Baptiste: dream becomes reality: British saxophonist Denys Baptiste brings Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech back to life.(Jazz)

Jazz musicians were doing concept albums way before the Beatles and Floyd. You only have to look at the masterpieces that were Duke Ellington's Black, Brown And Beige, Sonny Rollins' Freedom Suite and Max Roach's We Insist! to see that improvisers were already thinking about more than chord changes in the late-Fifties. Tackling a major theme social, cultural or political--by way of an extended suite of music fascinated the aforementioned players.

British saxophonist Denys Baptiste, the man who is the link between Courtney Pine and Soweto Kinch, has taken his cue from albums such as Roach's We Insist!, an important example of jazz's engagement with civil rights, to create his most ambitious work to date, Let Freedom Ring! (Dune). The four-part suite is directly inspired by Martin Luther King's famous I Have A Dream speech, a rousing call for equal rights made on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial centre in Washington DC in August 1963.

"It was one of those pivotal moments," says Baptiste, who graduated from Gary Crosby's Tomorrow's Warriors school and plays at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on November 14 as part of the London Jazz Festival's opening-night programme. "The speech was something that all those people at the Lincoln Memorial really had to believe. It was on TV all across America and that was critical. I Have A Dream wasn't just a speech that applied to the black community; my understanding is that the speech was so important because it turned on a lot of white Americans to the idea of equal rights.

"As far as my project was concerned, the main idea was to take the speech out of its context and highlight its timeless and universal meaning. If you apply the same words that Dr King used then today, in how many places in the world would they fit? Unfortunately, in too many. How far have we come from civil rights, then? The work is really about then and now."

Baptiste has already proved himself to be one of the most promising and intelligent young players on the British jazz scene, having dropped two fine releases in the shape of 1997's Be Where You Are and 2001's Alternating Currents.

Full of articulate writing and sharp playing, these first records revealed an original voice within a ...