Thursday, August 16, 2007; 3:26 PM
Max Roach, the dazzling drummer who helped create the rhythmic language of modern jazz while expanding the expressive possibilities of the drums, died Aug. 15 in New York. He was 83 and had been ill for several years.
Mr. Roach was a founding architect of bebop, the high-speed, harmonically advanced music of the 1940s that helped elevate jazz from dance-hall entertainment to concert-stage art. In dozens of landmark recordings with such musical giants as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk -- including a 1953 performance that has entered legend as "the greatest jazz concert ever" -- he pioneered a new approach to jazz drumming that remains the standard to this day.
 
Jazz musician Max Roach attends Ossie Davis' funeral at Riverside Church in New York on Feb. 12, 2005. The master percussionist whose rhythmic innovations and improvisations provided the dislocated beats that defined bebop jazz, died Thursday, Aug. 16, 2007, at an undisclosed hospital in Manhattan after a long illness. He was 83. (AP Photo/Michael Kim) (Michael Kim - AP) |
An influential force in music for 60 years, Mr. Roach expanded the borders of improvised music by incorporating elements of other artistic traditions, including African and Asian music, dance, poetry and hip-hop. He led performances with as many as 100 percussion instruments on stage, but he also played minimalist solos using only the high-hat, a pair of cymbals mounted on a metal stand and worked with a pedal.
"Nobody else ever had the nerve to come out on stage with a cymbal under his arm and say, 'Thisis art,' " jazz critic Gary Giddins told the Los Angeles Times in 1991. "Max Roach's whole bearing says he is a musician to be treated like any great virtuoso. No drummer before him had everachieved that."
He later became a strong voice for racial equality through his compositions and his recordings with singer AbbeyLincoln, to whom he was married for several years.In 1988, he was among the first jazz musicians to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, or so-called "genius grant."
Mr. Roach's most significant innovations came in the 1940s, when he and another 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, Mr. 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.
Virtually every jazz drummer plays in that manner today, but when Clarke and Mr. 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 Mr. Roach's importance: "I came to realize that, because of him, drumming no longer was just time, it was music."
Maxwell Lemuel Roach was born Jan. 10, 1924, in Newland, N.C., and moved with his family to Brooklyn, N.Y., when he was 4. He sang in a children's church choir, played in a drum-and-bugle corps and had his first drum set at 12.
He played briefly with Duke Ellington's orchestra when he was 16 and studied at the Manhattan School of Music, but his real education came in the all-night clubs of Harlem.
"When I was young in New York, we worked seven days a week, around the clock," he said in a 1977 interview. "We'd play downtown from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. Thenwe'd pack our gear and go uptown to an after-hours club from 4 a.m. until 9 a.m. During the day there were house-rent parties where you could see [pianist] Art Tatum and [drummer] Sid Catlett. That was our teaching. It was the most marvelous way to learn."
In 1944, Mr. Roach played drums with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins on Gillespie's "Woody 'n' You," widely acknowledged to be the first true bebop record. Working with alto saxophonist Parker a year later, Mr. Roach performed on such benchmark bebop tunes as "Billie's Bounce," "Koko" and "Now's the Time."
He worked off and on with Parker until 1953 and for a time acquired Parker's taste for narcotics. Mr. Roach overcame his addiction and in the 1950s helped trumpeter Miles Davis kick his own heroin habit.
In 1949, Mr. Roach appeared on pianist Bud Powell's groundbreaking "Tempus Fugit" and "Un Poco Loco," then turned up on the influential 1949-50 sessions led by Davis and Gerry Mulligan called "Birth of the Cool." In 1951, he was the drummer on "Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 2," an important work by pianist and composer Thelonious Monk.
Taken together, these recordings defined the vibrant language of bebop, which remains the predominant form of modern jazz. In the view of many fans, bebop reached its zenith on May 15, 1953, when Mr. Roach joined Parker, Gillespie, Powell and bassist Charles Mingus in Toronto for "the greatest jazz concert ever." It was captured on the album "Live at Massey Hall," released on the Debut record label, founded by Mingus and Mr. Roach. (The two later feuded over money after the company folded.)
In California in 1954, Mr. Roach and trumpeter Clifford Brown formed a widely admired quintet that came to include saxophonist Sonny Rollins. They created a sensation with their earthy but elegant music, which became the foundation of the jazz style known as hard bop.
When Brown was killed in a car accident in 1956 at the age of 25, a distraught Mr. Roach fell into an alcoholic depression. He recovered through hard work, exploring new projects with Rollins, Monk and trumpeter Kenny Dorham. He also formed a musical and personal alliance with Lincoln, a singer and actress who abandoned her early sex-kitten image for a stance of black pride.
Their 1960 recording, "We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite," with music by Mr. Roach and lyrics by Oscar Brown Jr., featured Lincoln's sometimes anguished vocals and became an important musical milepost in the civil rights movement. Lincoln and Mr. Roach, who were married from 1962 to 1970, recorded two other albums and continued to live in the same Manhattan apartment building for years.
Beginning in 1972, Mr. Roach taught at the University of Massachusetts and lectured on music throughout the country. He worked with avant-garde musicians Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton and Archie Shepp; formed a 10-member drum ensemble, M'Boom Re: Percussion'; and appeared with gospel choirs, symphony orchestras, brass quintets and Japanese drummers. He also composed music for dance pieces by Alvin Ailey and for plays by Sam Shepard.
In the 1980s and '90s, Mr. Roach often performed with a string quartet that included his daughter Maxine Roach on viola. He played drums in spoken-word concerts with writers Toni Morrison and Amiri Baraka and sometimes accompanied hip-hop artists.
When asked why he would perform with rappers, Mr. Roach replied, "The world of organized sound is a boundless palette." (He drew the line at jazz fusion, however, because of his disdain for electronic music.)
The trim, dapper Mr. Roach, typically attired in a suit and tie, was a man of dignity who demanded respect for his art. Late in his career, he rejected the term "jazz," saying it relegated his music to second-rate venues and low pay.
"For some time now," critic Giddins wrote in 1985, "it has been insufficient to say of Max Roach that he is the most widely admired drummer since the advent of modern jazz. He's become something more -- a tough-minded monitor of the music's best instincts."
He made his final recording, with trumpeter Clark Terry, in 2002.
He was married and divorced three times -- Lincoln was his second wife -- and had relationships with several other women.
Mr. Roach's survivors include his daughter Maxine and a son, actor Daryl Roach, from his first marriage, to Mildred Roach; a son, Raoul Roach, from another relationship; and twin daughters, Ayodele Roach and Dara Roach, from his third marriage, to Janus Adams Roach.
With great respect and deep sorrow, we acknowledge the passing of Max Roach, August 16, 2007. Max Roach 
"The American drummer," Max Roach once said, "is a one-man percussion orchestra." No one had a better right to make that claim, and none demonstrated the truth of it so consistently for so long. He was the most influential drummer of his generation. Before he was twenty, he had set the pace for what came to be called bebop: breaking up the time with snare- and bass-drum punctuation and providing a running polyrhythmic commentary on everything played by his great compatriots, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. And, more than any other drummer before him, he showed how the drum kit could be turned into a full-fledged melodic instrument.
From 1954 to 1956, he and the brilliant young trumpet player Clifford Brown led a quintet that epitomized hard bop. In the decades that followed Brown's untimely death, Roach went on to compose many types of music and lead a host of different groups, including an all-percussion orchestra called M'Boom, and a double-quartet with strings, and to record with avant-garde artists less than half his age.
He was also deeply involved in the movement for Civil Rights. His 1960 album, "We Insist! Freedom Now Suite," written with Oscar Brown, Jr. and featuring saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and the singer Abbey Lincoln, sought to capture all of that struggle's anguish and aspiration.
In 2005 Max Roach was inducted into Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Nesuhi Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame.
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