The legendary drummer-composer and social activist went through a period of immense creativity in the late 1950s, the culmination of which was the landmark protest record We Insist! Freedom Now Suite. This four-album-on-2CD collection documents the prelude to that work as well as including it. Quiet As It’s Kept, Percussion Bitter Suite and It’s Time are outstanding sessions that show how brilliantly Roach negotiated a very personal path through the modernism of the era, creating a canvas that could be explicitly African as well as African-American. His desire to integrate percussion as well as voices into his composing and arrangements took him to daring new places on the landscape of jazz that have lost none of their emotional power – above all the searing drums-vocal duet with Abbey Lincoln that is a graphic evocation of rape on a plantation – all the while recognising that the state of the wider world around him, such as the evil of apartheid, also needed to be addressed. From hushed preludes to orchestral gospel exuberance via intricate polyrhythmic interludes Roach really stretched out on this quartet of albums that mark him as both a formidable creative force and fearless social commentator in post-war American music.