Max Roach

Max Roach died early this morning at the age of eighty-three. Phone calls and e-mail messages announcing his passing and commenting on his importance have been pouring in all day.

Max Roach
As a teenager, Roach began developing a way of drumming that grew out of the bop pioneer Kenny Clarke and was also profoundly affected by Sid Catlett. By the mid-1940s, Roach was the premier innovator among bebop drummers, with virtuosity, complexity and subtlety that made him perfect for the rhythm sections of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell, his peers in bebop. Virtually all drummers in modern jazz patterned themselves to some degree on Roach. It is unlikely that drummers as disparate in style as Elvin Jones and Paul Motian, Ben Riley and James Black, Arthur Taylor and Mel Lewis would have developed as they did without Roach’s example.
For an outline of his career and appreciation of his artistry, see the obituary by Peter Keepnews in The New York Times and another by Ron Wynn in Nashville’s The City Paper.
YouTube has dozens of clips of Roach playing. This short video from fairly late in his career is a good one to start with. It captures Max looking handsome, healthy and happy — and playing a typically inventive solo.
WKCR, the radio station of Columbia University is devoting its schedule through next Wednesday to Roach’s music. In the New York area, tune in to 89.9 FM. Elsewhere, you’ll find WKCR’s streaming internet audio by clicking here.
I cherish remembrance of two occasions with Roach. The first was in New York in the early 1970s. I was at Lincoln Center covering a rehearsal for a concert that night at Avery Fisher Hall. By noon, my UPITN camera crew had enough material. I sent them back to the bureau to have the film processed and was heading off to find lunch when Dizzy Gillespie said, “You’re coming with us.” I ended up in a restaurant across the street with Dizzy, Percy Heath, Billy Eckstine, Max Roach and Roach’s young wife. As we were settling in, Fats Waller’s “Your Feet’s Too Big” materialized on the sound system. The table conversation continued, but Max announced, “Quiet. I haven’t heard this in years.” So, we all stayed mostly silent for three minutes, listened to Fats and watched Roach’s grin.
In 1981 when I was news director at KGO-TV in San Francisco, Roach was playing with his quintet at the Keystone Korner. That was the week of the annual contest to choose the best bell ringer among San Francisco’s cable car gripmen and conductors. I told Todd Barkan, who ran the club, that if he could arrange for Roach and the winner of the contest to get together, we’d send a crew. Barkan was leery; he wasn’t sure that the dignified Mr. Roach would go for what he might consider a gimmick.
Max liked the idea. The winner, Carl Payne, a gripman who over the years won the contest ten times, showed up one afternoon at Keystone Korner with a cable car bell something like this one.Roach was waiting at his drum set. Mr. Payne could meter on that brass bell. He invented patterns that stimulated Max and the two spent a half hour or so playing for, to and with one another. I have never heard anything quite like it — Max Roach trading fours with a cable car gripman. It made a good story on that evening’s six o’clock newscast, and a memory that has stayed with me for a quarter of a century.
Writing this, I began wondering what had become of Carl Payne and tracked him down. We had a fine conversation. He told me that he joined the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency in the early 1960s after he did his stint as a US Marine Corps military policeman in Viet Nam. He worked on the cable cars until 1990. Then he took a new job as an officer with the San Francisco Police Department, where he still works as a beat cop in China Town and on Union Square. Every year at the cable car bell ringing contest, he is an honored guest. He told me that at the demonstration ring-offs, he always wins.
Payne treasures his encounter with Roach. When I told him about Max’s death, he paused a moment, then said, “Oh, man, he was the nicest guy.”