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When Max Roach died last August at 83, he was remembered for a number of things: his stature as a patriarch of bebop; his role in quickening the pulse of jazz drumming; his intelligent ambitions as a conceptualist and composer; his commitment to social justice and equality. What was sometimes buried in the mix was Mr. Roach’s track record as a bandleader, which began in earnest in the 1950s.
Lee Smith, left, and Billy Harper at Iridium Thursday night.
But this weekend at Iridium, a handful of Mr. Roach’s former sidemen are celebrating precisely that aspect of his legacy. Chief among them is the tenor saxophonist Odean Pope, who worked alongside the trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater in a longstanding edition of the Roach quartet.
On Thursday night Mr. Pope and Mr. Bridgewater occupied a front line that also included the tenor saxophonists Billy Harper and James Carter. What they played was power music, some of it only tangentially related to Mr. Roach but all of it connected to the fast-flowing currents of bebop and its stylistic successors.
Early in the first set Mr. Harper and Mr. Bridgewater teamed up to play “Effi,” a hard-bop waltz by the pianist Stanley Cowell. They took divergent paths in their solos: Mr. Bridgewater developed a concise motif, while Mr. Harper unleashed an outpouring. In both cases there was calm and competent support from a rhythm section composed of the pianist George Burton, the bassist Lee Smith and the drummer Jeff (Tain) Watts.
Mr. Pope has organized the tribute to feature a slightly different cast of characters each night, with a natural emphasis on the drum chair. In Mr. Watts he had an assertive dynamo, the sort of player who drives the music onward with complex polyrhythm. The inevitable drum solo came at the set’s close, on a song of Mr. Pope’s called “To the Roach.” Fittingly, it was both technically agile and thematically sound.
The set included a few other ecstatic contributions, among them a version of the Mal Waldron ballad “Soul Eyes” performed by Mr. Carter on soprano saxophone. (He was never a member of a Max Roach band, but that’s no hindrance to his enthusiasm.) On “Prince Lasha,” a modal fanfare by Mr. Pope, there were gripping, blustery solos by each of the saxophonists. Mr. Harper’s elaboration somehow ended up as a waggish reggae vamp, which made the return to form feel a bit jarring.
Cohesiveness can be a hurdle for any all-star team, and this one generally had more firepower than focus. So it was a small relief when Mr. Pope played one ballad unaccompanied, with a balance of adroitness and restraint. It was also appropriate: the ballad was “I Remember Clifford,” a lament for the trumpeter Clifford Brown, who jointly led Mr. Roach’s first significant band, and who died in 1956. Here the song paid homage to both musicians, and its elegiac tone was coupled with a spirit of celebration.
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