Freedom, Rhythm & Sound: Chapter Two

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From the 1960s onwards, these artists helped reshape the cultural landscape for African-American musicians in the USA, changing the role of jazz musician from nightclub entertainer to artist. The artwork of their often self-produced record cover designs during this era reflected their radical agenda, spiritual awareness and singular search for musical and personal freedoms.
Freedom, Rhythm and Sound: CHAPTER TWO is a new second collection featuring hundreds more beautiful and rare jazz record cover designs from the 1960s-1980s. These designs help document the continued developments in jazz as African-American artists set out on new pathways and journeys to enlightenment, heading out into Europe, Japan, Africa and beyond where eager audiences gave them a new-found respect and where local producers and record labels were keen to record their ground-breaking and radical new music. Back at home in the USA, African-American jazz artists in the mid-1970s now also found themselves freer to explore their creative artistry, having successfully renegotiated their relationship with the USA record industry through the pioneering work of those earlier artists.
Through stunning record cover designs Freedom, Rhythm and Sound: CHAPTER TWO acts as a visual documentation of this period. As well as the radical jazz music of this time, the book also includes sections on the record cover art of African-American poets, Civil Rights Speech recordings (Martin Luther King, Malcolm X), early pioneers (Yusef Lateef, Max Roach, Ornette Coleman and others) all of which helped influence and shape the world of radical jazz from the 1960s onwards.

Since the 1980s, Gilles Peterson has been a pivotal figure in the club scene, renowned for his genre-defying approach to music with jazz at its core. As one of the UK's most iconic DJs, he has spent over 40 years shaping music trends as a radio presenter, club DJ, producer, and festival curator. He hosts a flagship show on BBC Radio 6 Music and, in 2016, launched Worldwide FM. He is founder of the Worldwide Festival in the South of France and We Out Here festival in the UK. He runs the label Brownswood Recordings, dedicated to discovering and promoting new talent and bringing fresh voices to the global stage.
Stuart Baker founded the much-respected Soul Jazz Records in 1992. In the last thirty years the record company has released more than 500 records covering a genre-defying array of non-mainstream musical worlds - Jazz, Reggae, Punk, Latin, Brazilian, Disco, African, Gospel, Acid House and more.
In 2007, Baker launched Soul Jazz Books, developing and editing a similarly diverse and critically acclaimed publishing house with graphic art, culture and photography titles that include 'Voguing and The House Ballroom Scene of New York', 'Dancehall - The Rise of Jamaican Dancehall Culture', 'Yo! The Early Days of Hip-Hop', 'Freedom, Rhythm and Sound - Revolutionary Jazz Cover Art 1965-83', 'Punk 45- The Singles Cover Art of Punk 1976-80' and others.
In 2017, part of Stuart Baker's jazz record collection (much of which appears in the first volume of Freedom, Rhythm and Sound) was featured and displayed as part of the Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power exhibition at Tate Modern in London and subsequently at The Broad in Los Angeles (2019) and Brooklyn Museum (2019).