The 1950’s was a hopeful decade. People like Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr. each successfully battled against segregation. Philadelphia’s bebop scene was blossoming. Cal Massey’s touring days were over, and he had started his own band with Albert Heath on drums, Jimmy Garrison on bass, “C” Clarence Sharpe on alto sax and a seventeen–year–old pianist named McCoy Tyner.
Still life as a musician was hard; there was never a steady income. Not one to give up easily, he began to produce his own concerts, giving them at his own house and organizing benefit concerts at the St. Gregory’s Church right across the street. Concerts that featured names as Rashaan Roland Kirk, Thelonious Monk, Elvin Jones and of course his close friend, John Coltrane.
Then things got worse. On July 17, 1967 John Coltrane died from liver cancer at the age of 40. Then, on April 4th, 1968, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot dead on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee.
Cal Massey had gotten involved with musicians that had a more radical attitude towards black liberation, including the Black Panthers, and during the Pan African Festival in Algiers he paid a visit to one of their early leaders, Eldridge Cleaver, who lived there in exile. Cleaver asked Cal Massey to write the Black Liberation Movement Suite dedicated to black leaders. Cal compiled this suite of some of his best work and wrote pieces dedicated to Malcolm X, Cleaver himself, Dr. Marten Luther King, Huey P. Newton and John Coltrane.
Back in Brooklyn Massey organized a series of historic benefit concerts to help the Black Panthers party of which 21 members were on trial. The first benefit concert premiered Massey’s Black Liberation Movement Suite.
The Black Liberation Movement Suite is an unsung masterwork worthy of joining Mingus‘ “The Black Saint and the Sinner“, Oliver Nelson’s “The Afro–American Suite“, and Ellington’s Sacred Concerts. But while it is jazz on a scale of considerable musical and artistic grandeur, the BLM Suite is also a work of considerable socio–political significance, commissioned by The Black Panther Party and musically and ideologically expressing the revolutionary upsurge of the Black Liberation Struggle in the America of the mid to late 1960s.
Music: From 1969, “Part 1: Prayer” from Cal Massey’s “Black Liberation Suite.“
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