[Dixielandjazz] MAX ROACH obit from Drummerworld

[ALOHArose at aol.com]

Max Roach, a Founder of Modern Jazz, Dies at 83
By PETER KEEPNEWS - Published: August 16, 2007
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 early today in Manhattan. He was 83.
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.



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