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Max Roach, "changed the face of modern jazz"
* Max Roach, 83; jazz drummer changed the face of
percussion (Los Angeles Times)
* The Night Max Roach Conquered Havana (Granma)
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Max Roach, 83; jazz drummer changed the face of
percussion
By Don Heckman
Los Angeles Times - August 17, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-roach17aug17,1,6948293.story
Max Roach, a leader of the modern jazz revolution of
the 1940s whose innovative approach to drumming forever
changed the way the instrument was played and
perceived, died Thursday. He was 83.
Roach died in a New York hospital, according to an
announcement from Blue Note Records. No cause of death
was given, but Roach was known to have been in failing
health for some time.
His achievements reached well beyond his importance as
a jazz drummer. He did not favor either word, in fact,
believing that "jazz" and "drummer" diminished the
creative and cultural significance of what the terms
were intended to represent.
But his many accomplishments expanded the meanings of
both. As a composer, Roach began from a jazz foundation
and created a sequence of works expanding the
vocabulary of contemporary composition.
As an instrumentalist, he brought the drum set to the
front of the stage, making each element of the kit into
a unique, individual instrument. No longer a roaring
sound behind the horns, the drums -- after Roach --
became a musical source of infinite possibilities.
He was, in addition, a pioneer in the use of the
creative arts for the advocacy of civil rights and
racial equality.
Arriving on the jazz scene as a talented teenager in
the early '40s, Roach was surrounded by a turbulent
world of musical experimentation. Rhythm was a
substantial element in the transformations taking place
via the arrival of the powerful new jazz ideas that
became known as bebop. Roach, inspired by the
breakthrough drumming techniques of Kenny Clarke (a
decade his senior), quickly began to add his own
visionary methods to the fundamental methodology of
jazz drumming.
In the process, the heavy-footed drive of the then-
dominant swing style was converted to a lighter
propulsion, in which the basic time-keeping of the beat
was moved from the thump of the bass drum to the airy,
ringing tone of a "ride" cymbal.
The change was liberating for drummers, allowing them
to employ the bass drum for accents -- sometimes
described (in those World War II years) as "dropping
bombs" -- while encouraging the use of the full panoply
of percussive effects within the standard drum kit.
>From the time he made his recording debut with
saxophonist Coleman Hawkins in 1944, Roach displayed a
mastery of the new drumming while continuing to develop
ways to use the freedom it afforded, effectively
positioning himself as a cutting-edge member of the
newly arriving bebop fraternity.
His style, with its urgent sense of swing, its mastery
of brush and cymbal playing and its constant quest to
establish drumming as an expression that moved beyond
rhythm into rich and complex areas of melody and
timbre, continued to evolve creatively for the balance
of his long and vital presence as a jazz icon.
"Max," said composer Quincy Jones on Thursday, "was one
of the founders and original members of the A-Team of
Bebop. He was also one of the first American musicians
to understand the complex polyrhythms of Africa."
Born in New Land, N.C., on Jan. 10, 1924, Roach moved
with his family to Brooklyn when he was 4. Growing up,
he sang in the choir of the Baptist church where his
aunt was a pianist.
After briefly studying piano, he turned to the drums
and was playing professional engagements while still
attending Brooklyn's Boys High School.
Roach was only 17 when he had the opportunity to
temporarily fill in for drummer Sonny Greer with the
Duke Ellington Orchestra.
"Most of the great drummers were in the Army," he told
The Times in 1991, "so when Sonny Greer got sick . . .
I got the job because I could read music. . . . From
that time on, everyone began calling me to make records
-- Dizzy Gillespie, Henry Allen, Hot Lips Page. Whether
I could play or not, they thought I could play because
I'd been with the master."
After performing and recording with the pioneers of the
bebop movement -- Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud
Powell, Miles Davis -- starting a record company
(Debut) with Charles Mingus and participating in Davis'
influential "Birth of the Cool" sessions, Roach
traveled to Los Angeles in 1953 to briefly replace
Shelly Manne with the Lighthouse All-Stars.
A year later, he formed a quintet with trumpeter
Clifford Brown, saxophonist Harold Land, pianist Richie
Powell and bassist George Morrow.
The group's tough-sounding blend of trumpet and tenor
saxophone, urged forward by Roach's dynamic drumming,
became the vanguard sound of hard bop -- powerfully
influential in the late 1950s and '60s and still a
model for many contemporary jazz groups.
But the deaths of Brown and Powell in an automobile
accident in 1956 effectively ended the group.
Roach was devastated but eventually returned to work
with saxophonist Sonny Rollins (recording the classic
"Saxophone Colossus"). His "Jazz in 3/4 Time" recording
in 1957 was an early examination of the jazz potential
of waltz rhythms.
In 1960, the recording of "We Insist: Freedom Now
Suite" with Oscar Brown Jr., Coleman Hawkins and his
then-wife Abbey Lincoln -- commissioned by the NAACP to
celebrate the approaching 100th anniversary of the
Emancipation Proclamation -- was a breakthrough
sociopolitical statement for a jazz artist. As vital
and transformative in its own fashion as Roach's
musical innovations of the '40s, it opened the way for
jazz, and pop artists as well, to invest their music
with meaningful commentary on the world around them.
"It all comes down to originality," Roach told jazz
critic Leonard Feather some years ago.
"There was one unforgettable night when I worked with
Pres [Lester Young] at Birdland. Because I was with
Pres, and because he and Papa Jo Jones were so close in
the Basie band, I played all of Papa Jo's old licks. At
the end of the evening, after I said good night to
Pres, he gave me one of those succinct lessons in that
personal language of his. He said, 'You can't join the
throng until you write your own song.'
"That's a great lesson, something that stays with you
the rest of your life; this music allows you, prefers
you to be an individual, to do your own thing."
Ever eager to expand his musical horizons, Roach -- who
as a young man earned a degree in composition from the
Manhattan School of Music -- began teaching at the
University of Massachusetts in 1971, establishing a
jazz major degree.
A few years later, he dipped into the avant-garde with
pianist Cecil Taylor and alto saxophonist Anthony
Braxton.
Other Roach ensembles included M'Boom, a 10-person all-
percussion ensemble playing an extraordinary array of
instruments from around the world; the Double Quartet,
an ensemble consisting of the Max Roach Quartet and the
Uptown String Quartet, led by his daughter, Maxine; and
the So What Brass 5.
In 1983, again leading the way, Roach collaborated with
MTV's Fab Five Freddy on a performance piece combining
jazz and rap. And his 1995 dance, music and reading
recital with choreographer Bill T. Jones and novelist
Toni Morrison was an extraordinary combination of the
work of three highly honored African American artists.
He also composed for choreographer Alvin Ailey and
scored plays by Shakespeare, Eugene O'Neill, Amiri
Baraka and Sam Shepard, winning an Obie Award in 1985
for his work with Shepard. And he performed with the
Japanese percussion group Kodo and the Cuban jazz group
Irakere.
Roach was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant"
in 1988, the first jazz artist to receive the honor.
He was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for his
Massey Hall recording on Debut Records with Parker,
Gillespie, Powell and Mingus. He received an NEA Jazz
Masters award, a Commander of Arts and Letters award
from the French government and several honorary
doctorates.
Roach's survivors include his sons, Daryl and Raoul;
and his daughters, Maxine, Ayl and Dara. Funeral
arrangements were incomplete.
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* The Night Max Roach Conquered Havana
by Pedro de la Hoz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
GRANMA - August 18, 2007
http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/2007/08/18/cultura/artic01.html
Nice photo of Max Roach:
http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs1467.html
When US jazz great Max Roach came to the Havana
International Jazz Plaza Festival in 1989 he spoke to
Cuban writer Leonardo Acosta about his first trip to
Cuba in the mid-1950s. The legendary drummer said that
he had made the trip after hearing stories about shows
at the Tropicana Cabaret and about the Cuban musicians
there who made jazz music their own. Sadly, Roach
wasn't allowed to enter the club in pre-revolutionary
Cuba because of the color of his skin.
Max Roach, considered the most important drummer in the
history of jazz, received a completely different
welcome at the 1989 Jazz Plaza Festival. He conquered
Havana, joining the percussion section of Irakere to
put on display his domination of a wide range of
rhythms. After that memorable jam session, Roach
lavished praise on Cuban kit drummers Enrique Pla and
Oscarito Valdes, conga player Miguel Anga, and veteran
musician Oscar Valdes, who played the chequeré and the
batá drums. Nine years later, presided by former
Irakere bandleader Chucho Valdes, Jazz Plaza dedicated
its 18th festival to Roach.
Max Roach died in New York on Thursday, August 16. He
was 83. With his death, an unforgettable era of jazz,
of the big names and founders of bebop, comes to a
close.
Max Roach helped invent modern jazz in the 1940s,
playing in groups with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker,
Coleman Hawkins, Duke Ellington, Sonny Rollins, Charles
Mingus, Thelonius Monk and Miles Davis, and left an
unforgettable mark of âhard bopâ in the quintet he
formed in 1954 with trumpeter Clifford Brown.
Critics praised Roach for his improvisations and
rhythmic innovations, and for his nonconformist
attitude that took him beyond the confines of jazz to
work with gospel choirs, hip-hop bands, visual artists
and a whole gamut of musical expressions.
Max Roach once said that anyone can acquire technique,
but that the real challenge is to bring a seal of
individuality and identification.
Roach did not live isolated in his music. He was an
activist who often lent his support to the African-
American civil rights movement. In 1985, he was among
the main figures to perform at a concert calling for
the release of Nelson Mandela.
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