I remember vegging out in front of the TV a few years ago in that I-had-a-long-day-and I-just-want-a-beer-and-a-bowl-and-the-TV sort of way I sometimes have. I had landed on the Cosby Show, probably because of the bowl. It was the episode where the ditzy daughter, the one with no direction in life, had decided that she was going to teach kids through rap, and that since she could rap already she didn't need an education degree. It was a really lame episode of an otherwise occasionally fine show.

Watching a classroom scene, I noticed the drummer who was tapping out the beats so little miss dipshit could jingle out the alphabet to the kids. My exact words, I think, were "Fuck me, is that Max Roach???" I endured the episode with its obvious and heavy-handed lesson on the value of education in order to see the credits and sure enough, it was Max himself, who I later learned was an old friend of Bill's. And I thought "Cool".

I was in a position to recognize Max because I'd been paying special attention to him for a couple of years already. When I went to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 2001, I saw that name on the program and recognized it, but couldn't remember why. The friend I was there with didn't want to see him, but I was drawn to that tent. I don't remember what she saw, but I saw a jazz master. Obviously getting up there in years, he deftly drummed to the delight of a tightly packed audience (so much so, that I was barely able to get any passable photos) and introduced some of tomorrow's stars in a fine, if not overly long, show. I left there a fan, and determined to hear more of this highly impressive old man.

When I got home, I looked through my CDs and found why his name seemed familiar. Not only was it on my Charlie Parker CD, it was also on the back of my recently-bought copy of Miles Davis' The Complete Birth of the Cool. This guy had street cred like no one else at that festival, including B.B himself. This was Max himself.

Max is one of four men - along with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Kenny Clarke - to be credited for the development of be-bop. His innovation of using the cymbal to keep time, thus opening up the entire drum kit for improvisational frolics, helped usher in a sound still heard 60 years later. He didn't just stick with that sound though. Like his lifelong friend, Miles Davis, he continued to grow and change his style over the years, yet never losing his comfort with what he's done before.

For the past several days, I've been immersed in the various sounds of Max Roach. Since his sad death last week at the age of 83, the underground recordings have been flying about like bats. This is common - when someone passes on, the fans spread his music around to salve the wound, and to warn those in the afterlife that someone special is coming. It's like playing their theme song as they enter the Tonight Show stage, and more aesthetically pleasing than the Klingon Death Scream. And it helps one get an overall picture of an amazing career.


Max's career started rather early, when he was just 16 years old, and Duke Ellington's drummer fell ill. After that he worked behind a drum kit steadily. His early career never really reached the underground - my oldest underground recordings are from the mid-1950s - so one must hit the record store for that, and well worthwhile it is to do so. I can give you a decent idea of what he's done in the decades since then, though.

In the mid-50s Max had formed a partnership with a young and very impressive trumpet player named Clifford Brown. While this partnership was cut short by Brown's untimely death in an auto accident (along with pianist Ritchie Powell and Powell's wife) it is still one of the more famous and well-regarded partnerships in jazz history. At 25 years of age, Brown (or "Brownie" as his friends called him) had carved out a big reputation as the next trumpet phenomenon. There are a few great CDs of this pairing available in stores, and I recommend them.

This underground piece comes from the Jazz Festival in Newport, RI on July 16, 1955. Playing with Max and Clifford were Harold Land (tenor sax), Ritchie Powell (piano) and George Morrow (bass). The song is a Cole Porter number known to all Blazing Saddles fans, and that this band had made very much their own. It's called I Get a Kick Out of You.

In the sixties Max was politically active in the civil rights movement, something that cost him work at times. Known beforehand for being very soft-spoken, he gained quite a different reputation when fighting for his rights. In later interviews he said that Clifford, while also very polite, was a very strong person and stood up for Max on many occasions. Many others said that Brown's death was what brought the change in Max.

He did stay busy, though, and while I don't have much from the 60s to share I can give you this number done with tenor sax giant Sonny Rollins and Jymie Merritt on bass. It was recorded on Nov. 22, 1966 (the day before I turned one year old) at the Stefaniensaal in  Graz, Austria, and it is titled Love Walked In.

Now, like a true artist, Max never settled on one style of music. He spent his entire career trying new things (he was, in fact, one of the first jazz musicians to collaborate with hip-hop musicians, but I don't have that to offer). The difference, though, is that Max didn't have phases. He'd go back and forth between different styles, setting one thing down to do another and going back to the first eventually, and staying fresh with all of it. That was how he approached his work with percussion band M'Boom.


This work was entirely different from what he'd done before, and is more closely comparable to Micky Hart's Rythym Devil sessions from several years later. While the sound is different than Max's previous work, it is a logical extension of his lifelong theme of finding ways to move the drum out of just doing the rythym and helping out with the melody. While Max was playing with them as early as 1973, this sample is a striking piece from Paris in 1983. I don't know the names of the other musicians, but the song is called Kujichaglia.

Also from the 70s I have three very short songs to share. The first two are solos that he did at the Kornhaus in Ulm, Germany on April 26, 1979. He was with his quartet that evening, but you won't hear them on these songs. Now, it's easy for a rock fan to hear "drum solo" and roll his eyes, because we know that interesting ones are few and far between. These aren't solos, though, they're songs, and when you listen to them you will hear the difference that I'm talking about. Even if you don't listen to anything else I put up here, you should listen to this track, Papa Jo. I won't tell you what makes it unique, but I will tell you that I've never heard anything like this attempted by anyone before. Frankly, it's difficult to imagine anyone but Max getting away with it, but he certainly does. That track plus For Big Sid are how he warmed the audience up for the entire quartet that evening, and together they illustrate his genius in less than six minutes.

The other seventies cut is from NPR's first Jazz at the White House show on June 18, 1978. It's an impromptu quickie version of the jazz standard Salt Peanuts by Max, Dizzie Gillespie on trumpet and amateur musician Jimmy Carter contributing his voice. Here's a photo of the moment.

He continued playing with his quartet in the 80s, as well as M'Boom (obviously) and also came up with another idea; the Max Roach Double Quartet. This was his jazz quartet playing simultaneously with a string quartet. There were at least two lineups for this project (one of which had his daughter, Maxine, on viola) and several tours over the years. I posted about this last year, and those who haven't heard it (or want to hear it again) can find it here.


Finally, I have another short piece from the most recent recording I have found thus far (still looking for a recording of that Jazz Fest appearance!). It's from Marian McPartland's terrific radio show Piano Jazz, where Max is joined by Marian on piano and Ray Drummond on bass for a sweet, slow version of John Coltrane's Giant Steps.


I could go on and on and on - since his death on the 16th, I've downloaded at least eight gigabytes - 15 or so titles- of underground Max. All of it, however, couldn't do him justice. His was simply too long and creative a career to be summed up in one post, regardless of its' length. Anyone who wants to build a good jazz collection can't go wrong with Max.

Here's the great thing, though. While Max's career passed 50 years, I only have 20 or so of his bootlegs and ten or so releases. That means that there is still a LOT out there to listen to.

You and I can go at least a few more decades of discovery, Max. Easily.

I'm looking forward to it. I'll see you there.