Photo by Francis Wolff
Max Roach, the jazz percussionist, drummer and composer, was born 97 years ago today.
A pioneer of bebop, Roach went on to work in many other styles of music, and is generally considered one of the most important drummers in history.
He worked with many top jazz musicians, including Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Billy Eckstine, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, Clifford Brown, Eric Dolphy and Booker Little.
Roach also led his own groups, and made numerous musical statements relating to the African American civil rights movement.
Born in the Township of Newland, Pasquotank County, North Carolina, which borders the southern edge of the Great Dismal Swamp, Roach's family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York when he was four years old. He grew up in a musical home, his mother being a gospel singer.
He started to play bugle in parade orchestras at a young age. At the age of 10, he was already playing drums in some gospel bands. In 1942, as an eighteen-year-old fresh out of Boys High School, he was called to fill in for Sonny Greer with the Duke Ellington Orchestra when they were performing at the Paramount Theater.
In 1942, Roach started to go out in the jazz clubs of the 52nd Street and at 78th Street & Broadway for Georgie Jay's Taproom (playing with schoolmate, Cecil Payne). His first professional recording took place in December, 1943, supporting Coleman Hawkins.
Roach's most significant innovations came in the 1940s, when he and the 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, 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. The idea was to shatter musical conventions and take full advantage of the drummer's unique position. "In no other society," Roach once observed, "do they have one person play with all four limbs."
While that approach is common today, when Clarke and 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 Roach's importance: "I came to realize that, because of him, drumming no longer was just time, it was music."
Roach died in the early morning on August 16, 2007 in Manhattan.