Saturday Music Club: why this blog is called Sweet Freedom...

Well, because I did, for a long time with my ex, Donna Wilson, a radio show called Sweet Freedom, first on WGMU-AM at George Mason University, then at WCXS (then WEBR, now Radio Fairfax) cable radio in Fairfax County, VA, and finally so far at WPPR-FM (now basically the Prometheus Radio Project) in Philadelphia  That lasted, with interruption, for just under a decade of weekly broadcasting/cablecasting/narrowcasting.

The CBS reissue I had first.

And, of course, because I've been a libertarian socialist for essentially all my political life. (That I've been a diagnosed diabetic with a savage sweet tooth throughout most of the years I've used the title gives a bit of resonance to it, too.)

But also, and certainly not least, because of the Freedom Now Suite composed by Max Roach and Oscar Brown, Jr., and performed by various Roach groups over the years (initially on record with a band including Abbey Lincoln, Babatunde Olatunji and Coleman Hawkins), and the Sonny Rollins composition Freedom Suite.

("Socialist Jazz" is a dismissive if teasing nick-name some fellow high-school students came up with for me. Rather difficult for me, at the time nor since, to be insulted by that combo, however overdetermined it might be, even given how it was intended.)





An interview segment, essentially, below...as one commenter on the YT post notes, "Freedom Suite" was hardly the first political statement among jazz instrumentals...


I didn't remember the Rascals' album when I named the radio show, but its resonances didn't upset me, either:


The Michael McDonald song for the Running Scared soundtrack wasn't on my radar at all at the time. Nor the much earlier Uriah Heep song.