Drums | 1924-2007

Max Roach was born in Newland Township, North Carolina on 10 January 1924 and raised in Brooklyn, where his mother sang gospel and he played bugle in parade orchestras before moving to drums at ten. He substituted for Sonny Greer with the Duke Ellington Orchestra at sixteen, was on 52nd Street in 1942 alongside his schoolmate Cecil Payne, and by the mid-1940s was recording at the centre of the bebop revolution with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. His key technical contribution, moving the time-keeping role from the bass drum to the ride cymbal and liberating the rest of the kit for melodic and rhythmic commentary, became the structural foundation of modern jazz drumming. He co-founded the Clifford Brown and Max Roach Quintet in 1954 and the EmArcy recordings made across two years before Brown's death in 1956 remain among the most collected hard bop records. After Brown's death, Roach's career took a more overtly political direction. Reportedly blacklisted by the recording industry for his civil rights activism, he recorded "We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite" (Candid, 1960), a five-part suite with vocalist Abbey Lincoln and lyrics by Oscar Brown Jr. that confronted racial injustice and the African independence movements of the moment. "Money Jungle" (United Artists, 1962) with Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus stands as one of the finest trio albums in jazz. He founded the all-percussion ensemble M'Boom in 1970 and taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1972. Roach died on 16 August 2007, aged 83.