(Sonny Rollins, Clifford Brown, Ritchie Powell, Max Roach, George Morrow. Image from The Legacy of Clifford Brown.)
The last remaining innovator of High Bebop has left us today.
Kenny Clarke invented the jazz ride cymbal beat and its relationship to the bass drum, the high-hat, and the left hand. Clarke also had a very warm time feel, always bathing the other musicians in a non-judgmental glow. However, there is only one studio date of Charlie Parker with Clarke from 1951 (and just last week Charlie Haden was raving to me about how great Clarke sounds on it).
It is Max Roach who plays on myriad classic sides with Charlie Parker from the beginning. Early tracks like 1945's "Ko-Ko," "Now's the Time," and "Billie's Bounce" are among the most influential jazz recordings in history. While the drumming on these tracks is immortal, Roach would sound better and better with Bird over the next decade, pushing himself and his instrument on every recording. The 1953 records of "Confirmation" and "Chi-Chi" with Al Haig and Percy Heath feature the highest-level ensemble playing recorded in a studio with Parker. If Percy and Max showed up anywhere in the world right now playing just how they played for Bird in 1953 they could take anybody's gig. (This is not true of the performances of the bass and drums on most classic bebop.)
While Max Roach's beat would always be a little icy in comparison to Kenny Clarke's glow, his fearsome clarity and control would ultimately make his music more expressive than Clarke's. Also from 1953 and with Hank Jones and Teddy Kotick, "Kim" is the definitive Bird and Roach "as fast as you can count it" rhythm changes. To this day, it sounds like the record player is at 45 rpm. "Kim" is slashing, angular, and quite unbelievably virtuosic: classic mid-century Black American art.
The "as fast as you can count it" tempo is still called the "Max Roach tempo" by straight-ahead jazz musicians today. The apotheosis of the "Max Roach tempo" is Sonny Rollins' Tour De Force with long workouts on "B. Quick" and "B. Swift," both of which are faster then "Kim." Indeed, they are almost certainly the fastest performances in jazz history, and Roach is just maniacal behind Sonny on them. Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, Jack DeJohnette: all the assertive drummers come from Max, and all fiery horn-drum relationships in jazz stem from Roach with Bird, Sonny, and Clifford Brown.
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Roach was an intellectual player. Some of his solutions from the early days can still stun with their freshness. This is the intro to "Dewey Square" with Bird (1947):
I mean, what?
Or his legendary 5+5+6 cowbell part on Bud Powell's "Un Poco Loco" (1952).
Bud apparently didn't like this, which is not surprising, given that this unprecedented beat remains an unexplored path in the music. It must have been really hard for Bud to play with in the studio that day for the first time! There are three takes during which you can hear Roach getting his part together. Bud and Max is a terrific combination, not just on the greatest Bud trio recording, Jazz Giant, but on the 1947 Sonny Stitt quartet recordings.
On Thelonious Monk's "Bemsha Swing," (from the song's first recording on Thelonious Monk Trio, 1952) Roach plays a cymbal only once in the body of the performance. Would that every version of "Bemsha Swing" I've ever heard had this level of analysis from the drummer! The excerpt runs until the cymbal hit.
Download Bemsha_Swing_excerpt.mp3
Herbie Nichols' Blue Note recordings feature two great drummers, Art Blakey and Max Roach. Nichols' compositions were very original and complicated, and his music's difficulty is exacerbated by his opaque piano playing. Blakey swings with Nichols, but doesn't try to do much more than that. Roach swings too, maybe not as hard as Blakey, but with a composer's intelligence and a lot of delicate nudging and shading, enabling the listener to parse Nichols' strange sound world. Try "The Spinning Song." (I don't have a digital version, but the excerpt on iTunes has some of the unusual drumming.)
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There must be some great Max Roach records as a leader without Clifford Brown, but I'm only casually acquainted with them (the Brownie albums are, of course, essential, but even those I don't know as well as I should). After the Bird, Bud, and Sonny Rollins (see especially Freedom Suite and Saxophone Colossus) records, the only two Max Roach recordings I have studied are Booker Little's Out Front and that extraordinary battle with Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus, Money Jungle. On Out Front you can hear how much Ed Blackwell took from Roach (it sometimes sounds like Blackwell is on the date), and on Jungle Roach always insists on being a part of the ensemble. Poor Duke, dealing with those unrepentant tigers on bass and drums. What a great record.
Roach would go on to play an important role in the civil rights movement and embrace key figures of avant-garde jazz. He even made duo records with Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, and Anthony Braxton. I haven't heard it in 15 years, but I remember The Long March with Shepp as being quite wonderful. I respectfully request this obscure and out-of-print recording from Destination: Out!, who have already posted a great track from Freedom Now in remembrance.
DJA has links to many more obits and comments. (Update: DJA's own essay.)
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In my interview with Billy Hart, Billy talks about how all the major modern jazz drummers come from Max Roach.
