One of the defining features of jazz has been the genre’s approach to rhythm. While this absolutely means the phrasing of 8th notes ala Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker, it also very much means an approach to percussion. The modern drum set, trap set, has developed through jazz and jazz provided innovations in drumming that have become “taken for granted” today.
I’ve spent a lot of time writing about Jazz in the 60s the last several weeks—and I anticipate spending much more time in the 1970s once we enter the new year. So I found myself asking the question “Which icon have I not really gotten to yet?” and “What from the 50s or even 40s would be worthwhile to engage this week?” And when I say “Icon”, I mean who would be analogous to when Steve Martin refers “Names above the titles only”.
It didn’t take too much thinking to come up with this week’s topic: Max Roach; drummer, percussionist, innovator, composer, educator, entrepreneur, and civil rights activist. Max Roach is the drummer on some of the most important recordings in jazz from the 1940s and 50s and he continued to make excellent music up until his death. There is really so much Max Roach that I can’t get to it all today. Today we focus on the first two big stages of Max’s career…and I don’t expect to get past 1956 today…
Welcome to my weekly Sunday evening Jazz diary. If you are finding me for the first time, I try to publish a diary about Jazz music and related genres every Sunday around 10pm est. Comments are welcome and encouraged.
Maxwell Lemuel "Max" Roach, January 10, 1924 – August 16, 2007, was born in North Carolina and his family moved to Brooklyn when he was 4. He was playing with gospel groups by the time he was 10 and at the ripe old age of 18, was called to sub for Sonny Greer in Duke Ellington’s band. By the way, there is no website dedicated to Max Roach.
Maybe you’ve seen Max Roach on TV doing something like this….
Computers and drum machines can’t do that. Though it is somewhat amusing that Max would become associated with brilliant Hi-Hat playing.
Max Roach is one of the most important innovators in the development of the modern approach to drumming. As part of the earliest Be-Bop players in the 1940s, Max and another drummer named Kenny Clarke began to experiment with keeping time of the ride cymbal instead of with the hi-hat and bass drum. This freed the drummer up to accentuate the melody of the song with the other drums. This approach to drumming is so “taken for granted” today that we forget that someone(s) had to invent this approach: Time on the ride cymbal, accents under the time on the drums. Max…and Kenny Clarke…did that.
Kenny Clarke, January 9, 1914 – January 26, 1985, perhaps is the original innovator of this approach. Clarke had a decent career and his name is spoken with reverence among Jazz musicians. Sadly, not a lot of Clarke is recorded in the 1940s. Max Roach’s life, however, is extremely well documented in recordings.
Max’s earliest recordings are with Coleman Hawkins
Woody ‘n you
This band includes some other new comers such as Dizzy Gillespie.
Rainbow Mist
Yesterdays
From a later recording date is this tune written by Thelonious Monk, I Mean You
But Max’s “Jazz god” status starts with some small group recordings he made with someone kinda influential…..
Koko
Max Roach is the drummer on many of the most classic recordings made by Charlie Parker, with and without Dizzy Gillespie, with and without Miles Davis.
Now’s the Time
Every time there is a shift in popular music, there seems to be some change in the drumming. This shift in drumming is also often related to a shift in bass playing, but not always. Motown recordings all have a similar sound and grove to them, mostly it’s the same bass and drummer. Stax too. How much of the Bob Marley sound is the result of Bob, Peter and Bunny…and how much is the Barnet brothers? Heck, the whole grunge rock movement seemed to LACK an innovation in drumming and at times just seemed like a new generation combining the arena rock and the punk rock of the 1970s rerecorded with digital technology. That’s probably less so for a “Beck” and more so for the Seattle bands like Soundgarden and Pearl Jam and Nirvana….all of whom I like and enjoy and with whom I have the strange coincidence of being the same age as Kurt Cobain…what he would be.
How High the Moon—Live at the Royal Roost 1948
Jazz has a generational break with its past in the 1940s just like Rock does in the 60s and 70s and 80s etc or how Hip-hop diverges from the R&B and soul of the 1970s. There are obvious elementals of the previous “generations” (in terms of popular music and jazz, this isn’t quite an actual generation. Styles seem to change every 10 years, maybe 5 years in some cases. And sometimes there are brief fads.) in their later reformations, but there is enough of a change for folks to collectively see what they are doing as new and as opposed to and different from something in the past.
Constellation
Bird leads this break and Max is beating the drum behind him. This post WWII break is unique because there was a moratorium on making records via the musicians union from 1942-1944. Be-Bop’s origins are not well documented at all on records. This makes the change from the past more identifiable because there is a stage of development missing. But it also a unique shift because it is here that Jazz begins to drift away from being popular music, certainly it begins to move away from being dance music. But what is gained through what is let go is the ability to innovate and expand approaches to harmony, rhythm and melody. And it invites and celebrates virtuosity and creativity.
And Max Roach is the one keeping time during all of this.
Wikipedia—
Roach's most significant innovations came in the 1940s, when he and jazz drummer Kenny Clarke devised a new concept of musical time. By playing the beat-by-beat pulse of standard 4/4 time on the "ride" cymbal instead of on the thudding bass drum, Roach and Clarke developed a flexible, flowing rhythmic pattern that allowed soloists to play freely. The new approach also left space for the drummer to insert dramatic accents on the snare drum, "crash" cymbal and other components of the trap set.
By matching his rhythmic attack with a tune's melody, Roach brought a newfound subtlety of expression to his instrument. He often shifted the dynamic emphasis from one part of his drum kit to another within a single phrase, creating a sense of tonal color and rhythmic surprise. The idea was to shatter musical conventions and take full advantage of the drummer's unique position. "In no other society", Roach once observed, "do they have one person play with all four limbs."
While that approach is common today, when Clarke and Roach introduced the new style in the 1940s it was a revolutionary musical advance. "When Max Roach's first records with Charlie Parker were released by Savoy in 1945", jazz historian Burt Korall wrote in the Oxford Companion to Jazz, "drummers experienced awe and puzzlement and even fear." One of those awed drummers, Stan Levey, summed up Roach's importance: "I came to realize that, because of him, drumming no longer was just time, it was music."
Max is also on the first recordings Miles does as a leader.
Max is even the drummer on much of the Birth of the Cool sessions with Miles.
Godchild
Deception
He records with Bud Powell
Max has also recorded on sessions with the following as leaders: Don Byas, Sarah Vaughn, Dexter Gordon, Benny Carter, Stan Getz, Fats Navarro, and Sonny Stitt…all before 1950.
From 1950 to 1953, Max attended Manhattan School of Music and worked towards a BM in classical percussion. While they awarded him an honorary Doctorate in 1990, I’m pretty sure he never did finish that undergraduate degree.
In fact….wikipedia—
Roach was given a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant in 1988, cited as a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France (1989), twice awarded the French Grand Prix du Disque, elected to the International Percussive Art Society's Hall of Fame and the Downbeat Magazine Hall of Fame, awarded Harvard Jazz Master, celebrated by Aaron Davis Hall, given eight honorary doctorate degrees, including degrees awarded by Medgar Evers College, CUNY, the University of Bologna, Italy and Columbia University. While spending the later years of his life at the Mill Basin Sunrise assisted living home, in Brooklyn, Max was honored with a proclamation honoring his musical achievements by Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz
In 1986 the London borough of Lambeth named a park in Brixton after him. Roach was able to officially open it when he visited the UK that year invited by the Greater London Council, when he performed at a concert in March at the Royal Albert Hall together with Ghanaian master drummer Ghanaba and others.
Roach was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2009
Of course while at Manhattan School of Music in the early 50s, he recorded more jazz
With Bud Powell
With Monk
These foolish things
I’ll follow you
And with Sonny Rollins too!
The way you look tonight
But at this relatively early stage—before he turned 30!—he also started up his own record company with Charles Mingus! Debut records was founded in 1952 and closed up in 1957. It was intended to give artists the opportunity to record without label influence. Eventually their catalog was bought and rereleased by Fantasy records. Max and Mingus had the rights to one concert in particular.
On May 15, 1953, a concert was given in Toronto at Massey Hall featuring Charlie Parker, Dizzy, Bud, Mingus and Max. Debut records released this first. It is the only recording of all five men playing together and it is the last recording of Bird and Dizzy together.
I think it is important to recognize the business sense and entrepreneurialship at display by such artistically creative and musically skilled intelligent African-American men. And to note when this is happening: 1952.
So much Max and so little time….
In 1954 Max made his first recordings with yet another giant figure in Jazz and goes on to form one of the more important Jazz quintets from the 1950s: The Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet. One of my first Jazz diaries went into Clifford Brown a bit. It’s always worth listening to this group. George Morrow on Bass, Richie Powell—Bud’s brother—on piano and first Harold Land and then later Sonny Rollins on tenor sax.
Dahood
Parisian Thoroughfare
It’s one of those things where perhaps you can’t quite say what is and what isn’t jazz all the time….but when you hear stuff like this, there is absolutely no question. This is jazz.
I Can’t Get Started
Stompin’ at the Savoy
The first time I encounter Harold Mabern was when I was waiting to enter a practice room for an ensemble class I had. This would be fall 1986 and I was a freshman at William Paterson College. Harold was the instructor to the previous class and he was finishing up the session. He kept playing various Brown-Roach tunes and repeated that he knew the arrangements of them (and hence how he was able to get a particular gig). Harold would often use Brown-Roach as a touchstone for how to play. So would Rufus Reid. And quite a bit of emphasis was on how the group approached the arrangements and just an overall “group” concept.
In 1955, Sonny Rollins replaces Harold Land
Cherokee
I’ll Remember April (sonny)
Clifford Brown, born October 30, 1930, died in a car accident along with Richie Powell on June 26, 1956. This was a great tragedy to jazz and to music in general.
There is almost no video footage available of Clifford Brown. But here he is on the Soupy Sales Show
Max becomes a more vocal advocate for Civil Rights and uses his music to do so. He also is known for getting drunk and walking up on stage and punching Ornette Coleman because he didn’t like what Ornette was doing (circa 1959ish). Later in his life Max would record duos with Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton, so I suspect he came to appreciate Ornette a bit more later in life.
The one time innovator continued to play for decades, showing how skilled and creative he could be at every turn. But more on all of that another time…
Thanks for listening everyone. Please support your local Jazz musicians and all local live music.