Chicago’s Symphony Center will mark the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth on February 13 with a performance of We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, a rarely performed 1960 work about the civil rights struggle in Africa and the United States by jazz composer Max Roach and singer-songwriter Oscar Brown Jr. The performance will feature vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater and drummer Lewis Nash, as well as two musicians from the original Freedom Now Suite recording from the 1960s—trombonist Julian Priester and percussionist Ray Mantilla—plus trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater, who frequently performed with Max Roach. The evening also includes songs performed by Maggie Brown, the daughter of Oscar Brown Jr., as well as a pre-concert discussion with Lewis Nash, Maxine Roach (daughter of Max Roach), and former Village Voice critic Nat Hentoff (via teleconference). The following week, James Earl Jones will narrate Copland’s Lincoln Portrait at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Lincoln bicentennial tribute at Symphony Center; the February 21 CSO concert will also include Roy Harris’s Symphony No. 6 (“Gettysburg”) and selections from Robert Russell Bennett’s Abraham Lincoln (“A Symphonic Portrait”).
