MAX ROACH
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Mop Mop 1995 Including: Who Wil Buy?, Sophisticated Lady, Long as You're Living, and more... Buy album: iTunes Music Store - Rhapsody |
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Long As You're Living 1960 Including: Lotus Blossom, Long as You're Living, Night in Tunisia, and more... Buy album: J & R Music and Computer World |
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We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite 1960 Including: Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace, Freedom Day, All Africa, |
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New Sounds: Max Roach Quintet/Art Blakey & His Band 1949 Including: Maximum, Just Moody, Bop Alley, and more... |
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Members, Don't Git Weary 1968 Including: Abstrutions, Libra, Absolutions, and more... Buy album: AOL Music Now - Wal-Mart |
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The Max Roach Quartet, Featuring Hank Mobley 1953 Including: Drum Conversation, Pt. 2 [Live], Orientation, Just One of Those Things, and more... |
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Lift Every Voice and Sing 1971 Including: Motherless Child, Joshua, Were You There When They Sacrificed My Lord, and more... Buy album: Wal-Mart |
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Jazz in 3/4 Time 1956 Including: Blues Waltz, Lover [Mono Version], Lover [Stereo Version], and more... Buy album: iTunes Music Store - Rhapsody - Overstock.com - |
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Max Roach and Friends, Vol. 2 1961 Including: Long as You're Living, Who Will Buy?, Love for Sale, and more... |
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It's Time 1962 Including: The Profit, It's Time, Lonesome Lover, and more... Buy album: iTunes Music Store - Rhapsody |
August 16, 2007
Max Roach, a Founder of Modern Jazz, Dies at 83
By PETER KEEPNEWS, NY Times
Max Roach, a founder of modern jazz who rewrote the rules of drumming
in the
1940's and spent the rest of his career breaking musical barriers and
defying listeners' expectations, died Wednesday night at his home in
New York. He was 83.
His death was announced today by a spokesman for Blue Note records, on which
he frequently appeared. No cause was given. Mr. Roach had been known to be
ill for several years.
As a young man, Mr. Roach, a percussion virtuoso capable of playing at the
most brutal tempos with subtlety as well as power, was among a small circle
of adventurous musicians who brought about wholesale changes in jazz. He
remained adventurous to the end.
Over the years he challenged both his audiences and himself by working not
just with standard jazz instrumentation, and not just in traditional jazz
venues, but in a wide variety of contexts, some of them well beyond the
confines of jazz as that word is generally understood.
He led a "double quartet" consisting of his working group of trumpet,
saxophone, bass and drums plus a string quartet. He led an ensemble
consisting entirely of percussionists. He dueted with uncompromising
avant-gardists like the pianist Cecil Taylor and the saxophonist Anthony
Braxton. He performed unaccompanied. He wrote music for plays by
Sam Shepard and dance pieces by Alvin Ailey. He collaborated with video artists, gospel
choirs and hip-hop performers.
Mr. Roach explained his philosophy to The New York Times in 1990: "You can't
write the same book twice. Though I've been in historic musical situations,
I can't go back and do that again. And though I run into artistic crises,
they keep my life interesting."
He found himself in historic situations from the beginning of his career. He
was still in his teens when he played drums with the alto saxophonist
Charlie Parker, a pioneer of modern jazz, at a Harlem after-hours club in
1942. Within a few years, Mr. Roach was himself recognized as a pioneer in
the development of the sophisticated new form of jazz that came to be known
as bebop.
He was not the first drummer to play bebop - Kenny Clarke, 10 years his
senior, is generally credited with that distinction - but he quickly
established himself as both the most imaginative percussionist in modern
jazz and the most influential.
In Mr. Roach's hands, the drum kit became much more than a means of keeping
time. He saw himself as a full-fledged member of the front line, not simply
as a supporting player.
Layering rhythms on top of rhythms, he paid as much attention to a song's
melody as to its beat. He developed, as the jazz critic Burt Korall put it,
"a highly responsive, contrapuntal style," engaging his fellow musicians in
an open-ended conversation while maintaining a rock-solid pulse. His
approach "initially mystified and thoroughly challenged other drummers," Mr.
Korall wrote, but quickly earned the respect of his peers and established a
new standard for the instrument.
Mr. Roach was an innovator in other ways. In the late 1950s, he led a group
that was among the first in jazz to regularly perform pieces in waltz time
and other unusual meters in addition to the conventional 4/4. In the early
1960s, he was among the first to use jazz to address racial and political
issues, with works like the album-length "We Insist! Freedom Now Suite."
In 1972, he became one of the first jazz musicians to teach full time at the
college level when he was hired as a professor at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst. And in 1988, he became the first jazz musician to
receive a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation.
Maxwell Roach was born on Jan. 10, 1924, in the small town of New Land,
N.C., and grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. He began
studying piano at a neighborhood Baptist church when he was 8 and took up
the drums a few years later.
Even before he graduated from Boys High School in 1942, savvy New York jazz
musicians knew his name. As a teenager he worked briefly with Duke
Ellington's orchestra at the Paramount Theater and with Charlie Parker at
Monroe's Uptown House in
Harlem, where he took part in jam sessions that
helped lay the groundwork for bebop.
By the middle 1940's, he had become a ubiquitous presence on the New
York
jazz scene, working in the 52nd Street nightclubs with Parker, the
trumpeter
Dizzy Gillespie and other leading modernists. Within a few years
he had
become equally ubiquitous on record, participating in such seminal
recordings as
Miles Davis's "Birth of the Cool" sessions in 1949 and 1950.
He also found time to study composition at the Manhattan School of
Music. He
had planned to major in percussion, he later recalled in an interview,
but
changed his mind after a teacher told him his technique was incorrect.
"The
way he wanted me to play would have been fine if I'd been after a career
in
a symphony orchestra," he said, "but it wouldn't have worked on 52nd
Street."
Mr. Roach made the transition from sideman to leader in 1954, when he
and
the young trumpet virtuoso Clifford Brown formed a quintet. That group,
which specialized in a muscular and stripped-down version of bebop that
came
to be called hard bop, took the jazz world by storm. But it was
short-lived.
In June 1956, at the height of the Brown-Roach quintet's success, Brown
was
killed in an automobile accident, along with Richie Powell, the group's
pianist, and Powell's wife. The sudden loss of his friend and co-leader,
Mr.
Roach later recalled, plunged him into depression and heavy drinking
from
which it took him years to emerge.
Nonetheless, he kept working. He honored his existing nightclub bookings
with the two surviving members of his group, the saxophonist
Sonny Rollins
and the bassist George Morrow, before briefly taking time off and
putting
together a new quartet. By the end of the 50's, seemingly recovered from
his
depression, he was recording prolifically, mostly as a leader but
occasionally as a sideman with Mr. Rollins and others.
The personnel of Mr. Roach's working group changed frequently over the
next
decade, but the level of artistry and innovation remained high. His
sidemen
included such important musicians as the saxophonists Eric Dolphy,
Stanley
Turrentine and George Coleman and the trumpet players Donald Byrd, Kenny
Dorham and Booker Little. Few of his groups had a pianist, making for a
distinctively open ensemble sound in which Mr. Roach's drums were
prominent.
Always among the most politically active of jazz musicians, Mr. Roach
had
helped the bassist Charles Mingus establish one of the first
musician-run
record companies, Debut, in 1952. Eight years later, the two organized a
so-called rebel festival in Newport, R.I., to protest the Newport Jazz
Festival's treatment of performers. That same year, Mr. Roach
collaborated with the lyricist Oscar Brown Jr. on "We Insist! Freedom Now Suite,"
which played variations on the theme of black people's struggle for equality
in the United States and Africa.
The album, which featured vocals by
Abbey Lincoln (Mr. Roach's frequent
collaborator and, from 1962 to 1970, his wife), received mixed reviews:
many
critics praised its ambition, but some attacked it as overly polemical.
Mr.
Roach was undeterred.
"I will never again play anything that does not have social
significance,"
he told Down Beat magazine after the album's release. "We American jazz
musicians of African descent have proved beyond all doubt that we're
master
musicians of our instruments. Now what we have to do is employ our skill
to
tell the dramatic story of our people and what we've been through."
"We Insist!" was not a commercial success, but it emboldened Mr. Roach
to
broaden his scope as a composer. Soon he was collaborating with
choreographers, filmmakers and Off Broadway playwrights on projects,
including a stage version of "We Insist!"
As his range of activities expanded, his career as a bandleader became
less
of a priority. At the same time, the market for his uncompromising brand
of
small-group jazz began to diminish. By the time he joined the faculty of
the
University of Massachusetts in 1972, teaching had come to seem an
increasingly attractive alternative to the demands of the musician's
life.
Joining the academy did not mean turning his back entirely on
performing. In
the early '70s, Mr. Roach joined with seven fellow drummers to form
M'Boom,
an ensemble that achieved tonal and coloristic variety through the use
of
xylophones, chimes, steel drums and other percussion instruments. Later
in
the decade he formed a new quartet, two of whose members - the
saxophonist
Odean Pope and the trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater - would perform and
record
with him off and on for more than two decades.
He also participated in a number of unusual experiments. He appeared in
concert in 1983 with a rapper, two disc jockeys and a team of break
dancers.
A year later, he composed music for an Off Broadway production of three
Sam
Shepard plays, for which he won an Obie Award. In 1985, he took part in
a
multimedia collaboration with the video artist Kit Fitzgerald and the
stage
director George Ferencz.
Perhaps his most ambitious experiment in those years was the Max Roach
Double Quartet, a combination of his quartet and the Uptown String
Quartet.
Jazz musicians had performed with string accompaniment before, but
rarely if
ever in a setting like this, where the string players were an equal part
of
the ensemble and were given the opportunity to improvise. Reviewing a
Double
Quartet album in The Times in 1985,
Robert Palmer wrote, "For the first time
in the history of jazz recording, strings swing as persuasively as any
saxophonist or drummer."
This endeavor had personal as well as musical significance for Mr.
Roach:
the Uptown String Quartet's founder and viola player was his daughter
Maxine. She survives him, as do two other daughters, Ayo and Dara, and
two
sons, Raoul and Darryl.
By the early '90s, Mr. Roach had reduced his teaching load and was again
based in
New York year-round, traveling to Amherst only for two
residencies
and a summer program each year. He was still touring with his quartet as
recently as 2000, and he also remained active as a composer. In 2002 he
wrote and performed the music for "How
to Draw a Bunny," a documentary about
the artist Ray Johnson.
