Max Roach born 10 January 1924

Max Roach (January 10, 1924 – August 16, 2007) was an American jazz drummer and composer. A pioneer of bebop, he worked in many other styles of music, and is generally considered one of the most important drummers in history. 

Maxwell Lemuel Roach was born in rural North Carolina in 1924. His mother was a gospel singer, and that early immersion in the church had a lasting effect on his musical direction. He started playing the drums at age ten and undertook formal musical studies at the Manhattan School of Music. By the time he was 18, Roach was already immersed in proto-bop jam sessions at Minton’s Playhouse and Monroe’s Uptown House (where he was the house drummer) with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, listening to Kenny Clarke and absorbing his influence. He made his recorded debut in 1943 with the progressive-minded Coleman Hawkins on the Apollo label, and played with Benny Carter’s orchestra in California and Gillespie’s quintet, as well as briefly with Duke Ellington in 1944. 

By 1945, Roach was red-hot in jazz circles, and he joined Parker’s group that year for the first of a series of sporadic periods (1945, 1947-49, 1951-53). He participated in many of bop’s seminal recordings (including Parker’s incendiary “Ko-Ko” of 1945 and Miles’ Birth of the Cool recordings of 1949-50), although he would not lead his own studio session until 1953. During this time Roach had enrolled in a classical percussion degree course at the Manhattan School of Music. 

Even then, Roach would not be forced into a narrow box, for he also played with R&B/jazz star Louis Jordan and Dixieland’s Henry “Red” Allen. With Charles Mingus, Roach co-founded Debut Records in 1952, though he was on the road too often to do much minding of the store. But Roach later said that Debut gave his career a springboard — and indeed, Debut released his first session as a leader, as well as the memorable Massey Hall concert in which Roach played with Parker, Gillespie, Mingus and Bud Powell. 

Parker & Roach

In 1954, not long after recording with Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse All-Stars, Roach formed a quintet in Los Angeles to take out on the road at the suggestion of Gene Norman. This group included one Clifford Brown, who had been recommended to Roach by Dizzy several years before. The Brown/Roach quintet made a stack of essential recordings for EmArcy that virtually defined the hard bop of the ’50s, and though Brown’s death in a 1956 auto accident absolutely devastated Roach, he kept the quintet together with Kenny Dorham and Sonny Rollins as the lead horns. For the remainder of the ’50s, he would continue to use major talents like Booker Little, George Coleman and Hank Mobley in his small groups, dropping the piano entirely now and then. 

                                  

Heavily affected by the burgeoning civil rights movement and his relationship with activist singer Abbey Lincoln (to whom he would be married from 1962 to 1970), Roach recorded We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, a seven-part collaboration with Oscar Brown, Jr., in 1960, and he would continue to write works that used solo and choral voices. Throughout the 1960s, Roach was a committed political crusader, and that, along with the general slump of interest in jazz, reduced his musical visibility, although he continued to record sporadically for Impulse! and Atlantic. 

Max with Abbey Lincoln

In 1970, Roach took another flyer and formed M’Boom, a ten-piece percussion ensemble that borrowed languages and timbres from classical contemporary music and continued to perform well into the ’90s. Roach was interested in the avant-garde and recorded with the likes of Anthony Braxton, Archie Shepp and Cecil Taylor in the late ’70s, although the results were mostly issued on erratically distributed foreign labels. In the 1980s, he began to experiment with a double quartet (with Odean Pope, Cecil Bridgewater and Tyrone Brown) — his regular jazz quartet combined with the partly improvising Uptown String Quartet (which includes his daughter Maxine on viola). 

The late ’80s and ’90s found Roach unveiling special projects like a double-CD duo concert with a sadly faded Dizzy Gillespie, the much more successful To the Max, which combined several of Roach’s assorted groups and idioms, and a huge, uneven concerto for drum soloist and symphony orchestra, “Festival Journey.” He toured with his quartet into the 2000s, and continued to record or compose until he became less active due to the onset of hydrocephalus-related complications. 

Roach died of complications related to Alzheimer's and dementia in Manhattan in the early morning of August 16, 2007. More than 1,900 people attended his funeral at Riverside Church on August 24, 2007. He was interred at the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx. 

(Edited from Blue Note bio by Richard S. Ginell & Wikipedia)