By now, you’ve probably heard that Max Roach, the great jazz drummer, died on August 16. The thing that stands out for me about Roach is that he, along with drummer Kenny Clarke, moved the beat up to the cymbals. As the BBC puts it in their obituary of Roach:

Before bebop, jazz was primarily swing music played in dance halls, and drummers served to keep time for the band, Blue Note spokesman Cem Kurosman said.

Roach, along with fellow-drummer Kenny Clarke, changed that by shifting the time-keeping function to the cymbal, allowing the drums to play a more expressive and melodic role. [Link]

All of which opened up all kinds of rhythmic possibilities, moving jazz away from the strict 4/4 beat of the popular dances. Many people accused Roach and the other originators of bebop of making jazz undanceable — as if you can’t dance to 3/4 and 5/4 and polyrhythmic beats — as if moving jazz from the dance hall to the concert hall made it somehow less worthy. I like to think that Roach saw larger possibilities for jazz, just as Mozart saw there was more to a minuet than music for one kind of dancing.

What I didn’t know about Roach was how active he was in fighting for the rights of African Americans. Trymaine Lee, in a appreciation printed today in the New York Times, reports:

“It was his technique,” said Jimmy Heath, 81, a saxophonist. “And his concepts were so innovative. But he wasn’t only a drummer. The thing about Max was he was always fighting for the rights of African-American people, that we were creative, worthy people.”…

The group [jazz musicians Heath, James Moody, Jon Faddis, and Phoebe Jacobs] remembered an incident at a Miles Davis show, when Mr. Roach took to the stage with a protest sign — “something to do with Africa or black people,” Mr. Heath recalled — and sat there with the sign held high above his head. “Miles was like, ‘Man, why did you have to do that during my set?’ ” Mr. Heath recalled, laughing with Ms. Jacobs and Mr. Moody. [Link to NY Times article]

I’m also amazed at the range of musicians with whom Roach played or made recordings. Of course I knew he had played with Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. I did not know that he had played with Duke Ellington, nor did I know that he played with avant-garde composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton, nor did I know that he had played rap music with a hip-hop group called Fab Five Freddy, nor did I know that he had performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Roach could play the full range of African American music — indeed, he played the full range of human music.

Selected videos of Max Roach:

Roach with Dinah Washington in “All of Me”
Roach playing Ellington’s “What Am I Here For”, with Billy Taylor and big band
Roach with Fab Five Freddy and break dancers
Roach soloing on just hi-hat