Maxwell Lemuel Roach a.k.a Max Roach (January 10, 1924 – August 15, 2007),
the master percussionist whose rhythmic innovations and improvisations
defined bebop jazz during a wide-ranging career where he collaborated with
artists from Duke Ellington to rapper Fab Five Freddy, has died after a long illness.
He was 83.The self-taught musical prodigy died Wednesday night at an undisclosed
hospital in Manhattan, said Cem Kurosman, spokesman for Blue Note Records,
one of Roach’s labels. No additional details were available, he said
Thursday.

Roach received his first musical break at age 16, filling in for three
nights in 1940 when Ellington’s drummer fell ill.

Roach’s performance led him to the legendary Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem,
where he joined luminaries Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in the
burgeoning bebop movement. In 1944, Roach joined Gillespie and Coleman
Hawkins in one of the first bebop recording sessions.

What distinguished Roach from other drummers were his fast hands and ability
to simultaneously maintain several rhythms. By layering different beats and
varying the meter, Roach pushed jazz beyond the boundaries of standard 4/4
time. His dislocated beats helped define bebop.

Roach’s innovative use of cymbals for melodic lines, and tom-toms and bass
drums for accents, helped elevate the percussionist from mere timekeeper to
featured performer — on a par with the trumpeter and saxophonist.

“One of the grand masters of our music,” Gillespie once observed.

In a 1988 essay in The New York Times, Wynton Marsalis wrote of Roach: “All
great instrumentalists have a superior quality of sound, and his is one of
the marvels of contemporary music. … The roundness and nobility of sound
on the drums and the clarity and precision of the cymbals distinguishes Max
Roach as a peerless master.”

Throughout the jazz upheaval of the 1940s and ’50s, Roach played bebop with
the Charlie Parker Quintet and cool bop with the Miles Davis Capitol
Orchestra. He joined trumpeter Clifford Brown in playing hard bop, a jazz
form that maintained bebop’s rhythmic drive while incorporating the blues
and gospel.

In 1952, Roach and bassist-composer Charles Mingus founded Debut Records.
Among the short-lived label’s releases was a famed 1953 Toronto performance
in Massey Hall, featuring Roach, Mingus, Parker, Gillespie and pianist Bud
Powell.

But by the mid-1950s, Roach had watched several of his friends — including
Parker — die from heroin addiction. In 1956, Roach was further devastated
when Brown died in a car accident.

After his own struggle with drugs and alcohol, Roach rebounded with the help
of his first wife, singer Abbey Lincoln. Married in 1962, they divorced
eight years later.

Roach re-emerged in the 1960s free jazz era with a new political
consciousness. Albums like “We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite”
reflected his support of black activism.

Over the next decades, Roach expanded his repertoire and explored new
challenges. He taught at the University of Massachusetts, traveled to Ghana
in search of new music, and performed with groups from Japan and Cuba.

He also formed an all-percussion ensemble known as M’Boom, a quartet and a
double quartet that included Roach’s daughter Maxine Roach on viola.

Roach even worked with rapper Fab Five Freddy in the early 1980s. Ignoring
critics, Roach insisted rap had a place on music’s “boundless palette.”

Roach, who in 1988 became the first jazz musician to receive a MacArthur
Fellowship “genius award,” said his curiosity reflected his sense of
obligation to music. He was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1995.

Max Roach was born in New Land, North Carolina, on January 10, 1924. His
family moved four years later to a Brooklyn apartment, where a player piano
left by the previous tenants gave Roach his musical introduction.

Using player piano rolls of Jelly Roll Morton and Albert Ammons, Roach
played along by putting his fingers on the keys and pedals as they rose and
fell. But he was looking for another instrument to play when he began
singing with the children’s choir at the Concord Baptist Church.

Roach found a snare drum, and was hooked. His father gave the eighth-grader
his first set of drums, and Roach was drumming professionally while still in
high school.

He was survived by five children: sons Daryl and Raoul, and daughters
Maxine, Ayl and Dara.

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