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

Thu Aug 16 15:16:00 PDT 2007

Sure could swing when he had a mind to, and outswing most drummers!

On 16/08/07, David Richoux <tubaman at tubatoast.com> wrote:
>
> 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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