Liberty Now! by Free Country (IV), featuring Hank Roberts, Jim Yanda, Drew Gress & Phil Haynes

!! 2 CD Set !!
++ a limited number of hardcopy collector's CD editions available via:
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"[A]n exploration into Americana and Bluegrass bliss that merged with improvisational jazz and Coltrane culture. The result is something new and precious." ~Dee Dee McNeil, Making A Scene

"[A]n album that does not shout but insists, that does not simply recall the past but reanimates it, binding together memory, protest, and personal loss into a singular statement ... music that feels urgent, even combustible ... a dialogue between protest and celebration ... Like life itself, it resists a single mood ... in its capacity to unsettle, then console, to amuse, then provoke, that the album finds its truth ... not that it tells us what liberty is, but that it asks us to imagine it anew ... a call to consciousness ... for hope, for resistance, for solidarity." ~Thierry De Clemensat, Paris Move


Vital, timely and moving, Liberty Now! is, nonetheless, not the album that drummer Phil Haynes and his string band Free Country intended to make when they entered the studio last December.

“After the American Trilogy recordings, plus our live record, I felt like the band was done,” Haynes explains. “Yet the sound of Free Country and the chemistry that the four of us shared never left me. I thought about what I would want to do if we ever made another record, and I knew it would have to be our own originals. Each of these terrific musicians are lovely and very personal composers, and when a band comes together with this much chemistry, mutual love and respect, you write, arrange and contribute material very differently.”

Their music gained additional urgency and profundity that the band couldn’t have foreseen when they wrote and selected the compositions for the album. The first was the dire outcome of the 2024 U.S. presidential election just a month prior to the date. The second was the death of the revered trumpeter Herb Robertson, a close friend and collaborator of everyone in Free Country – the news of which reached them at the very moment they were entering the studio.

“You better believe Herb’s death colored the session,” Haynes says. “On the one hand, none of us felt like making music after that – certainly not immediately. On the other hand, that’s exactly what Herb would want us to do: make music. So we were hurting, yet that pain turned into a vulnerable beauty.”

While the grief was immediate, the album’s political edge emerged only once Haynes and his bandmates revisited the music after the fact. “I realized that we had made a protest record without planning one,” he marvels. “Given everything that’s happening now, it comes as a sort of relief to discover that the band’s collective subconscious wasn't tone deaf.”

Political awareness is certainly nothing new to the Free Country four. There is a strong undercurrent of social consciousness threaded throughout the band’s work, which Haynes wanted to underline. He decided to pair the new recordings with an album-length compilation of the most pointed cuts from the quartet’s catalogue, crafting an American history lesson in song.

“We've been thinking about these issues for a long time,” Haynes says. I thought this music might offer everyone some solace and courage to live through this period and find ways to do things that might have a positive impact.”

~Briathwaite & Katz Communications

25 year NYC veteran drummer, composer and bandleader of singular voice and stirring stylistic range, from the innovative avant-garde to romantic ballads, Americana, ambient & adventurous modern jazz classics. philhaynes.com cornerstorejazz.com