Max Roach, one of the most famous jazz drummers of all time, has died at age 83. Here's the story from Telegraph.co.ukMax Roach, who died on Wednesday aged 83, was one of the most creative and influential percussionists in the history of jazz.
His exceptional sense of form, allied to an impeccable technique and mastery of tempo, enabled him to establish a new role for the drums in the jazz ensemble. His work with Charlie Parker in the late 1940s altered the whole emphasis of jazz rhythm, lightening the beat and bringing the drums fully into the musical dialogue. The punctuating, commentating part played by the drums in contemporary jazz derives largely from Roach.
Maxwell Roach was born at New Land, North Carolina, on January 10, 1924 and brought up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York, from the age of four. He took piano lessons from an aunt, and could play well enough to accompany congregational hymns by the age of 10. He also played the snare drum in the local Boy Scouts' band, and his father bought him a drum kit when he was 12.
At high school, Max played in a student band and at weekends worked at Coney Island with a vaudeville show, Darktown Follies. He wanted desperately to hear some of the great players at close quarters, but was too young to visit the nightclubs where most of them performed. On one occasion he drew himself a moustache with his mother's eyebrow pencil and presented himself at Kelly's Stables, only to be turned away.
Max studied drums privately while at school and, on leaving, enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music. The percussion tuition there, however, was of little use to him. "It would have been fine if I'd been after a career in a symphony orchestra," he said, "but it wouldn't have worked on 52nd Street - so I switched to majoring in theory and composition."
The United States had now entered the war, but Roach was immune from the draft because of bad eyesight (the thick glasses he wore led to his being given the nickname "Tojo", after Hideki Tojo, the bespectacled prime minister of Japan from 1941 to 1944), and he soon built a busy freelance career. He made his recording debut at 19, in a band led by Coleman Hawkins.
During the early 1940s, two after-hours clubs in Harlem drew adventurous young jazz musicians to their nightly jam sessions. The music played informally at Minton's and Monroe's Uptown House was to lead to the revolutionary new style known as bebop. Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie ("Bird") Parker, Thelonious Monk and Max Roach were among the regular participants, and they worked together whenever the chance arose. Roach was the drummer in Gillespie's first big band, which toured the South in a show entitled Hepsations of 1945.
The formation in 1947 of the Charlie Parker Quintet, one of the classic bands, brought Roach's style to full maturity. No previous drummer had managed to do much more than keep time behind Parker, but Roach evolved a whole new percussive language to complement his alto saxophone lines. "Bird's approach demanded new drum concepts," he recalled. "He set tempos so fast that it was impossible to play a straight four-style, so we had to work out variations." Roach made his first overseas trip in 1949, as a member of the Parker quintet, to play at the first Paris Jazz Fair. While there he made the first recordings under his own name.
By 1950, Roach was widely acknowledged as the leading drummer in modern jazz. He toured widely and recorded prolifically. In 1954, while temporarily based in Los Angeles, he appeared in Otto Preminger's film Carmen Jones.
Later the same year, he formed a quintet with the young trumpeter Clifford Brown, which was soon hailed as the finest small band of its time. Records by the Brown-Roach Quintet, in particular A Study In Brown and Live At Basin Street, are numbered among the classic jazz albums and have scarcely been out of print since their first release.
Clifford Brown's death in a car crash in June 1956, aged 25, left Roach devastated. He attempted to overcome his depression through drink and almost died of alcoholic poisoning.
Always a forceful and outspoken man, Roach was frequently embattled. In 1960, together with Charles Mingus, he organised an alternative event to the Newport Jazz Festival, in protest at what they regarded as its safe and populist programme. He also took part in a prolonged campaign to improve the pay and working conditions of musicians in New York clubs.
Throughout the 1960s Roach's music was closely engaged with the civil rights movement. Albums from these years, such as We Insist! Freedom Now Suite and It's Time still retain their power and eloquence. An enthusiastic partner in these enterprises was the singer Abbey Lincoln, to whom he was then married. Roach's interest in African-American history, combined with his early training in gospel music, prompted him to write and record the choral work Lift Every Voice And Sing in 1971.
In 1970 Roach formed M'Boom Re: Percussion, a 10-piece percussion ensemble which gradually evolved its own unique idiom and confounded all expectations, not only by lasting for three decades but in becoming highly popular.
In later years, Max Roach devoted much of his time to education. He held a teaching post at the University of Massachusetts, where he liked to show his students "the correlation between hip-hop and Louis Armstrong".
Max Roach married Abbey Lincoln in 1962. They divorced eight years later and he is survived by two sons and three daughters.
