newcritics

When Max Roach was on the bandstand, it always seemed like he was the smartest guy in the room.

Roach, who died Thursday at 83, carried his intelligence as dignity, not conceit. It was displayed in a CV that everyone watching him knew, a CV characterized by restless innovation and, yes, a degree in composition from the Manhattan School of Music (and a UMass music professorship in the 1970s). But that academic achievement was strictly post graduate work for Roach who, by the time he went back to school, had already changed drumming forever.

Although he was not the first drummer to play bebop, beginning in the late 1940s his work with the Dizzy Gillespie-Charley Parker quintet (and with Parker’s breakaway group) defined the form. With Diz and Bird, Max kept time for two of jazz music’s showiest virtuosi. As a musician he was their equal, but his was a style characterized by a contrasting subtlety and agility. He played just as fast and he swung like mad with machine gun wrists and ride cymbal shivers. But he played with a lightness, a spaciousness, and an elasticity that would inspire the flex-time breakthroughs of a later generation of drummers–achieved, in part, by eschewing the 4-4 bass drum thump of the swing era. It was a style that was not just rhythmic but musical, a musicality Roach intentionally cultivated for percussion playing later in duos with melodic instruments (played by avant gardists a generation younger) and even leading an all percussion ensemble, M’Boom.

‘I always resented the role of a drummer as nothing more than a subservient figure,” he told interviewer Mike Zwerin in 1999. “The people who really got me off were dealing with the musical potential of the instrument.”

It wasn’t that Roach played lead drums, it’s that he played music on a drum kit.

If Roach’s career ended with his exit from Parker’s band, his place in music history would be secure. But beyond bebop, his career displayed a seeker’s spirit that produced not experiments but immaculately realized new approaches to jazz. In the 1980s his double quartet–a jazz four piece combined with a string quartet–created not stolid, knotty third stream music but organic, swinging jazz for rhythm, brass and strings. Composed with lyricist Oscar Brown and recorded by a band that included his then-wife, singer Abby Lincoln, Roach’s 1960 album, We Insist!–Freedom Now was that rare work of polemical art notable as much for its aesthetic achievement as for its politics (”Driva Man” stands as one of the great songs of the period). His 1950s group, co-led by the brilliant trumpeter Clifford Brown, offered the hard bop era’s most dazzling musicianship.

The jazz world today–like the world of constitutional interpretation–is lousy with neocons seeking to etch the old verities in stone, protecting them from heretical impurity. But for Roach jazz was a living art form and the spirit of jazz WAS the spirit of innovation, that’s why, in his teens he could play with Duke Ellington and in his 60s he could play with Fab Five Freddy. There’s no doubt that Roach’s legacy as a drummer is secure. But I suspect that for Roach, a man who was both musician and educator, his lessons of innovation and imagination would be just as important.

New York Times critic Ben Ratliff offers an excellent beginner’s Roach discography in the August 17 edition to which I would only add one of the few Double Quartet albums, perhaps 1985’s unfortunately out of print Easy Winners.