Historically Speaking: Drummer Man, Max Roach by John Manbeck ( edit@brooklyneagle.net ), published online 09-27-2007 By John B. Manbeck My first encounter with Max Roach happened when I heard his first recording with trumpeter Clifford Brown on a 10 inch LP called Brown and Roach, inc .
on the EmArcy (read: Mercury) label around 1954. In those days, the music produced by these artists bordered on the controversial. They identified their music style as “hard bop.
” Eventually I met Max Roach when he was inducted by Borough President Howard Golden into Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Celebrity Walk in the late 1990s. Soft-spoken, tall and lean, he commanded a quiet attention. Not at all typical for a drummer when one thinks of Gene Krupa or Buddy Rich.
But then Max Roach was far from typical. In The New York Times obituary, Peter Keepnews called him “adventurous” and his music “contrapuntal,” a term usually reserved for Bach. Born in North Carolina but raised in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, he graduated from Boys’ High School and almost immediately immersed himself in the new music called “be-bop” by the press.
With a war raging around the world, top musicians were drafted from the big bands. Smaller combos seemed a more logical recourse. Roach traveled to Harlem to watch the techniques of Kenny Clarke, a percussionist who had devised complex new drumming rhythms.
In 1942, as a teenager, he joined Charlie Parker at Clarke Monroe’s Uptown House. Other names associated with the nascent music called “bop” became his fellow travelers: Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young and Sonny Rollins. The year 1944 brought him together with Coleman Hawkins, another early bop proponent.
By 1949, he appeared on the Miles Davis album introducing “Birth of the Cool.” But these gigs never limited his scope for he also played with Ellington, Basie and Benny Carter and their big bands. In 1952 he helped Charlie Mingus establish a record company.
By 1954 he moved from the rhythm section to co-leader of a quintet with Clifford Brown on trumpet and Richie Powell on piano. That same year he appeared in a minor, uncredited Hollywood film role. As Max, he acted in Otto Preminger’s “Carmen Jones,” with a book by Oscar Hammerstein, based on the opera “Carmen,” starring Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge, Pearl Bailey, Diahann Carroll and Alvin Ailey, the cream of Hollywood’s African American core.
It seemed Roach had hit the big time. Unfortunately, Brown and Powell died in an auto accident two years later, breaking up the quintet and sending Roach into a depression. Emerging from the blues, Roach immersed himself into politics and issues of social significance.
He resumed recording in 1957 with a musical tribute to Charlie Parker and teamed with Buddy Rich in 1959. In 1962 he married singer Abbey Lincoln, born Anna Woolridge. His career diverted in 1972 when the University of Massachusetts at Amherst hired him full time to teach music.
Previously, he had taught in Lenox, Massachusetts, at the School of Jazz and as a youth had studied tympani at the Manhattan Conservatory of Music. He branched into other fields in 1982, playing with Cecil Taylor, writing music for plays and dance, playing with gospel singers and for rappers, break dancers and hip hop groups. This led to his winning an Obie award for his music in a Sam Shepard play.
In 1985 his newly formed Max Roach Double Quartet performed with the Uptown String Quartet, a combo created by his daughter. The greatest recognition for Max Roach came in 1988 when he received a “genius award” from the MacArthur Foundation. He was the first jazz musician to receive this prestigious prize.
Max Roach, a product of Brooklyn, died August 16, 2007, at the age of 83.
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