By then, though, Roach had already had an education that most musicians of his generation could only dream of. Born in North Carolina and raised in Brooklyn, at 16 he sat in for Sonny Greer one night with the Duke Ellington Orchestra at the Paramount Theater. Two years later he was going up to Minton’s, Harlem’s proto-bop workshop, playing with Parker and Gillespie and dueling with Clarke. He made his recording debut in 1943 with the great Coleman Hawkins, and soon had fulltime employment in Benny Carter’s orchestra. In other words, Roach’s journeyman years were spent with the most modern (and ultramodern) players of the era.

That training kept him on the cutting edge for the remainder of his career. Having played with Miles Davis in the first Charlie Parker Quintet, he then joined Miles in the ensembles that defined a new genre with the 1949 Birth of the Cool sessions. When bop transitioned into the rootsier, groovier hard bop a few years later, Roach was again on the front lines, co-leading his great quintet with Clifford Brown. In the same era, he was also at the vanguard of jazz’s intimate involvement in civil rights: He and Charles Mingus started an independent record label, Debut Records, whose stated purpose was to provide jazz musicians with an outlet that didn’t enforce the compromises of the major labels—a place where they didn’t have to be the “Uncle Toms” of the music industry.

Clifford Brown’s 1956 death was a crippling blow, and Roach drifted for a few years, but remained a steadfast experimenter. He worked with George Russell and Booker Little, recorded with the Boston Percussion Ensemble, formed a band with tubaist Ray Draper, tried his hand at the new “pianoless” lineup, and began to play with waltzes and other odd meters that were then rare in jazz.

When the ‘60s avant-garde came about, he was initially unprepared (when he first heard Ornette Coleman’s quartet at the Five Spot in 1959, the soft-spoken but outspoken Roach invaded the bandstand and punched Coleman in the mouth), but quickly assimilated the new sounds—or at least their implications.

His 1960 protest album We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite prominently featured Abbey Lincoln screaming against Roach’s (her husband) raucous, irregular playing. It remains a touchstone, and evidence that once again Roach was in on the evolution very near the beginning—but its radicalism, and Roach’s newfound militancy (he and Mingus had organized the Newport Anti-Festival in 1960, protesting white exploitation of black music, and the following year interrupted a Miles Davis/Gil Evans concert by taking the stage with a “Freedom Now” sign), got Roach blacklisted for the early 1960s.

When he came back into prominence in the mid-sixties, Roach still had firmly avant-garde ideas. In 1965 he released another groundbreaking recording, Drums Unlimited, in which drums were the primary instrument playing the themes and solos. Three years after that, Roach’s quintet featured Stanley Cowell on electric piano and Jymie Merritt on electric bass (check the album Members, Don’t Git Weary), at precisely the same time that fusionmeister Miles was beginning to experiment with plugging in.