RECORDS / Jazz

Max Roach: Percussion Bitter Sweet (GRP/Impulse 11222). You're just back from Malcolm X. What do you put on the stereo? Try this reissue of one of the great bebop drummer's civil-rights albums, recorded in 1961 with a scintillating group featuring the trumpeter Booker Little and the saxophonist Eric Dolphy, both doomed to die young. A suite dedicated to the freedom fighters of southern Africa, making the obvious analogy with their brothers and sisters in Mississippi and Alabama, it was controversial at the time (this was before Dylan had brought the 'protest song' to a broad audience) and retains most of its power today.