Maxwell Roach, drummer, bandleader and composer: born New Land, North Carolina 10 January 1924; three times married (two sons, three daughters); died New York 16 August 2007.
Kenny Clarke was the first bebop drummer of significance, but Max Roach took over from him in the way that Louis Armstrong succeeded King Oliver. And in drumming terms, Roach's talent was as big as Armstrong's had been on the trumpet. He revolutionised the role of the drums in a band and was a brilliantly inventive player who often didn't accompany soloists in the conventional way, but actually played alongside them, integrating the drums as a second voice.
Roach powered Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Jay Jay Johnson and Bud Powell, the founding fathers of bebop. He and Buddy Rich were the two fastest and most technically brilliant drummers of all time (their respective devotees will tell you which of the two was the best).
Roach and the trumpeter Miles Davis made their names as young musicians in the Charlie Parker Quintet, truly a baptism of fire, and Roach would play on many of Parker's most important records. "Bird would begin the first set with the fastest, most difficult tune in our book," Roach said.
I would be scuffling with the drums and Miles would be spitting. Neither of us warmed up enough to play such a tune. Playing that fast was just how he liked to warm up his own horn. But it drove Miles and me crazy.
In the middle Sixties I was at Broadcasting House as a guest on a late-night jazz programme when Roach, on a private visit to London, turned up out of the blue and expected to be interviewed. As the programme, already in progress, was heavily scripted, the producer and the presenter didn't like the idea and declined. With my part in the programme over, Roach and I went off for a drink. Over the next hour or so he told me a treasury of anecdotes. "Miles Davis and I were very young when we worked in Charlie Parker's quintet," he recalled:
Bird had much more experience than we had and he exploited us. We both had young families and were having trouble making ends meet. One night when we were out on tour, Miles and I got ourselves really worked up about this, and after the job we went to Parker's hotel room to demand a raise. I opened the door and there he was like a great Buddha, sitting up in bed with a moneybox on his lap counting out all these notes. It was like something out of Dickens.
We raised our voices and made our demands. He waited till we'd finished and then looked at us with scorn. He shouted at us even louder, I don't remember what he said, but when he'd finished we slunk away without our raise.
The group Roach formed in 1954 with the young trumpeter Clifford Brown played a bebop variant called hard bop. It was certainly one of the best of all bop groups and it included the young Sonny Rollins. Roach had another anecdote for me.
The band with Clifford Brown and Sonny Rollins was one of the greatest I was ever associated with. Clifford always bubbled over with good humour, while Sonny was serious and detached. Sonny's nickname was Newk. One day, looking thoughtful, he came to us and in a very dignified way asked us to stop calling him Newk.
"I want you to call me Rowntree," he said.
We asked him why but he wouldn't tell us.
Clifford finally thought he had the solution.
"Sonny looks like a boxer called Jimmy Roberts," he said.
"What's that got to do with it?" I asked him.
"Jimmy Roberts always got knocked out in Round Three."
Roach, like the rest of the jazz world, was shocked when Brown, then the most admired trumpeter in the world, was killed in a car crash in 1956, when he was 25. It took Roach many years to recover from the loss.
Fortunately their quintet made many recordings before Brown's death. These have remained in the catalogues ever since and still sell widely across the world today. Roach continued to record prolifically with his subsequent bands and gave a platform to young progressives in his groups such as Eric Dolphy, Booker Little, Kenny Dorham, George Coleman and Donald Byrd.
Born in North Carolina, Roach was brought up in Brooklyn. His mother was a gospel singer and Roach began studying piano at their local Baptist church when he was eight. He switched to drums a few years later and soon attracted attention. When he was a teenager he deputised in the Duke Ellington band for a few days for Ellington's drummer Sonny Greer. He also played in experimental jam sessions at Monroe's Uptown House in Harlem where Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Christian andThelonious Monk were laying the ground rules for bebop.
Soon he was a regular on the New York scene, playing regularly for Coleman Hawkins as well as Parker and Gillespie and appearing on some of the first recordings of the new music. In 1949 he was a vital factor in the success of what became known as "The Birth of the Cool" recording sessions by an innovative 10-piece band led by Miles Davis. A participant, Gerry Mulligan, said
Another thing that made it worthwhile was Max Roach on the first date. The first set of dates was really wonderful. He was far and away the best drummer because he could approach the things as a composer and he took the kind of care with playing with the ensemble that showed his compositional awareness.
In 1950, Roach recorded a dozen or so sides with Duke Ellington's small bands. He was to join Ellington again to play on the soundtrack of the film Paris Blues (1961) and for the seminal Money Jungle album, a trio set done with the bassist Charlie Mingus for the Blue Note label in 1962.
Mingus, like Roach, was an aggressive fighter against racism. The two had formed the Debut record label together in 1952 and travelled with Parker, Gillespie and Bud Powell in 1953 to perform a legendary concert in Massey Hall in Toronto.
Angered by what they saw as prejudice in the selection of musicians to play at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, Roach and Mingus established what they called a rebel festival at Newport in protest. That year Roach wrote and recorded his We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, with lyrics by Oscar Brown Jnr. The suite told of the travails of black people in Africa and America and had vocals by Abbey Lincoln, to whom Roach was married from 1962 to 1970. The suite received much publicity at the time, but was not regarded as a success. Brown and Roach fell out. "I was preaching love," said Brown. "Max thought that Malcolm X had a better solution than Martin Luther King. So that whole collaboration was aborted and at that point it was never completed."
"Oh yeah, we fought," agreed Roach. "We never could finish it. It still isn't finished."
Some of Roach's protests about inequality were not universally well received. He was blacklisted by the American recording industry for a period during the Sixties.
One of the most artistically successful concerts of the time was given by Roach's friend Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall with the Gil Evans orchestra on 19 May 1961. It was a benefit for the African Research Foundation. The author Ian Carr recalled what happened:
This hugely successful concert was almost spoiled and cut short by a political incident. When Miles was in the middle of "Someday My Prince Will Come", Max Roach, dressed in a white jacket and carrying a placard on which was painted "AFRICA FOR THE AFRICANS! FREEDOM NOW!", walked up and sat down on the stage apron, while Davis and the crowd looked on in amazement.
A moment later Roach was joined by another demonstrator. Miles waved his trumpet at Roach in dismay and then stopped the music and walked off stage. Security guards carried off Max Roach and his companion, and backstage people talked Miles into going back on, which he eventually did to prolonged applause. The anger Davis felt expressed itself in the even greater intensity of the music.
When asked later what he thought Roach had been doing, Davis replied, "I don't know . . . Ask him." Carr recounted Roach's explanation:
Roach said "I was told some things about the Foundation that I thought Miles should know. Some people tried to contact him, but they couldn't get to him. I went onstage because I wanted Miles to be aware of these things."
Roach was referring to accusations by African nationalists that the Foundation was in league with South African diamond interests who sought to enslave Africans instead of helping them.
Unique in his mastery of percussion, Roach was able to give complete and expressive recitals as a solo drummer. In the early Seventies he founded M'Boom, a group using a variety of percussion instruments including xylophones and steel drums. He had studied composition at the Manhattan School of Music in his youth, and in 1972 he became a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts.
Throughout his life he continued to move his music forward, refusing to revisit his earlier achievements. "You can't write the same book twice," he said. "Though I've been in historical musical situations, I can't go back and do that again. And though I run into artistic crises, they keep my life interesting."
He played a drum concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, performed with the Alvin Ally Dance Company and with various choirs and gospel groups. Amongst his eccentric appearances was a concert in 1983 with a rapper, Fab Five Freddy, two disc jockeys and a group of break-dancers and in 1984 he won an Obie award for music that he had written for three off-Broadway plays.
In 1985 he joined the video artist Kit Fitzgerald and the stage director George Ferencz in a multi-media collaboration. He was at this time leading with some success a group consisting of a jazz quartet and a string quartet, led by his daughter Maxine Roach, in tandem. Roach continued to teach and to tour with his quartet until 2000, as well as to compose.
Amongst his honours was appointment as a Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and two awards of the Grand Prix du Disque in France, a park called after him in the Lambeth borough of London, eight honorary degrees, innumerable magazine poll victories and the title of Harvard Jazz Master.
Steve Voce
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