Clifford Brown on The Left Coast: The Origins of the Max Roach - Clifford Brown Quintet ;From the Archives]

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Rumsey's real coup, however, was in bringing bebop legend Max Roach to the club as Manne's replacement. For the next several months Roach served as the unlikely drum-keeper of the Lighthouse flame — a period that proved exciting not only for inimitable percussion work, but also for Roach's many friends who sat in with the band. "When Max Roach came in from New York to take over Shelly Manne's drum chair," Rumsey relates, "he drove up with Charles Mingus and Miles Davis in the car with him."' Roach's arrival signaled a reversal of compass points from west to east. During the drummer's brief tenure, the Lighthouse hosted some of the brightest jazz stars from the East Coast scene. Rumsey continues:

Miles was just starting to play again after a long sabbatical back home in St. Louis. He hung around for a while, stayed at my home for a week, and did a couple of guest shots at the club. . . . Mingus never played bass for me, but he sat in several times as intermission pianist. As for Max, he set the whole town on fire. Out of his stint I developed long-lasting friendships: Dizzy, Sarah Vaughan, Charlie Parker. …”

- Ted Gioia, West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California 1945-1960

Max Roach came to California in the fall of 1953 to replace Shelly Manne as drummer with Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse All-Stars.

He arrived by car with Miles Davis, who, due to his heroin addiction, was looking for a change of venue, and bassist Charles Mingus, who was originally from Los Angeles.

At the time, Max and Mingus were business partners as co-owners of the Debut recording label which they left in the capable hands of Mingus’ wife Celia who remained in New York to oversee its operation while they sojourned to what geocentric New Yorkers disparagingly refer to as “The Left Coast”.

Many Jazz fans are not aware that one of the forerunners of the Hard Bop style of Jazz - the Max Roach - Clifford Brown Quintet - a style of Jazz usually associated with New York City - had its origins in sunny, southern California

In his definitive treatment of West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California 1945-1960 [pp. 308-311], Ted Gioia offers the following narrative about how the Max Roach - Clifford Brown Quintet became a reality, albeit, tragically, a short-lived one.

“Despite his growing reputation as the outstanding exponent of modern jazz drumming, Roach had been working almost exclusively as a sideman. He had recorded as a leader for Debut—the label he had founded with Charles Mingus—but, by his own admission, had not yet "got seriously involved in bandleading." In California, he was asked by jazz impresario Gene Norman to start a group of his own. Promised an extended booking at the California Club, Roach agreed to form a quintet. His next move was to send for a young trumpeter from back east named Clifford Brown. These two musicians, one already famous in the jazz world and the other soon to be so, were about to become the most prominent members in one of the finest — if not the best — jazz combos of the early 1950s.

Brown's work in jazz was as striking for its architectonic structure as for its emotional immediacy. And this quest for order was as much a part of Clifford's life as it was integral to his music. Studies of highly gifted youngsters have revealed that in three areas of human endeavor — music, mathematics, and chess — talent becomes apparent at an especially young age. Clifford Brown's biography (as well as those of many other jazz musicians) substantiates the view that these three highly structured ways of seeing the universe may be correlated. Brown showed early ability in all three disciplines. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, on October 30, 1930, he revealed, first and foremost, a prodigious musical talent. In addition to quickly mastering the trumpet, which he began in his early teens, he pursued studies in piano and arranging while still in high school. When he entered Delaware State College, he started as a mathematics major, only switching to music after transferring to Maryland State. Brown's complementary skills as a chess player have been attested to by, among others, his bandmate Max Roach. And Roach should know: He was a fine player in his own right, who made the all-city chess team when still back in Brooklyn. By his late teens, Brown's career as a promising musician had come to overshadow these subsidiary interests. Even so, the ordered universe of mathematics and chess may have found its way into the trumpeter's music. At its best, his playing combined the raw passion of jazz with the precision and logic of composed music.

In a macabre foreshadowing. Brown was injured in an automobile accident in June 1950. For almost a year his promising musical career was placed on hold. His comeback was slow at first, and his first record date, with Chris Powell and His Blue Flames, did not take place until March 1952, almost two years after the accident. Only six weeks later, however, Brown was back in the studio again, this time with a much finer band consisting of Lou Donaldson, Elmo Hope, Percy Heath, and Philly Joe Jones. From this point until his tragic early death in a second auto accident in June 1956, Brown would record and perform regularly with the finest musicians in jazz. His few recordings are among the most important jazz legacies from the 1950s.

By the time of his fateful journey to California, he had already impressed many with his precocious skills on the trumpet. Both Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were strong supporters of the young musician: Parker's glowing recommendation had convinced Art Blakey to add Brownie to his band for a brief period earlier in 1954, while Gillespie had been among the first to tell Max Roach about the extraordinary talent of this future colleague. In addition to these illustrious connections, Brown had already gained valuable experience recording and playing with Tadd Dameron, Lionel Hampton, J. J. Johnson, and Gigi Gryce. These early sideman sessions, as well as a few dates as a leader from this period, demonstrated that Brown had already achieved a mature, poised style and a polished virtuosity well before his twenty-third birthday.

Perhaps the most striking element of this provocative trumpet style was Brown's distinctive sound. When many aspiring bop trumpeters were willing to sacrifice tonal clarity in order to play fast, Brown proved that it was possible to have it both ways: One could (or at least Brown could) play complex, rapid-fire melodic lines while still maintaining a warm, well-rounded tone. Building on the legacy of Fats Navarro, Brown could boast of the purest, cleanest sound of any of the young bebop trumpeters.

One could well imagine Brown playing the classical trumpet repertoire — much as Wynton Marsalis would do a generation later — without having to alter his basic musical conception. (Nor is it a coincidence that Marsalis's earliest jazz work showed the strong influence of Clifford Brown. Brown was the perfect role model for this latter-day master of both the classical and jazz idioms.) This keen sense of sound provided the foundation for Brown's other musical virtues: his melodic creativity, his speed of execution, his sense of phrasing and dynamics.

The Brown/Roach group was perhaps the strongest working jazz band of its day, the ensembles of Parker and Gillespie notwithstanding. At first, however, the personnel of the band underwent a number of changes. Roach's initial choice for the saxophone chair. Sonny Stitt, made the trip out west with Brown, only to leave the band after a few weeks. Stitt's replacement was Teddy Edwards, a powerful tenorist who had made a name for himself on recordings with Howard McGhee and Dexter Gordon a few years before. Edwards was playing in the San Francisco area during the summer of 1954 but returned to Southern California when Roach asked him to finish out the group's engagement at the California Club. … “

Although Edwards did not remain with the group when it went on the road a short while later—by then Harold Land had taken his place— he participated in the group's first recording for Gene Norman. … , by the time the Brown/Roach group returned to the studio in early August, the side-men had changed to the very successful combination of Harold Land, Richie Powell, and George Morrow.

In the interim, Brown had participated in a very different session for Richard Bock's Pacific label. Tenor saxophonist Jack Montrose was called in as an arranger and proceeded to create a distinctive setting for Brownie's horn, one very different from the hard bop orientation of the Roach group. Montrose's tight, medium-groove arrangements were typical of the "West Coast sound," but to counterbalance this tendency toward the cool, Montrose wisely drew on some of the more hard-swinging musicians in the area to complement Brown's energetic style. Zoot Sims and Bob Gordon both proved to be compatible front-line foils for the young trumpeter.”

These Pacific Jazz recordings by the Roach - Brown 5tet are included in Clifford Brown: The Complete Blue Note and Pacific Jazz Recordings [CDP 7243 8 34195 2 4] for which its producer, Michael Cuscuna provided the following notes about Brownie and the tracks he cut for Pacific Jazz.

“It was just four years. One presidential term. The interval between Olympic contests. No time at all. Virtually everything we know about trumpeter Clifford Brown — who at age 26 was killed on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, in an accident that also claimed the life of pianist Richie Powell — comes from what he recorded in one incredibly narrow four-year window.

Of course Brown's storybook transformation took a bit longer: In less than a decade, he went from semi-unknown to jazz royalty, from student to master stylist. With the methodical dedication of a professional athlete, he established himself on the jazz scene of his hometown, Wilmington, Delaware, and then nearby Philadelphia, and then the world. Before he'd finished his first year of college, the network of musicians on the East Coast were buzzing about this unusually proficient young talent—Charlie Parker was so enamored, he told Art Blakey not to bother bringing a trumpet player to a gig in Philadelphia. How quickly did Brown ascend? One year he was making his recording debut with R&B bandleader Chris Powell and his Blue Flames, the next he was doing sessions with established

bebop trombonist Jay Jay Johnson and leading a date that featured MJQ pianist John Lewis, By 1954, when the Downbeat critics poll identified him as the new trumpet star, he was already co-leading the group with Max Roach that ushered in and helped delineate the bebop-derived music that became known as hard bop. Two years later, he was dead. Jazz artists traditionally expect to get a few years to develop; Duke Ellington, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis and others established their musical identities over decades. Listening to Clifford, any Clifford, it's obvious he never counted on that. Every solo was the one for the books. His phrases carried an irrepressible fight-to-the-finish urgency, and his tone practically demanded attention. A mathematician and chess player, he cared about clarity more than any jumble of notes. He did develop in the short duration of his recording career, but even his early solos sound poised, carefully thought-out, complete.

Everyone who heard Clifford Brown in the early '50s remembers him being fully ready, even as a very young man. Jimmy Heath, active in Philadelphia jazz at the time, says he can still hear the way "this shy kid" sounded when Brown sat in with Heath's group at Wilmington's Two Spot in the late '40s: "He came in and wiped everybody out. He was already polished. It was pretty unexpected coming from this gentle introverted person."

It is this unexpectedly wise-beyond-his-years attitude that makes "early" Clifford Brown—the first few years of his recording career, as opposed to the last few—so important. These discs, which collect his contributions to Blue Note as both sideman and leader, suggest new angles from which to view this firebrand. They're the oft-overlooked back pages of a man who's influenced everyone who followed him in jazz trumpet. More than footnotes, they're the stuff he recorded in the midst of building his reputation, and as such, they capture an artist laying the foundation, developing the vocabulary, and beginning to test the limits. Like many who sought to utilize the language of bebop, he worked out on its difficult slalom courses nightly, and understood that mistakes were part of the cost of doing business. If 1955 and '56 represent Brown's mature zenith, then 1953 and '54 were his crucial formative time, a period of explosive growth and near-constant financial worries. Brown could scarcely afford to turn down work, as the critics understood: writing about Brown's first date as a leader (disc one, known as the Clifford Brown Memorial Album), Down Beat's Nat Hentoff ended his 4-star rave by announcing "Brownie has really arrived; now let's hope he can get some steady gigs."

In 1953, the Blue Note stable was a logical point of entry for jazzmen in pursuit of steady work. After signing Thelonious Monk in 1947. the label somehow missed bebop's other pioneers, and played catch-up by documenting the work of a large group of younger, bop-influenced players. The leaders changed depending on the day, but the quality of musicianship and the spirit of the sessions remained consistently high. It made sense for an emerging artist like Clifford Brown, then just entering the close-knit circuit of New York musicians, to get a call from Blue Note. Alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson, who co-led a June 9 session with Clifford that was the trumpeter's first appearance on the label, remembers the atmosphere this way: "Everybody was real compatible, both personally and musically. It just happened that in New York at that time, there were a lot of like-minded musicians — situations where it almost didn't matter who you got, everybody could play."

By the time Brown got his first call to record, he could certainly play. Born in Wilmington on October 30, 1930, he became fascinated by the look of a trumpet his father, a multi-instrumentalist, had around the house. He started playing at age 13, when his father bought him his own horn. While in junior high, he studied music with Robert Lowery, a musician whose clinics and jazz band rehearsals were well-known in the community. Lowery remembers Brownie as a "serious" student: "He really wanted to get out of it everything he could, that's why he stood out more. Not right off the bat, after he learned exactly how to hear. I have a method, and when you learn that method you can actually hear what you're going to play. He got it."

Marcus Belgrave, who followed Brown through Lowery's classes, often heard Clifford practice. "When he played, everything was scientifically laid out. He was into writing ideas down, he would always tell me to write things down. He'd play everything through the keys." Belgrave remembers that even after Brown began playing jazz gigs, he'd still show up at this weekly community marching band whenever he could. "I asked him why he bothered to show up to play these circus-type tunes, and he said "I like all kinds of music," and from that point on, I delved into everything I could get my hands on. That one thing he said really turned me around."

By the dawn of bebop. Brown had already identified his inspiration: He loved the crisp articulation and intricate phrases of the ill-fated trumpeter Fats Navarro, Max Roach recalled that in every interview situation, Brown would always mention Navarro first. He met his idol in 1949, on a gig in Philadelphia, and was encouraged by the bebop master, who died the next year from tuberculosis that was complicated by narcotics addiction. After attracting the attention of Dizzy Gillespie and others, Brown then had his own trouble: He was in a car accident in June 1950, and spent most of the year in the hospital, recovering. Among his visitors was Gillespie.

When he was back in action, he played with Bud Powell in Philadelphia, then with bandleader Chris Powell (no relation), and then in 1953, landed a job with Tadd Dameron's band playing the summer season in Atlantic City. That summer he also managed to record twice—with Jay Jay Johnson and in his first date as a leader. In the fall of that year, he did a European tour with Lionel Hampton's band, where he met, among others, the trumpeter and arranger Quincy Jones—who contributed some compositions to his first date, and supervised some recordings Brown made while in Europe with Hampton. In November, Brown found himself in New York, employed by Art Blakey; the two Live At Birdland discs were recorded in February 1954, and featured future Jazz Messenger Horace Silver on piano.

Later that year, Max Roach, who was leading a group at the Lighthouse, flew East to propose a partnership. Brown accepted, and that summer, the group worked the L.A. circuit while Brown was engaged by producer Richard Bock  play on a West Coast-style date—the Jazz Immortal Featuring Zoot Sims session found on disc two. A week later, the Brown/Roach band hit the studio, and one of the great Synergies of jazz was born: From the summer of '54 until Brown's death in '56, there was no band that more skillfully combined the breakneck tempos and harmonic excitement of bebop with more relaxed and musical textures that would become hard bop. (This music, as well as Brown's later solo records, is chronicled on the 10-CD set Brownie: The Complete EmArcy Recordings Of Clifford Brown, issued in 1989.)

Brown had a few advantages over some of his peers. He was a disciplined man—his wife, LaRue Brown Watson, remembers squeezing in time with Clifford between his practice sessions. He was also drug-free at a time when musicians leaned on narcotics the way baseball players rely on chewing tobacco. Says Lou Donaldson: "Back then, a lot of guys were strung out. But Clifford was strong. There was nothing to get in his way. He was powerful, the guy who could play all night and never split a note."

Brown was a leader well before he became a bandleader. He led with his instrument, with his innate ability to place phrases so they'd sting, or caress. He had enviable command of the instrument, but was no mere button-pusher; his strength was the rare ability to give technically demanding passages a human heart. He announced himself with terse fanfares — he had a knack for starting his solos with phrases that snapped listeners to attention — yet never relied solely on the herculean feats. Trumpet players gush in admiration over his gifts: Belgrave said that at one point, he had to stop listening to Clifford Brown, because Brown "made you feel so inadequate you'd want to put your horn in the trash." Art Farmer, already somewhat established on the scene at that time, said much the same thing in an interview shortly after Brown's death: "...He was such a sweet and warm human being, I was forced to like him even though he made things very difficult for me as a trumpet player."

Brown emulated a few Navarro-isms, most notably the beboppers' articulation. Where most trumpet players grouped their thoughts by Slurring notes together, Brown, like Navarro before him, used his tongue more frequently, creating clipped, machine-gun lines in which every note was crisply delineated. For Wynton Marsalis, this remains one of Brown's signatures: "It's real hard to play the trumpet and tongue that much," Marsalis says. "That was the way he phrased. If you play a Charlie Parker solo on the trumpet, it sounds like Clifford. He had them fingers, too."

Brown also possessed an unerring knack for drama. With one off-balance phrase or a sudden reversal of direction, he could suggest sweeping mood changes; where many musicians operated at one volume, he'd establish a quiet mood, then abandon it in favor of a celebratory shout. Saxophonist Benny Golson, who worked with Brown in Dameron's band, admired the trumpeter's control of resources, particularly on ballads: "He could change from a meek lamb, musically, into a fierce tiger. He could play the bottom, top, loud, soft; he was playing the whole instrument."

Not incidentally, these elements of his musical personality helped non-musicians respond to what Brownie did on the bandstand. Jimmy Heath tells the story of a gig he played with Clifford at Spider Kelly's club in Philadelphia. "It was a little place on Mole St., near Market, and a woman who was completely out of her head, you know intoxicated, came up to the bandstand after the set. We'd been playing all the bebop heads we heard Dizzy and them play, and this lady comes up and says “I don't know what it is that you guys are playing, but you" — and she points right at Clifford — "are playing the hell out of it." Clifford had his head bowed in his usual humble way, and we were laughing. She didn't know what it was, but she knew he was doing it well."

…

“The last eight tracks on disc two come from the summer of 1954, when Brown met up with Max Roach and they were beginning to work in Los Angeles. Producer Richard Bock proposed a West Coast-style four-horn session featuring Clifford, with arrangements by Jack Montrose; Clifford, always looking for new challenges, agreed to it. Montrose remembers spending day and night with Clifford: "Art Pepper and I had a group that was playing opposite Brown and Roach at the Tiffany Club. For a couple of weeks there, I would go to his hotel room during the day and go over his tunes, and then we'd play at night." Montrose says he worked up charts on a few Brownie originals—"Daahoud," "Joy Spring," "Tiny Capers," "Bones For Jones"—and then was told by Bock to write arrangements for "Blueberry Hill" and "Gone With The Wind." "I don't think they were Clifford's choice, so I had to make something good out of them." Montrose also had to bridge the stylistic difference between Brown's searing-hot mode of operation and the more laid-back West Coast style. This was another challenge, Montrose recalls: "It wasn't the kind of thing he'd been into— everything he'd played had more fire. But his tunes were terrific, and everybody was surprised by how warm he was. I think he was less hung up by the style than by the fact he'd never played with those musicians before. But he got over that. It was a really happy date."

What was most striking for her, LaRue Brown Watson says, was the way Clifford was able to keep the different styles separate. "This was something so totally different from anything that he had ever done or would do again. I always thought it was strange that he could go into the studio during the daytime and play the kind of music that came out of Pacific Jazz, and at night turn around and play something totally different with Max."

As Michael concludes: “These moments and others, are not just the work of a clever button-pusher. They’re the product of a true thinker, an artist who was serious about communicating through his improvisations.”

Max Roach - Masterful, Magisterial and Momentous [From the Archives - Revised]

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Where Kenny Clarke's bombs occurred every few measures, Roach's fall every two to four beats ... Where Clarke played just an occasional snare-drum fill to supplement his ride-cymbal pattern, Roach played so many that his snare drum often was more active than his cymbal ... Roach's ride cymbal sounded different from Clarke's, partly because its tone quality was clearer and more bell-like, and partly because of a different accentuation pattern. [Each of these assertions is accompanied by a musical example in the book.]

[But] the most dramatic difference between these two bebop pioneers was in their respective solos. Roach soloed far more frequently, both as a sideman and as a leader or co-leader, than Clarke did. Musicians use the term 'melodic drummer' to describe someone who develops rhythmic ideas throughout a solo instead of simply showing off technique.

In that sense, Roach is a supremely melodic drummer; his solo in 'Stompin' at the Savoy' is a striking case in point. He often starts his solos with simple patterns and gradually increases the complexity, as in Parker's 'Cosmic Rays'. He is a master of motivic developments and sometimes uses rhythmic motives drawn from the theme of the piece. He also plays solo pieces, including, since the late 1950s, solo pieces in asymmetric meters.”
- Thomas Owens, Bebop: The Music and its Players (1995).

“I was going to the Manhattan School of Music and...paying for my tuition by

playing on 52nd Street with Bird and Coleman Hawkins. The percussion

teacher asked me to play as a percussion major and told me the technique

I used was incorrect...(His) technique would have been fine if I had intended to

pursue a career in a large orchestra playing European music, but it wouldn't have

worked on 52nd Street where I was making a living.

On the one hand, I was playing with people like Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker and emulating people like Jo Jones of Count Basie fame, Sydney Catlett, Chick Webb and Kenny Clarke… the technique I was using then, that I use today, that I was trying to learn and am still learning about today, couldn't be used in European music.”

— Max Roach

“What young drummers had been studying in challenging drum instruction books by Edward B. Straight and George Lawrence Stone began to make sense after we heard Max Roach. The great teachers laid out the raw materials. But we didn't know how to apply them —until we heard Max. When we got into his coordination, the way he used cymbals, the snare and bass drum, the answers to the puzzle began to fall in place.”

- Vernel Fournier

“... Until we heard Max” pretty much sums it up for a lot of aspiring Jazz drummers who came of age in the fast and furious World of Bebop.

Max created a logic, a structure, a formula through which drumming rudiments and techniques could become the rhythmic pulse that would drive modern Jazz in all of its manifestations.

And he did it on such a broad scale for not only was Max the drummer on the Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie recordings that introduced the bebop style of Jazz, but he also played on the Miles Davis-Gerry Mulligan Birth of the Cool albums.

“Max played so well on the sessions that I fell in love with his work. He understood just what we were doing and just laid things in that made them perfect. He viewed the pieces as compositions. What Max did was melodic and quite incredible.” [Gerry Mulligan]

As Burt Korall asserts in Drummin’ Men: The Heartbeat of Jazz - The Bebop Years:

“In many ways, Max Roach lived a great success story, almost movielike in its positive progression. He—and certainly Kenny Clarke before him— changed the manner in which drums were used in jazz and popular music. Soon, everyone yielded to the obvious. Roach was the defining figure on drums—certainly in modern jazz. He had an explosive, wide-ranging effect. …

Max Roach's alliance with Charlie Parker was one of the most fortunate and meaningful in the history of the music. The Bird-Max pairing, on records, tells a story of great mutual creativity.

The twenty-one-year-old drummer had developed a declarative, expanded language on the instrument that, in many ways, was quite new. Kenny Clarke and Roach broke up the rhythm around the drums, particularly on the brutally fast tempi. The ride cymbals and the hi-hat served as time sources. A linear, unimpeded pulse was established in the timekeeping hand—generally the right. The left hand and both feet provided counterpoint and accents—rhythmical ideas to support and play against the primary pulse, the ensembles, and the soloists. Because of Roach's increasing technique, dexterity, and independent usage of hands and feet, the drums assumed multilevel musicality.

The drums no longer played just a limited, circumscribed, timekeeping role in the rhythm section. The drummer became a major participant, much more of a partner in what was done in the small group and big band. Expressing time and a variety of rhythms, color, and personality, Roach and Kenny Clarke before him related more directly to the music and musicians than their predecessors. The instrument was reborn.

Not only did Roach understand the needs of Parker and Gillespie and bebop, he had the technical resources and the vision to make the music work. As he plays, you sense the structure of the tune, its inner and outer movement, its drama, the unfolding of the developmental process. He inventively embroiders material, playing surprising fills and rhythmic combinations, adding to the quality of the music and its sense of thrust.

Unlike some others, who don't really understand music, drum set function, and liberation, Roach never turns his back on the time foundation of all jazz drumming. Nor does he encumber a band or soloist with overwhelming detail. Balance in his performances is very important to him. While moving through a performance, he takes chances with ideas and techniques that can upset and offset the time and continuity, if not well placed and played correctly. But he seldom fails in his responsibility to the music and himself. Roach is simultaneously dangerous and very much in command. …

Parker's Savoy, Dial, and Verve recordings make clear that Roach played a significant role in making the music work. He enhanced the thematic material. His time, manner of accentuation, ideas, and solo commentary were certainly central to increasing the rhythmic substance of this music. He simultaneously was a leading player, setting the pace, and a character actor, bringing background color and dimension to the music.

The new music made certain demands on the drummer that were not a factor in earlier forms of jazz. One of the most notable was using both hands and feet with equal ease and having the capacity to dexterously play different rhythms in each of the hands and feet.

Parker was conscious of the importance of "independence." Only with this kind of facility—well applied—could the modern drummer bring multiple rhythms and levels to music that openly asked for this sort of treatment. He sat Roach down one early evening in the Three Deuces on 5ind Street and demonstrated on drums what he was talking about. He played a different rhythm with each hand and foot and then put them together. He looked up at his drummer, giving him that insinuating smile of his, and asked if Roach could do that.

Roach had been intuitively simulating in performance what Parker illustrated. It was, in fact, a characteristic of bebop to play one rhythm against another. Later he achieved complete independence by studying and practicing exercises—much like the ones in Jim Chapin's book [Advanced Technique for the Modern Drummer] —  that made it possible to achieve this sort of dexterity.

In the early years of bebop, young drummers were both challenged and mystified by Roach's performances. When he dropped in his little rhythmic gifts—behind Parker or Davis, or in breathing spaces during ensembles— he made everyone wonder: ''Where did he get that idea? How did he do that? Why did he do that?" What he played could be as uncomplicated as a revised rudiment, broken up between his hands and the bass drum foot, or something a bit more complicated.

While enlarging jazz's general rhythmic base, Roach revised how the drum set and cymbals were used. He gave each drum, each cymbal, and the hi-hat expanded functions and more subtle treatment. He introduced new or revised sounds and textures suitable to the music played. ...

Roach had still another major virtue. He knew when to be relatively silent and allow the music to take itself forward. He might subtly help move things along but essentially would stay out of the way.

What Roach brings to all three is a deep groove—the sort of feel more characteristic of Kenny Clarke and Art Blakey. Intense without being loud, l£ suggests "2-and-4" accentuation, in the manner in which he plays the top cymbal, or directly defines it, closing the hi-hat on those beats of each measure. The time takes on clarity and a stronger sense of swing.

Soon this means of giving the beat heat and more of an edge would be widely adopted by jazz drummers, particularly after Art Blakey began doing it and made the hi-hat a primary center of his volcanic energy. This technique ultimately permeated jazz percussion to such a degree that it became almost a cliche’. …

Because of "Ko Ko" and other key Parker-Roach and Gillespie recordings, good-time primitivism in jazz, latter-day minstrelsy, and other elements of black show business no longer seemed at all feasible or possible. Because of these innovative musicians, jazz had become a thinking man's music. Things would never be the same again.”

Max Roach is arguably the greatest drummer of the century, and not just in jazz. He is a master musician of the first rank whose ability to lift a band with the propulsive surge of his drumming marked him out as the cream of the handful of truly great modern jazz percussionists. Even when simply playing fills behind a soloist in any of the many settings in which he has worked, his remarkably subtle and intricate drumming can set the music flowing and floating on a complex wave of polyrhythmic activity and rich tonal and timbral colouration. Equally, his solo performances have elevated the art of playing the jazz drum-set to a new level of musical achievement.

In his Giant Steps: Bebop and the Creators of Modern Jazz, 1945-1965, Kenny Mathieson explains Max’s significance this way:

“Max Roach is arguably the greatest drummer of the century, and not just in jazz. He is a master musician of the first rank whose ability to lift a band with the propulsive surge of his drumming marked him out as the cream of the handful of truly great modern jazz percussionists. Even when simply playing fills behind a soloist in any of the many settings in which he has worked, his remarkably subtle and intricate drumming can set the music flowing and floating on a complex wave of polyrhythmic activity and rich tonal and timbral colouration. Equally, his solo performances have elevated the art of playing the jazz drum-set to a new level of musical achievement. …

Roach took the supposed limitations of the standard jazz drum-kit, typically made up of bass drum, snare drum, large and small tom-toms, ride cymbal, snare cymbal and hi-hat, and turned them into an intricate vehicle for expression. Interestingly, Roy Haynes, another of the great bebop drummers, has recalled that Roach had no tom-tom when he first heard him play and while he admits he was not sure whether this was dictated by musical or financial considerations, he promptly took the tom-tom out of his own kit!

The old four-to-the-bar bass drum accompaniment of traditional and swing-jazz styles gave way in the bebop era to a more fluid style characterised by a shift away from the bass drum as an audible steady time-keeper towards a greater development of the concept of shifting the pulse on to the the cymbals. In turn, this created a flow or wash of sound/time behind and around the ensemble and soloists, something which had demonstrably already begun in the swing era with players like Jo Jones, Cozy Cole, Dave Tough and Buddy Rich, but was taken much further by the bebop drummers.

The increased fluidity and additional responsiveness of this approach, with accents placed in less regimented and predictable fashion and dictated in response to the specifics of what the soloist or the ensemble played rather than a programmatic rhythmic scheme, was crucial to the emergence of the new music. With it came an expansion of the importance of the idea of 'co-ordinated independence', an expression which refers to the less inhibited way the drummer combines and manipulates the rhythmic layers created from the different facets of his kit, with the primary emphasis being on bass drum, snare drum, ride cymbal and hi-hat.

There is, too, the matter of the actual sound of Roach's drums. In the booklet accompanying Verve's very useful Clifford Brown - Max Roach two-CD compilation Alone Together: The Best of the Mercury Years, drummer Kenny Washington relates a story about how he physically destroyed his first juvenile drum-kit in a desperate attempt to tune the drums to capture Roach's sound. What had caught his ear in particular was the fact that 'the high-pitched tom-tom tuning was so musical and gave each drum its own identity'. To this day, Washington concludes, ‘I still tune my drums like that'.”

Later in his career, Max would take his distinctive drumming “voice” into a variety of Jazz contexts, among them the brilliant recordings that he made with Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins, co-leading the Debut Records label with bassist Charles Mingus from 1952-1955, tour Europe with Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic, spend time as a member of bassist Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse All-Stars in Hermosa Beach, CA and, along with Art Blakey, go on to become one of the few drummers to successfully lead their own combos, the most notable of these being the quintet he co-led with trumpeter Clifford Brown.

"Max Roach From Hip Hop to Bebop" - Mike Zwerin

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The late Paris-based jazz musician and International Herald Tribune writer Mike Zwerin posted a 41-week series entitled Sons of Miles to Culturekiosque Jazznet. In this series, Zwerin looks back at Miles Davis and the leading jazz musicians he influenced in a series of interviews and personal reminiscences. Here is the Max piece in that series. It was published on January 14, 1999 so add 20+ years to any math in the article. 

Max Roach From Hip Hop to Bebop

“On July 14, 1988, Professor Max Roach, who has been called the Duke Ellington of the drums, stopped by his office during a lunch break while conducting his summer Jazz Studies Program for the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He found a telephone message from a certain Dr. Hope in Chicago.

Roach did not know anybody named Hope in Chicago. He had been negotiating to appear at the Chicago Jazz Festival and he thought that it must have been something to do with that. But Dr. Hope said: "Professor Roach, you have been awarded a $372,000 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. All we need is your Social security number."

"I'm still in a state of shock," Roach said a month later in his upper West Side apartment overlooking Central Park. "I didn't even apply. There was no warning. They don't tell you why they chose you. And they won't say who was on the committee."

The John D. and Catherine T. Mac Arthur Foundation awarded 31 fellowships that year. The smallest was $150,000. Roach's figure was close to the biggest. Former recipients included the composer Milton Babbitt, choreographer Merce Cunningham, poet John Ashbery and writer Irving Howe.

The award is paid over five years and passed on the recipient's heirs should he or she die before the period is over. No reports or projects are required. Nominees, according to the foundation brochure, should "meet rigorous standards of excellence in their work, well beyond professional competence, even if such work is in its earliest stages. They must show great promise for future work. Although committee evaluation has to be based on achievement, the fellowship is not intended to be a reward but rather to foster new accomplishment... to provide hitherto unavailable opportunities."

An extraordinarily fit 64, Roach had been creating his own opportunities with remarkable resourcefulness. Building on the innovations of Kenny Clarke, he became the measure of excellence for bebop drumming. He worked with Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, and co-led a legendary quartet with the trumpeter Clifford Brown.

He rendered obsolete the old joke about a jazz quartet being "three musicians and a drummer." The critic Rafi Zabor wrote: "Over no other instrument has the influence of one man been as decisive as Roach's over drums for the past 30-odd years."

Roach explains the philosophy behind it: "I always resented the role of a drummer as nothing more than a subservient figure. The people who really got me off were dealing with the musical potential of the instrument."

In recent years he had worked solo, in duo, with his quartet, with a "double quartet" (four strings added) and with his percussion ensemble, M'Boom, and he wrote for and performed with multimedia projects.

Since he had already managed to do all this within, or despite, the capitalist system, you could wonder what kind of five-year plan he had for the additional $75,000 a year.

He explained by way of a brief biography: "My family moved from South Carolina to Bed-Stuy [the Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto in Brooklyn] in 1928. Although the crash came a year later, and although the people were poor and disenfranchised, they had a lot of pride. Nobody was slick, everybody was honest. People went to church.

"I used to take musical instruments home from elementary school. There were some music teachers there - we all learned instruments. A lot of us got started in public schools. Charlie Parker and Bud Powell, for example. But now there are no more music teachers in public elementary schools. It's like (Senator) Moynihan said, 'benign neglect.' Just let it rot and fester.

"I'd like to use some of the MacArthur prestige and money to at least begin some of the statistical research necessary to present a plan to the city fathers to build a kind of cultural complex in Bed-Stuy. I'd like to build what I call an 'oasis.' It should be a pleasure to look at and to be in. I'd like to give something back to that community. Also, I'd like to have the time to work on my autobiography."

Roach is many things besides a great drummer: Civil, civic-minded, generous, healthy, intelligent, literate are appropriate adjectives. He said: "I've been through the whole mill. I've done everything everybody else did. I don't know if it was my parents prayers or what, but I gave up everything a long time ago. I don't smoke. I don't drink. I'm trying to take care of myself in my old age."

There was an ironic twist to the last sentence because in no way could he be described as old. There was also a hint of an unconscious plea not to be considered corny because he does not smoke or drink. You wondered if there wasn't somebody somewhere who wanted to make a film about a jazz giant who has not died some sort of tragic early death? He just came into a great deal of money - that might grab a producer somewhere.

After Roach had taught full time in Amherst from 1973 to 1979, Bruce Lundvall, president of CBS Records, who had just signed Dexter Gordon and Freddie Hubbard, called Roach and told him, "The water looks pretty good in New York now." So Roach went there and recorded two albums for CBS, both of which, unfortunately, "fell flat on their faces."

But he was weary of only relating to students, no matter how talented; he wanted to deal with his professional peers and they were in New York. He became an "adjunct professor" and proceeded to horrify the sort of people who hold on to the past for dear life when he recorded duos with the avant-garde musicians Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton.

"You used to play with Charlie Parker. How can you work with those guys?" he was asked by those who should know better.

"I answered this way," Roach said. "A person like an Anthony Braxton is more like Charlie Parker than a person who plays like Charlie Parker. Bird was creative and different and looked inside himself. He knew what Johnny Hodges and Benny Carter and the rest of them had laid down. That was the foundation. Bird built on that foundation.

"Now you have people like Phil Woods who preserve the tradition. And then there are people who push forward, who perpetuate the continuum by trying out things. Cecil Taylor is more like Art Tatum than a guy who plays like Tatum. It may not always come off, but that's what creativity's about. Anyway, by now people accept me for what I am."

In 1985, Roach won an Obie award for his music written for three Sam Shepard plays revived at New York's La Mama theater. After that Roach collaborated with the choreographer Alvin Ailey on "Survivors," a tribute to Winnie and Nelson Mandela.

Roach was preparing to record with the son of an old friend from Bed-Stuy, a young rapper by the name of Fab V Freddie. Roach considered rap "what took place after they removed the cultural enrichment programs from all the Bed-Stuys of the country." Through rap he began to putter with electronics, and he has bought a computer. He wanted to call the record "From Hip-Hop to Bebop."

Or was it the other way around? It can be hard to keep track of Max Roach and that's not only his charm but his great strength.”