Collection: Max Roach

Max Roach grew up in Brooklyn, started playing bugle in parade orchestras, was playing drums in gospel bands alongside his gospel-singer mother at ten, and substituted for Sonny Greer in a Duke Ellington Orchestra performance at sixteen. He was on 52nd Street by 1942, and by the mid-1940s was a central figure in the bebop revolution taking place in the clubs and rehearsal rooms of New York, recording with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis as the rhythm section of the music changed beyond recognition. His approach to the drum kit, shifting the timekeeper role from the bass drum to the ride cymbal, freeing the snare and bass drum for accents and counter-rhythms rather than fixed pulse, was foundational to everything that followed in jazz drumming. He co-founded the Clifford Brown and Max Roach Quintet in 1954 and the two years before Brown's death in 1956 produced some of the most collected hard bop recordings in the EmArcy catalogue. After Brown's death, Roach could have spent the rest of his career on that reputation alone. He chose not to. He was reportedly blacklisted by the US recording industry for a period in the 1960s for his civil rights activism. "We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite" (Candid, 1960), with vocalist Abbey Lincoln and lyrics by Oscar Brown Jr., confronted racial injustice in America through a five-part suite that moved from the memory of slavery to the African independence movements happening simultaneously. "Money Jungle" (United Artists, 1962), a trio recording with Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus, is regarded as one of the finest trio albums ever made. "Drums Unlimited" (Atlantic, 1966) proved that a drum kit could sustain an entire solo performance. He formed the all-percussion ensemble M'Boom in 1970 and taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1972. He died in Manhattan on 16 August 2007, aged 83.