Max Roach - M’Boom (1980 Japanese CBS/Sony 32AP 1873 Master Sound Digital Vinyl LP)

Max Roach - M’Boom | Vinyl LP - 1980 CBS/Sony Japan (32AP 1873, Master Sound DR Digital Recording)

• An all-percussion ensemble with no conventional melodic instruments, founded by Max Roach in 1970 and featuring up to nine percussionists playing drums, vibraphone, marimba, xylophone, timpani, bongos, steel drums, bells, gongs and whistles across nine compositions.
• The ensemble includes Roy Brooks, Joe Chambers, Omar Clay, Fred King, Ray Mantilla, Warren Smith, Freddie Waits and Kenyatta Abdur-Rahman, each doubling on multiple instruments. Includes a percussion arrangement of Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke’s “Epistrophy”.
• 1980 Japanese pressing in the CBS/Sony Master Sound DR Digital Recording series, one of the earliest digitally recorded jazz albums. Liner notes by Yui Shōichi.

Max Roach had been reinventing jazz drumming since the mid-1940s. By the time he founded M’Boom in 1970, he had co-led the definitive hard bop quintet with Clifford Brown, recorded the civil rights landmark We Insist! Freedom Now Suite with Abbey Lincoln, and played alongside Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus and most of the other musicians who defined the music after the war. M’Boom was something else entirely. The idea was simple: an ensemble where every musician is a percussionist, where drums are the melody as well as the rhythm, and where the full tonal range of mallet instruments replaces horns, piano and bass. The first album, Re: Percussion on Strata-East in 1973, introduced the concept. This Columbia recording, from three days at CBS Recording Studios in July 1979, is the second and arguably the most focused.

Each member composed for the group. Roach’s own “Onomatopoeia” opens. “Rumble in the Jungle” nods to Ali and Foreman. Roy Brooks contributed “Kujichaglia”, a Swahili word meaning self-determination. The boldest move is the arrangement of “Epistrophy”, the Monk and Clarke composition, played without a single conventional melodic instrument. It shouldn’t work, but the marimbas and vibraphones carry the angular melody with surprising clarity, and the piece swings in a way that would have pleased both composers. The digital recording format is worth noting: this was captured using CBS’s early digital system, making it one of the first digitally recorded jazz sessions. The technology suits the music. Every mallet strike, every skin tone, every overtone from the metal instruments is caught with precision. Yui Shōichi, one of Japan’s most important jazz critics, wrote the liner notes for this CBS/Sony pressing. Produced by Max Roach.