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Phil Haynes & Free Country — Liberty Now!
(Corner Store Jazz CSJ-0151, 2025, CD / DL)

by Jon Davis, Published 2025-12-10

Liberty Now! Cover art

Among the many projects of drummer Phil Haynes is Free Country, a jazz string band on a mission to reinterpret American roots music. His cohorts on this journey are Drew Gress (bass), Jim Yanda (guitar), and Hank Roberts (cello), and Liberty Now! is their fourth release (not counting a live album), coming more than a quarter century after their first, Shenandoah from 1997. On this double-CD set, they present one disc of original tunes by group members, and the other disc is a career retrospective of tracks from their past, some of which hadn’t been previously released as far as I can tell, including such traditional tunes as “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain” and “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho,” patriotic songs like “America the Beautiful” and “The Defense of Fort McHenry,” and others like “What a Wonderful World,” “What’s Going On,” and “Fanfare for the Common Man.” Haynes says that after 2018’s My Favorite Things (1960-69), where they focused on popular music of the 60s, they originally felt that Free Country had run its course, but they enjoyed playing together so much that they just had to reconvene, and the natural tactic seemed to be to change direction and record their own compositions. My first observation is that this is an appealing combination of instruments. Adding a cello to a guitar trio is not something often seen, and Roberts is a deft player who interprets melodies with skill and emotion and is also an imaginative improviser. The cello has such a range from lowest to highest notes that it can fill a variety of roles. Yanda plays electric guitar, but sticks with clean tones. The edge in his playing comes from his note and chord choices, which venture outside the bounds of both folk and jazz. “Strands of Liberty” features some wild atonal playing that would be at home in an avant-punk song. From time to time, Free Country has included vocals (by Roberts) on their albums, and here we have “Joy,” a Haynes composition that’s arranged more like a chamber song than jazz or pop. CD2 starts out with “The Way the West Was Won,” a spirited piece that blends the famous main title theme to How the West Was Won with that of The Magnificent Seven. Their rendition of The Beatles’ “Revolution” is a lot of fun, and “Respect” is given a funky treatment where Gress shines on bass. “To Ancreon in Heaven” is an interesting one: it’s a rendition of the song that “The Star Spangled Banner” borrowed the melody from, complete with lyrics. In all, Free Country works as both a top-notch jazz combo and a creative vision for interpreting music of the past, bridging jazz, bluegrass, folk, and popular song.

Filed under: New releases, 2025 releases

Related artist(s): Phil Haynes, Jim Yanda

More info
http://philhaynesmusic.bandcamp.com/album/liberty-now

 

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