Freddie Roach – My People (Soul People)
Freddie Roach – Mas Que Nada
Freddie Roach – Prince Street
Here on record store day it makes good sense to post up something bought in a local independent record store. Action Records, sometimes also known as As The Record Turns, is a largely hidden gem of a record store tucked away in Hollywood, actually literally on Hollywood Blvd. The handful of times I’ve been there’s always been records that I’ve never seen before just casually hanging out all over the place. Kevin the owner knows the quality and worth of his records and the price for many of them surely gives average record buyers sticker shock, but there are good deals to be made here just not jackpot deals, more like you get a $100 record for $50. Two things I especially like about Kevin and this store. One, sometimes the really expensive price tag on the record cut down to 1/2, and two, sometimes after you buy some records he’ll just throw in some additional records. In fact everytime I have gone, some of the records I wanted to buy but didn’t have enough money for ended up coming home with me because of magnanimity of the owner (as I mentioned here with the LP from Arnold Bean, this record was better than the ones I paid money for!).
This record from Freddie Roach was not one of those freebies, it was a record that I got significantly less than the price tag and is an example of the quality of material at this store. Freddie Roach didn’t make to much of a splash in an organ field dominated by Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff, Shirley Scott, Groove Holmes and others, but he was a player with great great feeling, and is maybe my favorite out of that bunch.
My People was one of Roach’s last records for Prestige (he’d also cut some thoroughly enjoyable records on Blue Note), which is really unfortunate because it is recorded just as things get funky and I would have loved to have gotten more music from Freddie Roach out of that period of time. We do get a little bit of that soulful funky jazz here, especially in the opener, “Prince Street,” a track dedicated to what Roach describes as the “soul center” of Newark, N.J., and on “I’m On My Way”. There’s also a bit of funk in one of the better versions of “Mas Que Nada” that I’ve heard. I like especially Eddie Wright’s guitar on this piece, it should seem a bit out of place, but it amps up grittier elements that aren’t normally hanging around this classic track. 
The most interesting song is the title track, “My People (Soul People),” which is a mostly standard blues, but features Freddie Roach doing some spoken word bits and singing with great soul. It’s a great example of the rising tide of black consciousness that was starting to find it’s expression more and more in African-American music in the 1960s. Roach takes things a step further with the liner notes, where he lays out a surprising deconstruction (at least on a jazz album’s liner notes in 1967) of the word “Freedom” link true freedom to economic self-determination.
Sounds like Brother Roach could have been teaching Sociology classes! Unfortunately, this was more or less his last album, his career never really took off, and I don’t know if anyone has written much about what happened to Freddie Roach in the years since. Perhaps I’ll have to figure that story out, but for now, we have the music…music that I wouldn’t have and you wouldn’t get a chance to listen to without independent record stores, so please SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL INDEPENDENT RECORD STORES!!!
Cheers,
Michael