[Dixielandjazz] maybe not OKOM for this list, but another jazz great has passed on - Max Roach r.i.p

[David Richoux]

Max Roach, a Founder of Modern Jazz, Dies at 83
By Peter Keepnews
The New York 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.


-----Original Message-----
From: Thurston Hunger - KFJC <hunger at kfjc.org>
To: David Richoux <tubaman at tubatoast.com>
Cc: trinitykfjc at aol.com; staff at kfjc.org
Sent: Thu, 16 Aug 2007 9:08 am
Subject: Re: [kfjc-staff] max roach r.i.p?


Quick, put him in front of a drum kit, that will revive him.

Seriously, when I saw him years ago he hobbled to the kit

and I expected he might fall apart, but once drumming it

was like he shed five decades...



Love,

  Lazarus







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