Jazz Workshop: Max Roach (1924 - 2007) - A Revised Retrospective - Page 3

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.

In the ‘70s, when forward-thinking jazz retreated from the clubs, Roach formed M’Boom, a percussion orchestra that could only have fit into a loft even if it could have gotten club booking, and did duets with fellow loft-dwellers Archie Shepp, Anthony Braxton, and Cecil Taylor, all the while retaining a quartet with trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater. The ‘80s saw him continuing all of these projects, but also writing music for Sam Shepard plays, fusing his own ensemble with the Uptown String Quartet, and, keeping with the “retro” spirit of the age, engaging in a high-profile bebop reunion with Dizzy Gillespie. Roach even anticipated, by nearly a decade, efforts at fusing jazz and hip-hop: he played a concert with rapper Fab Five Freddy in 1983.

He was still exploring in the ‘90s and ‘00s—playing solo concerts, touring with a large vocal chorus, performing with the New Orchestra of Boston and a brass quintet, and teaming with trumpeter Clark Terry—all while maintaining M’Boom, and his quartet and double quartet with strings—until being diagnosed in 2002 with hydrocephalus and withdrawing from the jazz world.

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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