UK Jazz News

10 Tracks I Can’t Do Without: Max Roach

Max_Roach, circa 1947. Photo William Gottlieb/ Public Domain

In the latest of LJN’s series in which musicians write about their inspirations and idols, Liam Noble praises one of the greats, Max Roach (1924-2007). What would have been the drummer’s 100th birthday fell on 10 January 2024.

Max Roach is a bebop drummer. That word “bebop” is bandied around an awful lot, sometimes losing the “be” to become simply “bop” when describing the rise of the streamlined rhythm sections that developed out of Miles Davis’s groups, Ahmad Jamal’s trio and, to some extent, Brubeck’s quartet. But it’s important to note the differences, because bebop is not a music of elegance. It is not the kind of thing you want in a wine bar. It is a music of violence, of conflict. Ideas don’t so much bounce off each other as collide and dissipate as each new idea envelops the next. It’s noisy. Throughout these tracks, which comprise mostly music made under his own name, Roach is pushing forward, musically, conceptually, there is a kind of fight to it, both sonically and politically.

Max Roach and Kenny Clarke are credited with the invention of bebop drumming. In broad brush strokes, you could say they turned the kit upside down by making the ride cymbal the main marker of the time and turning the bass drum into a kind of battering ram that converses genially with the snare. This made the music sound closer to the West African drum language from whence it came, but with piano and bass often in the same register as the bass drum, the music was crowded, and in a crowd everyone is fighting for space. Later drummers like Philly Joe Jones and Jimmy Cobb would find ways of thinning out the texture, pianists got rid of most of the lower sounds they were using, and the idea of the “rhythm section” as a well-oiled machine emerged. But even in the later recordings of players like Roach and Art Blakey, you can hear that sound, they’re fighting for space.

Unusually for someone who was famous for inventing something, Max Roach never rested on those laurels but continued exploring with each new album he made. I haven’t included any of his “double quartet” recordings with string quartet here as I’m not familiar with that music, but he certainly wrestled some interesting sounds from that combination. His work with choir, percussion ensembles and some of the leading avant-garde improvisers of the time show the range of his interests.

It’s often said that music is already “in the air”, and that musicians simply pull it out into the open. Max Roach is one of those musicians who, for me, always sounds like he’s making it himself, sculpting shapes with energetic belligerence out of flat and featureless rock. Whilst Michelangelo famously said” I saw an angel in the marble and I carved until I set him free”, perhaps Max Roach might have said, chisels in hand, “there’s nothing there yet, but when I’ve finished there will be”.

1 “I’ll Remember April” from Clifford Brown and Max Roach Live At Basin Street

It’s so much easier to write about experimental excursions than five great musicians playing at the top of their form on familiar tunes. Clifford Brown and Sonny Rollins are sensational, but Ritchie Powell is a revelation here too. I must say I used to be a bit underwhelmed by his playing, especially given brother Bud’s enormous presence, but Ritchie plays some truly strange lines (including a dreamy blues foray at the five-minute mark) between the inevitable changes. Roach’s ride cymbal is either light and floaty or stubbornly precise, depending on which day you listen to it, and his solo builds, as always, to a point where the re-entry of the horns feels so good.

2 “Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace” from We Insist!

It’s hard to imagine how radical this must have felt in 1960. Abbey Lincoln’s wordless vocalising is accompanied solely by Roach’s drums: as always, he’s playing phrases, but here they’re removed from any sense of meter. There’s a sense that these two ideas in combination could be interesting forever, but in “Protest”, Lincoln suddenly starts screaming and Roach matches her intensity all the way. In the final part of the three, a gentle 5/4 feel underlies the sense of exhaustion, then relief. Roach was always very active politically, and here he connects it with his music with a rawness rarely seen before or since.

3 “Garvey’s Ghost” from Percussion Bittersweet

There’s something tremendously warm about the way the ensemble come in over this groove, with Abbey Lincoln’s distinctive voice enriching the sound from inside the texture. Roach’s commitment to creating new music was undimmed throughout his long creative life, and this tune is one of my favourites. As usual, Roach dances through, and around, all the bell patterns, lending a disruptive quality to what is otherwise a fairly static pattern. And like all seemingly static patterns in jazz, it’s there to be danced through and around…

4 “Almost Like Me” from The Max Roach Trio (featuring Hassan Ibn Ali)

This track feels a little like a companion piece to Ellington’s “Money Jungle”, with everyone engaged in ferocious battle. Hassan’s out of tune piano screams like metal on metal in its high register, while Roach pummels patterns out of the air with a kind of ecstatic rage. The tune itself, a kind of extension of Monk’s “Friday The Thirteenth” into more intervallic territory, ends on a chord that seems to cast doubt on everything that went before. Like much of Roach’s work, it’s a straight up challenge to any notion of jazz as background music.

5 “For Big Sid” from Drums Unlimited

A transcriber’s dream this one…Roach takes the famous “Mop Mop” made famous by one of his heroes, Sid Catlett, and lays out a kind of manifesto of motivic improvisation around it. What’s noticeable is how he leaves space around his ideas, like the walls around the frames of the paintings in a gallery. And there’s something about his bass drum sound on this recording that makes it a sonic pleasure in itself, and that’s something no transcription, or written word, can capture.

6 “Abstrutions” from Members Don’t Git Weary

This is the obligatory grooving opener that the success of Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” had made almost compulsory in the early sixties. But something is different. Listen to that hi hat, it seems almost to have a whole drum kit’s worth of information in its simple shuffle – and it makes everything else sound great. During Stanley Cowell’s piano solo, I thought, surely he’s got to change it? But no, every chorus comes back to that hi hat pattern, lilting and firm, resilient yet delicate. The idea that each musician sticks to their guns, holding their place in the music, the flow coming not from a blend but a kind of continuing tension between players, is firmly rooted in bebop. It also prepares his fans for some of his more adventurous duo recordings.

7 “One In Two – Two In One, Pt.1” from One In Two – Two In One”

Following a studio album the previous year, Anthony Braxton and Max Roach recorded a second duo live, and this one has the edge for me. For the first five minutes, Roach answers Braxton’s plaintive melody with cymbals and gongs of contrasting colours almost like a religious ritual, unfolding in its own time and space. Then suddenly, Roach launches into time, with Braxton’s hyperactive lines the perfect foil as the two streams of rhythmic energy bump up against each other like juggernauts on a motorway. What follows is an extraordinary exploration of colours and rhythms. Roach is really listening…

8 “Duets, Part 2 (Live)” from Historic Concerts

Max Roach in duet with another titan of improvised music. In many ways, it would be enough simply to know that these concerts exist, that it is possible to shed one’s musical skin, as Roach appears to have done. The opening of this piece made me laugh out loud, Roach answering Taylor’s beautiful crystalline structures with swooping bell-like sounds. But, as with the Braxton set, we are soon in polyrhythmic territory where both players seem perfectly at home, both together and apart. Roach’s insistence somehow holds everything together, and the rhythmic counterpoint so central to all music of African origin plays out in its own idiosyncratic way here.

9 “Onomatopoeia” from M’Boom

Amongst the masses of percussion both tuned and untuned, what I love about this track is how you can hear Roach’s sense of melody in how he disrupts. Although the 11 quaver pattern chugs on throughout, the changes in range allow different voices to emerge, one of the most compelling being the timpanist, who sounds like he’s just come from a session recording Varese’s “Ionisation” and is working off the residual sounds in his head. This band is a real one-off, and yet another indication of how Roach refused to stop pushing his art into strange and wonderful places.

10 “Money Jungle” from Money Jungle

I was in two minds as to whether to include this, as it’s not really Roach’s record, but shut your eyes and listen to what he’s doing. I think it could be his record. Ellington is always an accompanist, even in a trio setting. Here he sounds like a boxer landing strategic punches against his opponent, who in this case is the disruptive and tantrum-prone Charles Mingus. It’s Roach’s heavy cymbal beat that keeps the show on the road and set against this kind of chaos, it sounds better than ever. If I’m underselling it, I apologise for the confusion: I think it’s my favourite piano trio ever…and now I never have to put three cats in a bag to see what it would sound like.

Share this article:

Advertisements

More from this series...

4 responses

  1. What a great read, another cracker from Liam. As ever, it’s made me want to listen to all these tracks REALLY closely. Surely there’s a best-selling book by now in the ‘Liam Noble Top Ten Tracks Collection’

  2. Liam Noble writes very well >As well as being a gret pianist .I would like to send him a CD by Welsh Pianist Dill Jones (It was his Centenary last year ) I think Liam would dig Dill Jones if he doesn’t already

  3. Brilliantly written piece. So glad that the awesome Garvey’s Ghost with out of this world vocals by Abbey Lincoln was included from the brilliant Percussion Bitter Sweet album and the also awesome Abstrutions from Members Don’t Git Weary.

Post a comment...

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Wednesday Morning Headlines

Receive our weekly email newsletter with Jazz updates from London and beyond.

Wednesday Breakfast Headlines

Sign up to receive our weekly newsletter