There were a handful of cassettes at the ready in my painting studio back in college—Hank Williams Greatest Hits, Black Flag Damaged, and Sonny Rollins Freedom Suite.
Seeing as I always had music spooling when painting these three albums saw a lot of play and I would hum along with the hypnotic melodies of Freedom Suite day after day, night after night. It became a 36-minute mantra.
Released in 1958 on Riverside, Freedom Suite saw Sonny Rollins (tenor saxophone), Oscar Pettiford (bass), and Max Roach (drums) offer a master class in songform and improv working through the Rollins-penned title track that takes up the entire A-Side with three waltzes and a ballad on the other including Noël Coward’s “Someday I’ll Find You.”
From the liner notes by Rollins (in its edited form):
America is deeply rooted in black culture: its colloquialisms, its humor, its music. How ironic that the black man, who more than any other people can claim America’s culture as its own, is being persecuted and repressed, that the black man, who has exemplified the humanities in his very existence, is being rewarded with inhumanity.
I’m not the person to make claims of greatness or to call this record a masterpiece but I can tell you that listening through Freedom Suite over and over and over again can show us how it feels to move through time with beauty, grace, and thoughtfulness.
Sonny Rollins passed away at his home in Woodstock, New York, on May 25, 2026, at the age of 95.