Though it doesn’t appear on any calendar, January 10th is Max Roach Day. He was born in Great Dismal Swamp, North Carolina in 1924, but moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn when he was 4. He died August 16, 2007 at 83. Max Roach was a percussionist, composer, bandleader, and a virtuoso on the American jazz drum kit, which is multiple percussion on a single instrument.
Max Roach was one of those singular people who, to paraphrase Phil Schaap, “was essential to making others’ music sound better and his music sound best.” He was on Stan Getz’s first recording, Miles Davis’s first recording, and the first recordings of the innovation called Be-Bop. An innovator of percussion, Roach shows the drummer’s responsibility, which is to swing.
Seeing Roach live, which I was fortunate to do a handful of times, was a thrill. He sometimes played with wire brushes and a single snare drum, and was able to create the most harmonic and musical sound in the world that was mesmerizing; you simply lost all awareness of everything outside of whatever he was doing on stage.
Roach appears on the most important Charlie Parker records, for example the November 26, 1945 recordings on Savoy such as “Now’s the Time” :
In 1954 he formed an important quintet with trumpeter Clifford Brown, heard doing magic on the standard “Cherokee,” which demonstrates Roach’s imagination and quick timing.
When Brown was killed in a car crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1956, Roach was devastated both personally and musically. But he somehow picked up the pieces and formed a new band first with trumpeter Kenny Dorham and later trumpeter Booker Little, heard here on “Cliff Walk”:
During the political changes in American society that happened in the 1960s, Roach emerged as an innovator again: there is no musician who more addressed the social concerns of progressive thought to freedom. He recorded explicitly political music We Insist! with his then-wife Abbey Lincoln, for example singing “Driva Man”:
In what remains a high water mark in the expression of not just jazz, but in all of music, in 1962 Roach recorded “Fleurette Africaine” with Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus:
In later decades, he performed some pretty extraordinary duets with Anthony Braxton while continuing the solo concerts that I mentioned earlier. He formed an innovative trio that experimented with the Chinese erhu player Jeibing Chen, and did some interesting collaborations with dance companies such as Alvin Ailey.
Roach’s genius showed, among other things, the suspension of time. By changing the role of the drums from mere timekeeping to music-making, he was not only the driving force behind the swing element in Be-Bop, but because of his idea to shift the pulse of drums from the bass drum to the ride cymbal, was able to create a more flexible or fluid texture to the music.
In terms of poetry, there are a few lessons I think Roach’s music gives: 1. Always be yourself in your writing. To paraphrase the comedian Bill Hicks, "if you’re yourself, no one else can be you, so you have supply and demand taken care of." 2. Use silence and not just your words to create meaning. Part of form, especially in free verse, is to create these meanings from silence, which is white space. 3. Jazz is about choosing to be joyful in spite of conditions. We must choose poetry every day, not as an academic exercise or historical artifact, but as a way of living.
(Note: Tune-in to or stream WKCR on Thursday January 10th for the 24-hour Max Roach birthday broadcast.)
Sean Singer is the author of Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; and Honey & Smoke (Eyewear Publishing, 2015).