August 16, 2007
>Max Roach, a
Founder of Modern Jazz, Dies at 83
>By PETER KEEPNEWS
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/arts/music/16cnd-roach.html
>
>Max Roach, a founder of modern jazz who rewrote the
rules of drumming in the 1940s and spent the rest
of his career breaking musical barriers and defying
listeners expectations, died early today in
Manhattan. 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 cant write the same book
twice. Though Ive been in historic musical
situations, I cant 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.
>>
>In Mr. Roachs 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 songs 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.
>
> 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 Ellingtons orchestra at the
Paramount Theater and with Charlie Parker at
Monroes Uptown House in Harlem, where he took part
in jam sessions that helped lay the groundwork for bebop.
By the middle 1940s, 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
Daviss 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 Id been after a career in a
symphony orchestra, he said, but it
wouldnt 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 quintets success, Brown was killed in
an automobile accident, along with Richie Powell, the
groups pianist, and Powells 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 50s,
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.
Roachs 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. Roachs 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 Festivals 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 peoples struggle for equality in the United
States and Africa. The album, which featured vocals by
Abbey Lincoln (Mr. Roachs 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 albums release. We
American jazz musicians of African descent have proved
beyond all doubt that were 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
weve 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 .
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 MBoom, 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
Quartets 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.
FURTHER COMMENT AND ANECDOTE:
As an instrumentalist,
he brought the drum set to the front of the stage,
making each element of the kit into a unique, individual
instrument. No longer a
roaring sound behind the horns, the drums -- after Roach
-- became a musical source of infinite possibilities.
....the basic time-keeping of the beat was moved
from the thump of the bass drum to the airy, ringing tone
of a "ride" cymbal.
The change was liberating for drummers, allowing them to
employ the bass drum
for accents -- sometimes described (in those World War II
years) as "dropping
bombs" -- while encouraging the use of the full
panoply of percussive effects within the standard drum
kit.
His style, with its
urgent sense of swing, its mastery of brush and cymbal
playing
and its constant quest to establish drumming as an
expression that moved beyond
rhythm into rich and complex areas of melody and timbre,
continued to evolve
creatively for the balance of his long and vital presence
as a jazz icon..........Roach was only 17 when he had the
opportunity to temporarily fill in for
drummer Sonny Greer with the Duke Ellington Orchestra.
"Most of the great drummers were in the Army,"
he told The Times in 1991, "so when Sonny Greer got
sick . . . I got the job because I could read music. . .
. From that time on, everyone began calling me to make
records -- Dizzy Gillespie,
Henry Allen, Hot Lips Page. Whether I could play or not,
they thought I could play
because I'd been with the master."
"It all comes down
to originality," Roach told jazz critic Leonard
Feather
some years ago."There was one unforgettable night
when I worked with Pres [Lester Young] at Birdland.
Because I was with Pres, and because he and Papa Jo Jones
were so close in the Basie band, I played all of Papa
Jo's old licks. At the end of the evening, after I said
good night to Pres, he gave me one of those succinct
lessons in that personal language of his. He said, 'You
can't join the throng until you write your own song.'
"That's a great lesson, something that stays with
you the rest of your life; this music allows you, prefers
you to be an individual, to do your own thing."
In 1983, again leading
the way, Roach collaborated with MTV's Fab Five Freddy
on a performance piece combining jazz and rap. And his
1995 dance, music and
reading recital with choreographer Bill T. Jones and
novelist Toni Morrison was an
extraordinary combination of the work of three highly
honored African American artists. He also composed for
choreographer Alvin Ailey and scored plays by
Shakespeare, Eugene O'Neill, Amiri Baraka and Sam
Shepard, winning an Obie Award in 1985 for his work with
Shepard. And he performed with the Japanese percussion
group Kodo and the Cuban jazz group Irakere.
He was, in addition, a pioneer in the use of the creative
arts for the advocacy
of civil rights and racial equality.Don Heckman
When US jazz great Max Roach came to the Havana International Jazz Plaza
Festival in 1989 he spoke to Cuban writer Leonardo Acosta about his first
trip to Cuba in the mid-1950s. The legendary drummer said that he had made
the trip after hearing stories about shows at the Tropicana Cabaret and
about the Cuban musicians there who made jazz music their own. Sadly, Roach
wasn?t allowed to enter the club in pre-revolutionary Cuba because of the
color of his skin.
Max Roach, considered the most important drummer in the history of jazz,
received a completely different welcome at the 1989 Jazz Plaza Festival.
He conquered Havana, joining the percussion section of Irakere to put on
display his domination of a wide range of rhythms. After that memorable jam
session, Roach lavished praise on Cuban kit drummers Enrique Pla and
Oscarito Valdes, conga player Miguel Anga, and veteran musician Oscar
Valdes, who played the chequeré and the batá drums. Nine years later,
presided by former Irakere bandleader Chucho Valdes, Jazz Plaza dedicated
its 18th festival to Roach.PEDRO DE LA HOZ pedro.hg@granma.cip.cu
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