This past summer Max Roach passed away at the age of 83. Two thousand friends and family gathered at Riverside Church in New York in late August to celebrate the life of this distinguished drummer. He touched many through his lifelong, innovative musicianship, including the UMass Amherst community. He was a professor here from 1972 to 1994; during his tenure, he received a MacArthur Fellowship (1988).
Born in 1924 in North Carolina, Roach grew up in Brooklyn. He began his career as a musician in a Baptist church, and by the age of 16, was keeping time with Duke Ellington. He broke onto the music scene in the forties, playing with musicians such as Miles Davies, Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, and others who were experimenting with bebop. Roach was one of the first drummers to play bebop, and he excelled at it, collaborating with a variety of musicians.
Roach’s drumming was richly complex, but he was more than a performer. According to his former colleague professor Jeffrey Holmes, head of the Jazz and African American-Music Studies Program, “Roach and Kenny Clarke modernized the very way in which the drum kit is played, carrying the pulse on the ride cymbal and interjecting with the snare and bass drum, which gave more buoyancy to the rhythm section and allowed for a more vertical texture on the drum kit.”
Tom Reney, host of Jazz à la Mode on WFCR, says that “even drummers who are unfamiliar with Roach by name benefit from the technical advances that he introduced in the forties.” Reney offers that Roach’s work with musicians such as saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Miles Davis have made the drum kit a “front-line partner with other instruments.”
Roach was also an activist, conscious of the pressing social issues of the early sixties. His 1960 recording We Insist! Freedom Now Suite incorporated lyrics sung by Abbey Lincoln that conjured up the African-American experience. “Roach was in the vanguard of a new social consciousness,” says Reney, “one reflected in his powerful music, which boldly decried racism, and in his tireless advocacy of jazz as an art form.”
During his long tenure as a professor at UMass Amherst, Roach performed in many concerts. Holmes fondly remembers playing with Roach at a benefit concert in the Fine Arts Center that also featured Bill Taylor, Yusef Lateef, Reggie Workman, and Frederick Tillis. Revealing something of Roach’s character and respect for others, Holmes says that his drumming style supported with distinguished taste every soloist. He was not a musician who needed to be in the spotlight; his repertoire included the innate capacity for being a team player.
In later years, Roach’s annual teaching gig in the Jazz in July program marked most of his time at UMass Amherst, where he offered workshops in improvisation. From Holmes’ perspective, “students benefited the most from his presence and inspiration.” By virtue of Roach’s transnational contacts, he put UMass Amherst on the radar, giving the jazz program an aura of sophistication it might otherwise not have enjoyed. He eventually pared back and became an adjunct professor in order to concentrate on his own work and to partake in collaborations with other musicians such as saxophonist Archie Shepp, and pianist Cecil Taylor, both known for their experimental edge.
Roach also founded his own ensemble, “M’Boom,” in the seventies, made up of nine percussionists, and the “So What Brass Quintet,” in the eighties, another ensemble featuring brass instruments.
Throughout the last two decades of the 20th century, Roach was a strong supporter of hip-hop music. He called hip-hop a “boundless palette” and said the artists involved with this brand of music “don’t have formal musical training, so they make music from the tones and rhythms of human speech.” At the time of his death, Roach was slated to record an album with rapper Fab V Freddie, called “From Hip-Hop to Bebop.”
Thousands of fans with a range of musical sensibilities will remember Max Roach for his uncompromising experimentation on the drumset. Along the way, Roach never forgot the musical achievements of his predecessors and contemporaries, but skillfully forged a synthesis between old and new.
