Multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee does not make a throw away album, and this reissue of a 1994 release is no exception. A response to the late drummer Max Roach's significant social statement from 1960, Freedom Now Suite, this extensive commentary on the original which was itself a musical commentary on the civil rights movement, is a captivating mix of introspective reflection and social relevance.

Taking some of Roach's compositions as vehicles freely adapted for McPhee and his cohort's own views on the status of African Americans and social change at large, Sweet Freedom--Now What? has many moods. For example, the quiet "Garvey's Ghost" is both intimate and elegiac with bassist Lisle Ellis's gentle but insistent pizzicato and pianist Paul Plimley's impressionism recalling the Billy Strayhorn touch in its gossamer voicings, while McPhee improvises a moving legato saxophone melody that cuts deep into the listener. Equally subdued is the traditional hymn "Singing with a Sword in My Hand," as if to say that the fire of the confrontations is behind us and the victory is bittersweet.

Indeed, bittersweet is the prevailing tone of this entire suite, even in intense tunes like "Driva Man" and the fast version of "Mendacity". But the effect is one of peaceful, restful acceptance of the successes of the battle while a melancholy lingers about the necessity of the ordeal and whether anything has really been accomplished. McPhee's tenor and soprano saxophones with alto clarinet on two cuts have never sounded so keening and wistful. As McPhee points out in his liner notes that update the intent of the album "Today the world is a very different and infinitely more dangerous place. The Berlin Wall has fallen, only to have new ones rise up....Still, at the end of the day 'TOMORROW IS THE QUESTION' and the question is, NOW WHAT?"

Through the 13 tracks here, the three musicians explore the musical ramifications of that question.