “War Orphans,” and the chaotic “Circus ’68 ’69,” in which two bands play separate compositions simultaneously as a means of replicating the chaos of the 1968 Democratic Convention. But with the minute-long rendition of “We Shall Overcome” to close it out, Liberation Music Orchestra ends on a note of hope and determination, closing out an album streaked with memento mori of war and discord.

Listen: Spotify

Freddie Hubbard and İlhan Mimaroğlu – Sing Me a Song of Songmy (1971)

Freddie Hubbard covered a lot of ground in his nearly five-decade career, from hard bop to electrified fusion, but Sing Me a Song of Songmy is unlike anything else in his catalog—or anyone else’s for that matter. A full-length composition from İlhan Mimaroğlu, who also performs on the album, it blends avant garde electronic experimentation with jazz fusion and spoken word libretti from a Greek chorus of sorts, which taken together feel like a protest against any kind of genre orthodoxy. Amid the far-out sounds and dizzying sound collage are poetic anti-war messages and references to everything from the murder of Sharon Tate to the Civil Rights movement to the massacre at Kent State. Even the title itself reveals layers of meaning, a reference to the village of Son My in Vietnam, where 400 unarmed civilians were murdered by soldiers in the U.S. Army in the My Lai Massacre. This isn’t an easy listen for both practical and emotional reasons, but it is a vital and powerful one.

Listen: Spotify

Jorge López Ruiz – Bronca Buenos Aires (1971)

Argentinian jazz bassist and bandleader Jorge López Ruiz released more than a dozen records under his name in his lifetime and played in several fusion bands, including Viejas Raices and Jazz Band de Free, though no record of his has been the subject of legend and controversy like that of Bronca Buenos Aires. An album-length avant garde jazz poem inspired by his home city of Buenos Aires and a sobering account of Argentina’s rule by dictatorship (“Then came the violence…slowly they got used to it/And no one dared,” reads one part of José Tcherkaski’s Spanish-spoken narrative), Bronca Buenos Aires is as revolutionary musically as it is bold in its message. Moments of free-jazz chaos erupt amid cinematic jazz-funk that’s equal parts Herbie Hancock and David Axelrod. Under the country’s regime at the time, Ruiz and his bandmates opted not to perform it live, and radio wouldn’t play it out of fear of government retaliation, but more than five decades later it feels timeless and innovative—a product of a specific time and place that has lost none of its poignancy or appeal.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

Archie Shepp – Attica Blues (1972)

The mission statement of Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues, so to speak, is placed right up front in the title track, the opening statement of one of the wildest documents of politically-charged jazz from the 1970s: “If I had the chance to make the decision/Every man could walk this earth on equal condition.” A seamless sequence of music and spoken-word (some of it read by civil rights activist and attorney William Kunstler) that swings from fiery gospel-funk to soul-jazz balladry and fiery blues, Attica Blues is both a masterful statement of composition and vision and a sobering reflection on America’s inequitable and racist treatment of prisoners—inspired by both the Attica prison riots as well as the killing of activist George Jackson by guards at San Quentin. There’s a lot to absorb on Attica Blues, some of it fiery, much of it beautiful, but the plea for humanity is right on the surface.

Listen: Spotify

Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson – Winter In America (1974)

Gil Scott-Heron created one of the earliest blueprints for contemporary hip-hop with his early album Pieces of a Man, pairing elements of jazz and soul with spoken-word poetry dripping with social critique. The first of his six collaborative albums with keyboardist and flautist Brian Jackson, Winter In America, offers a similar blend but at adjusted ratios, its arrangements thick with jazz fusion atmosphere courtesy of Jackson’s Rhodes piano. Its title evoking a country in decline during the Nixon administration, Winter In America is at once gorgeous, warm, grim and biting. Bookended by two versions of the beautifully lush “Peace Be With You, Brother,” with lyrics decrying a pervasive selfishness in American society, Winter In America is a landmark soul-jazz album, noteworthy for both its rich arrangements as well as Scott-Heron’s socially conscious lyricism, whether examining the societal wreckage of alcoholism on the deep-grooving “The Bottle,” its only single, to the spiritual yearning of “Rivers of My Fathers.” And though the names and details of “H2Ogate Blues” might be generations of the rearview, the humor and hangover still rings true.

Listen/Buy: YouTube | Rough Trade

Sons of Kemet – Your Queen Is a Reptile (2018)

Shabaka Hutchings retired his saxophone in 2023, following the indefinite hiatus of his London-based group Sons of Kemet, but the degree of heat they delivered in such a concentrated amount of time takes away a little bit of the sting of that chapter closing. Their greatest record, however, remains 2018’s Your Queen Is A Reptile, an album that’s earned the group a Mercury Prize nomination through its heavy Afro-Caribbean grooves and unflinching celebration of Blackness and condemnation of both monarchy and right-wing politics. Each of its song titles celebrates Black woman who left their mark on history, from Harriet Tubman to Angela Davis, while the two bookending tracks feature pointed spoken-word verses from Josh Idehen that, from track one, leaves no ambiguity to its message: “Burn UKIP, fuck the Tories/Fuck the fascists, end of story.” It’s both as fun and pissed off as jazz gets in the 21st century.

Listen/Buy: Spotify | Turntable Lab (vinyl)

Irreversible Entanglements – Who Sent You? (2020)

It’s fitting that members of Irreversible Entanglements initially came together at an event called Musicians Against Brutality, featuring music and discussions in part as a fundraiser for Akai Gurley, a Caribbean immigrant living in Brooklyn who was killed by an NYPD officer. In its aftermath, the free-jazz group featuring the poetry of Moor Mother came together as a force of its own, delivering what she calls “historical statements in sound.” The group’s sophomore album is their tightest statement, a curious thing to say about a heavily improvised group, perhaps, rife with taut grooves and chaotic eruptions amid lyrics decrying corrupt institutions, police violence and a soulless America. Their albums since haven’t strayed from their central concept, even as they’ve made the ascent to the legendary Impulse! label, but Who Sent You? is their most urgent statement, asking, matter-of-factly, “At what point do we stand up?“

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

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