Max Roach broke with tradition by recording protest jazz before release

Evidence

9 Roach began working on the suite in 1959, in collaboration with the cabaret artist Oscar Brown Jr. Their intention was to present it in 1963 on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. An elder statesman of thirty-seven, Roach had played with Bebop’s founding fathers Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk as well as Miles Davis and Charles Mingus; Brown, a few years younger, a multitalented crossover artist (as well as a former Communist), had not yet recorded his first LP, Sin and Soul. The urgency of the moment was such that, without informing Brown, the impetuous Roach recorded the material on his own. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1875