Today marks the one-hundredth birthday of pioneeering jazz drummer, composer, and activist Max Roach. Roach was a percussion virtuoso who was widely admired for his impeccable brush technique and mastery of dynamics. Along with drummer Kenny Clarke, Roach revolutionized jazz drumming, keeping time on the ride cymbal and playing irregular accents on the bass drum in order to fit into a bebop context.
As an eighteen-year-old high school graduate, Roach was called on to fill in for Sonny Greer in the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Within the next few years, he worked with a who’s who of jazz, including Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Miles Davis and others.
In 1952, Roach co-founded an artist-owned jazz label called Debut Records with bassist Charles Mingus. In the mid-fifties, Roach partnered with trumpeter Clifford Brown to form one of the most influential small groups in modern jazz. The group also included Bud Powell’s younger brother Richie Powell, and tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins. The quintet came to an abrupt end when Clifford Brown and Richie Powell were killed in an automobile accident on June 26th, 1956.
Roach was an important contributor to seminal mid-fifties jazz sessions, including Sonny Rollins’ 1956 Prestige recording Saxophone Collossus and Thelonious Monk’s Brilliant Corners LP on Riverside Records. In the late fifties and early sixties, Roach worked with a string of brilliant soloists and composers including trumpeters Kenny Dorham and Booker Little, saxophonist George Coleman, brothers Stanley Turrentine (tenor sax) and Tommy Turrentine (trumpet), saxophonist and clarinetist Eric Dolphy, and trombonist Julian Priester.
Activism and social justice played a major role in Max Roach’s music, especially on recordings like We Insist that featured vocalist Abbey Lincoln (Roach’s spouse) and lyricist Oscar Brown, Jr, and Percussion Bitter Sweet. In 1962, Roach participated in a trio session with bassist Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington that resulted in the classic recording Money Jungle, an album that sounds like nothing else in Ellington’s discography.
Roach studied classical percussion at Manhattan School of Music in the early fifties and in 1990 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the school. During the 1970s, Roach formed M’Boom, a percussion orchestra that included a wealth of talented players like Joe Chambers, Roy Brooks, and Warren Smith. From the early seventies until the 1990’s he was on the music faculty of University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Max Roach died in 2007. In 2023, Roach was the subject of a documentary feature film Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes, which was nationally broadcast on the PBS series American Masters.
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