Jazz Workshop: Max Roach (1924 - 2007) - A Revised Retrospective - Page 2

Is it any wonder that Charlie Parker, a great talent scout, hired Roach for his own band? On “Ko Ko,” the record that broke Parker to the jazz public, the only full-length solo besides Bird’s is Roach’s. That solo is almost as eye-opening as the sax one—the whirl of frenetic cacophony is actually a musical variation on the riffy head Parker had written in place of “Cherokee,” played at blinding speed and utilizing seemingly every sound a trap set can make. Once you really hear it, you’ll never listen to “Ko Ko” in the same way again. It becomes a double revolution, a new way of conceiving percussion just as it’s a new way of phrasing melodies.

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.

Article Author: Michael J. West

Michael J. West is a writer, editor, and dilettante jazz critic in Washington, D.C. In addition to BlogCritics, he writes for JazzTimes, Washington City Paper, and AllAboutJazz.com. He occasionally writes at Pop Musicology, too. He's very cute. …

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