Pelican Parts Forums - Sad day for Jazz...Goodbye Max Roach

As a jazz nut, it sucks to see the old generation go. Don't know if there are any other jazz fans on the board, but if you are, I thought youmight be interested. Stuff like this typically doesn't get covered in normal news.

From E! Entertainment News:

Pioneering Jazzman Roach Dies

by Natalie Finn

Max Roach made a career out of rewriting the rule books.

The pioneering jazz percussionist, known as much for the political convictionsas for his sleight of hand with the drumsticks died Thursday morning at a Manhattan hospital after a long illness. He was 83.

"I will never again play anything that does not have social significance," Roach told Down Beat magazine after the release of the experimental We Insist! Freedom Now Suite in 1960, one of the first jazz albums to arise in direct relation to the burgeoning civil rights movement.

"We American jazz musicians of African descent have proved beyond all doubt that we’re master musicians of our instruments. Now what we have to do is employ our skill to tell the dramatic story of our people and what we’ve been through."

And the North Carolina-born and Brooklyn-bred Roach seemingly never stopped employing his skill, from his teenage salad days as a self-taught substitute drummer with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, to his work scoring plays and collaborating with rappers in the 1980s, to this past decade, when he continued to teach and compose.

"Max was one of the founders and original members of the A-Team of bebop," said legendary music producer Quincy Jones. "Outside of losing a giant and an innovator, I've lost a great, great friend. Thank God he left a piece of his soul on his recordings so that we'll always have a part of him with us."

It was Roach's focus on a song's melody as well as its beat that made him one of the founders of bebop jazz, which allowed the percussion to emerge from the background and engage the brass and strings in a spirited back-and-forth exchange.

On his way to becoming known as perhaps the greatest jazz drummer of all time, Roach collaborated with what seems like all of the budding superstars of the insular jazz world at the time, including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie (who he joined for one of the first-ever bebop recording sessions), Miles Davis (Roach played on the 1949-1950 Birth of the Cool sessions), Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Bud Powell and Charles Mingus.

In 1952, he and Mingus founded Debut Records, one of the first musician-run labels. One of the short-lived outfit's most notable recordings was a Toronto performance featuring Roach, Mingus, Parker, Gillespie and Powell.

Roach formed a "hard bop" quintet with trumpet player Clifford Brown in 1954; however, Brown, Brown's wife and the group's pianist, Richie Powell, were killed in a car accident two years later, plunging Roach into a drug and alcohol-fueled depression.

WIth the help of his first wife, Abbey Lincoln, Roach was able to power through his addictions and continue to record. He and Lincoln divorced in 1970 after eight years of marriage.

The second half of Roach's career featured as much experimentation as ever, most notably with his all-percussion ensemble M'Boom and with the Max Roach Double Quartet, featuring his own group and the Uptown String Quartet, which was founded by his daughter, violist Maxine Roach.

"The roundness and nobility of sound on the drums and the clarity and precision of the cymbals distinguishes Max Roach as a peerless master," trumpeter Wynton Marsalis wrote in a New York Times essay in 1988.

Roach was also wooed to academia in 1972 when the University of Massachusetts in Amherst offered him a professorship. In 1988, he became the first jazz artist to receive a MacArthur Genius Grant.

Roach reduced his schedule at UMass in 1990s but toured with his quartet until 2000 and continued to compose for the rest of his life. The artist, who won an Obie Award in the 1980s for the score he composed for an Off Broadway production of three Sam Shephard plays, wrote the music for the 2002 Ray Johnson documentary How to Draw a Bunny.

Among his many honors, Roach was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1995. He is survived by his five children, daughters Maxine, Ayo and Dara and sons Daryl and Raoul.

Copyright 2007 E! Entertainment Television, Inc. All rights reserved.