FREEDOM DAY
Max Roach
We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite
Candid : 1960
MR, drums; Booker Little, trumpet; Julian Priester, trombone; Walter Benton, tenor sax; James Schenck, bass; Michael Olatunji, conga; Tomas DuVall, percussion; Raymond Mantilla, percussion; Abbey Lincoln, vocals.
GARVEY’S GHOST
Max Roach
Percussion Bitter Sweet
Impulse : 1961
MR, drums; Clifford Jordan, tenor sax; Eric Dolphy, bass clarinet, flute; Booker Little, trumpet; Julian Priester, trombone; Mal Waldron, piano; Art Davis, bass; Carlos Valdes, congas, Abbey Lincoln, vocals.
U-JAA-MA
Max Roach and Archie Shepp
The Long March
hatHUT : 1979
MR, drums; AS, tenor sax.
BIRTH
Max Roach and Anthony Braxton
Birth and Rebirth
Black Saint : 1978
MX, drums; AB, sax.
DUETS – PART ONE (EXCERPT)
Max Roach and Cecil Taylor
Historic Concerts
Soul Note : 1984
MR, drums; CT, piano.
â??You canâ??t write the same book twice. Though Iâ??ve been in historic musical situations, I canâ??t go back and do that again. And though I run into artistic crises, they keep my life interesting.â? -Max Roach
We’re sad to learn about the passing of the great Max Roach.
First the obvious: Max Roach was one the great drummers. Any genre. Period. His contributions to jazz have been immeasurable. Just skimming his impressive discography with one eye closed you’ll find the legendary sides with Charlie Parker, the famous Massey Hall gig, Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool, seminal recordings with Bud Powell, the group he co-led with Clifford Brown, the essential Money Jungle with Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus. And damn, that’s scratching the proverbial surface.
Many obits will stick to those historic moments and they are indeed impressive. But Max Roach never rested on his laurels. Like few others, he spanned jazz history from bebop to the furthest reaches of the avant garde. And unlike many of his peers, Roach restlessly sought to play in different contexts and embrace new musical modes. He embodied the idea that music was one great continuum and shredded the received notion the avant and the tradition were somehow at odds.
So for anyone who never got beyond the impression that Roach was mainly a killer bebop drummer and for those who never dug into his massive catalog, we’ll be highlighting a few of his more outwardly adventurous recordings.
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First up, a cut from one of Roach’s breakthrough recordings, We Insist! Freedom Now Suite. This record helped introduce explicit protest into jazz. Its aggressive tone and radical politics were an important contribution to free jazz, planting seeds that would quickly flower in the 1960s. It heralded the personal, the political, and the musical as one matrix. And the music here is key — because Max knew the music had to be freer for the message to truly resonate. Check out “Freedom Day”’s urgent and percolating polyrhythms, roiling groove, the interwoven horn charts, Abbey Lincoln’s theatrical vocal salvos. And oh yeah, that drum solo.
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Second, here’s “Garvey’s Ghost” — not to be confused with the great Burning Spear album of the same title — from Roach’s brilliant Percussion Bitter Sweet. Coming directly on the heels the Freedom Now Suite, this album has been overshadowed by its predecessor’s revolutionary cocktail of protest and art. But while Percussion will never have such historical importance, in many ways it’s the superior album.
Roach took the musical ideas of Freedom Now and developed them more fully here, using the same core group while adding Eric Dolphy and Art Davis. “Garvey’s Ghost” fuses Lincoln’s wordless vocals with a flotilla of Afro-Cuban-inflected percusssion. The horn solos careen above a bed of pulsing polyrhythms. The result is dizzyingly complex and immediately arresting. This isn’t some mournful ode to Marcus Garvey, but a stomping, joyous, and slightly menacing parade in honor of his visionary spirit.
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Third, by request, we’re pleased to share a blazing cut from the remarkable series of duets Roach performed with Archie Shepp. The 26-minute title track of The Long March sessions is a take-no-prisoners brain-scrambler, but we’ve chosen the less epic but still astonishing 12-minute version of Shepp’s “U-JAA-MA.”
Soulful and incendiary, it’s a mash-up of hardbop, modal, swing, and free jazz modes — a modernist monsta. Max is typically brilliant throughout, unleashing a sculpted barrage of ideas while finding rhythmic solutions to problems must drummers don’t even know exist. And then there’s Shepp, who’s on the top of his game with some of his very best playing from this period.
Now, anyone out there know the story behind Shepp and Roach’s Force: Sweet Mao -South Africa 1976 session?
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Fourth, there is the first duet between Roach and Braxton. This studio date found the two titans meshing fairly effortlessly on a series of compact tunes in a variety of modes. The results are compositional and swinging, abstract and occasionally blisteringly dissonant.
“Birth” begins with a fairly decorous prelude before steadily ratcheting up the tension throughout a series of shifting sections. Toward the end, Braxton unleashes gales of noise and then reins himself in, only to return with an even more intense assault. Roach keeps the beat jumping, ducking behind and galloping ahead. Along the way, he adds some almost melodic percussive surges that are so unusual they briefly make you hear Braxton’s playing with new ears. A killer track. The two met again for One in Two, Two in One – a continuous and joyfully unfettered improv that lasts almost 80 minutes. Recorded at Willisau in 1979, it’s recently been reissued by hatHUT and well worth seeking out.
Recently, we discovered Max Roach saw it this way himself. Partly. Speaking of his esteemed duet partners from the Seventies, he said: “But the one with Cecil was the one I looked forward to. That one was on my mind all the time. I’ve known Cecil and always said hello and I’d say ‘Cecil, I hope someday we’ll do something together.’ And he’d say, ‘Well, I’m looking forward to it.’ He used to play drums. And my first instrument was piano, gospel piano in a church!”
So here’s a 12-minute excerpt from the December 15, 1979, meeting of the most melodic of drummers and most percussive of pianists. Former drummer Stanley Crouch astutely noted at the time: “Roach, probably alone of his generation, was able to embrace the conception that Cecil Taylor’s style demands. He craftily found holes where other drummers hadn’t, was able to rearrange a Taylor statement or contrast it with a traditional figure or rhythm, and manipulate dynamics like a master who make a yo-yo sleep, rock, swing, twirl or what have you.”
As for Taylor, Crouch said: “Taylor’s playing was as happy as I’ve heard it. His technique has gone to another level now and he is not only able to play with more power and speed than I have heard from any pianist of any discipline, he is able to say more because his precision of touch is greater.” Amen. We’d only mention that in the second half of this excerpt note how Max barely if ever touches the cymbals so it creates a kind of crazy tension, while also letting Cecil’s flighty high notes come through cleanly.
There was a second duet twenty years later, also at Columbia University, which if anything was even more fiery and intense. But more on that later.
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Other notable links, with music:
-Locust St.
-ANABlog
-The Bad Plus blog highlights some key moments
-DJA has the rest, including a chunk of The Freedom Suite
And on the extended play tip, Roach Radio:
-WKCR is broadcasting a week-long memorial, through next Wednesday
-Friend of D:O Doug Schulkind featured a living tribute to Roach back in May on his WFMU program Give the Drummer Some (“Love Piece”!). Doug gave some more on today’s show, entirely devoted to Roach’s work, including a 1988 interview he did with the drum master. Those seeking “Mendacity” and a taste of the Shepp/Roach/So. Africa hit will find what they’re looking for here. (And here’s to more living tributes…)
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DJA // Aug 17, 2007 at 2:19 am
He embodied the idea that music was one great continuum and shredded the received notion the avant and the tradition were somehow at odds.
Obviously, I agree.
david // Aug 17, 2007 at 6:46 am
R.I.P. This is truly sad news, what with Paul Rutherford and Art Davis passing away in the past few weeks as well. Would it be twee to talk about ‘the great jam session in the sky’?
Lexman // Aug 17, 2007 at 12:28 pm
Yep i know that “Force: Sweet Mao -South Africa 1976″ cd , normally i should have that one at home as well as the two hathut cd’s. Great stuff. Unbelievable what Max Roach did througout his carreer… RIP Max!
Stephen V Funk // Aug 17, 2007 at 1:49 pm
RIP, Max.
Click my link for a few more MP3s from The Long March albums…
Stephen V Funk // Aug 17, 2007 at 1:50 pm
Hmmm… try that link instead…
David // Aug 17, 2007 at 5:39 pm
Gotta put a plug in for Percussion Bitter Sweet. Eric Dolphy, Clifford Jordon, Booker Little, Mal Waldron, Abbey Lincoln, and the recently late Art Davis. Phenomenal in/out album that seems to get overlooked, maybe b/c it postdates We Insist! and covers similar territory. I like it even more, and think that Mendacity may be both Abbey Lincoln’s finest moment and Max Roach’s best extended drum solo. Definitely my personal fave Roach-led date.
cjc // Aug 17, 2007 at 5:42 pm
Hey David – Agree totally Percussion Bitter Sweet. Stayed tuned for something from that one. It’s the Dolphy date we were thinking of in the third graph, it’s just taking us a little while to put all this together. The whole album is killer but we were leaning toward sharing “Garvey’s Ghost” instead of “Mendacity.” Maybe we need to reconsider that…
john // Aug 17, 2007 at 7:08 pm
Thanks for weighing in on the post-bop work.
An album in my musical pantheon — sometimes one of my Top 10 All-Time albums — is Roach’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” spirituals and gospel with a free/out sextet and the J.C. White Singers. Astoundingly powerful. Early ’70s. Never heard anything else like it. The gospel choir is idiomatic and powerfully itself, as is the free/out sextet, and the combination works — hair-raisingly.
DJA // Aug 17, 2007 at 11:57 pm
Well, if you’re taking requests — I would love a double quartet track. As far as I can tell, all of those records are out of print and damn near impossible to find.
centrifuge // Aug 18, 2007 at 8:46 am
“the received notion the avant and the tradition were somehow at odds”
- er, they were and still are… financially if nothing else, that’s a big enough consideration right there..!
anyway… thanks for this, and i look forward to hearing the rest of it. i must admit that i don’t have a lot of max roach, which is a little odd, certainly not the way i envisaged it turning out when i first got into jazz… but though he is known for (among many other things) having played with everyone, i guess he only played once or twice or not at all with most of the guys i’m really interested in these days… but of course i did hear the force album and was very impressed (mainly with shepp tho’ at the time)
his hand-speed is incredible: he squeezes more discernible beats into a tiny space than i have ever really heard before… see, i know he’s famous for it, tony williams in particular said it that i know of, but i haven’t especially picked up on it myself and fully understood it until today… i know of all these recordings and don’t yet have any of them, so yeah, thanks :)
Doug Schulkiknd // Aug 18, 2007 at 9:15 am
Beautiful. The whole page is beautiful.
That afternoon I spent with Max were the greatest hours of my musical
life. The spirit with which you D.O. gents share the music is in concert
with the way creative souls like Roach deliver it: Open, searching,
reverent, soulful. Constantly I travel the blogways in search of the
next best long lost, but it is always like coming home to return to
Destination Out. Funny that.
Doug Schulkind
WFMU
fairest // Aug 18, 2007 at 1:04 pm
“Mendacity” was the first track I thought of when I heard the news. I posted it over on my page. Also a great Dolphy solo. ‘Garvey’s Ghost’ is also great.
Thanks a lot for these.
Kuba // Aug 18, 2007 at 8:05 pm
Awesome, thanks for the music. So, what is the story behind the Shepp & Roach “Force” album? It’s one of my favorites.
Anthony // Aug 18, 2007 at 8:22 pm
Thanks for this post, I was ignorant of Max Roach’s work past 1960, so it’s great to see how much there is. I hope he’s in a better place.
peter breslin // Aug 19, 2007 at 1:36 pm
Hi- Thanks so much for this series of Roach performances. He’s one of a handful of bop innovators who realized somewhere along the way that the “traditionalization” of bop (and its bizarre absolute equivalency in the minds of some with “jazz”) was not a place he wanted to inhabit.
I’ve always been floored by Roach’s sheer musicality. His tendency to play the 8’s of a 32-bar song with reference to the melody lines, especially apparent on the bridge returning to the last 8. Also floored by his mastery of 4-way independence, keeping a bass and hi hat ostinato while articulating massively filigreed yet mathematical patterns over the top. This makes his playing without bar lines and meter absolutely unique, IMO. Although some of the so-called “free” drummers seem to come in large measure from the Roach lineage…Andrew Cyrille, for example.
Roach is important in another somewhat less heralded way: he repeatedly rescued the drums as an instrument of statements, of phrases and musicality, from a few different waves of flashy technicians. It was a moment of some comedy when a fellow student at Berklee asked one of those bisection questions: “Do you prefer Roach or Rich?” My unhesitating and resounding “Roach” even then (1978) seemed like an “outsider” answer.
PB
Derbyseville // Aug 19, 2007 at 3:34 pm
DJA- If your looking for recordings of the double quartet, check out ‘To The Max’, it’s a double live album, with a couple different ensembles-including some of the double quartet.
Max Roach will be deeply missed. A Personal favorite of mine is Money Jungle with Duke.
AK in CLE // Aug 20, 2007 at 7:17 am
Thanks for the post. Also, and unfortunately I don’t have
the details at hand, Max Roach was probably one of the
first prominent jazz players to work with hip-hop and
turntables, at a show at The Kitchen, I believe…
godoggo // Aug 20, 2007 at 1:35 pm
I also hope somebody has some double-quartet stuff to post. I remember being blown away when I heard something off that some years ago. Also, it occurs to me that there’s one other person that Max did a duet album with…
cjc // Aug 20, 2007 at 2:14 pm
We’re digging through our old vinyl and will see if we can get some double quartet stuff uploaded shortly…
peter breslin // Aug 21, 2007 at 12:24 pm
Hi- picking a nit: Clifford Jordan on tenor is missing from the personnel for Garvey’s Ghost, above. The project of revisiting Roach makes me realize almost all of the Clifford Jordan I’ve heard is thanks to MR.
PB
peter breslin // Aug 21, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Hey godoggo- Max and Dizzy! I somehow completely forgot about that recording. Time to get that one out too.
PB
Dan // Aug 21, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Thanks for the great tracks guys. In the duos department I’ve been spinning Streams of Consciousness with Abdullah Ibrahim as well. Not sure what other folks think of that one, but I really dig it.
-Dan
Doug Schulkind // Aug 21, 2007 at 5:15 pm
And with the passing of the beloved and monstrously talented bassist, Art Davis, I highly recommend revisiting the Atlantic LP from ‘64: The Max Roach Trio Featuring the Legendary Hasaan.
Andy Yue // Aug 22, 2007 at 10:51 am
One album you might have showcased as well is his experiments with jazz combo and choir, particularly “It’s Time”, an awesome record with some intense playing and choir throughout.
peter breslin // Aug 23, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Hi- If you just can’t get enough Max, my show on KSFR Santa Fe, streaming from http://www.ksfr.org from 1-3 Mountain Time Thursday August 30th, is all Max Roach, ranging from Valse Hot with Clifford Brown/Rollins to a few tracks in a trio setting with Herbie Nichols and Al McKibbon, through Bemsha Swing, to the D:O tracks above (but a different excerpt from the CT duet; the end of the encore) alternating with some Charlie Parker and ending with Caravan/Backward Country Boy Blues from Money Jungle. Hard to do Roach justice in two hours…
PB
Chris M // Aug 24, 2007 at 5:32 am
Good tribute, guys. Max Roach was tremendously versatile and showed a willingness to experiment with the innovations of be-bop and beyond which very few of his contemporaries dared. I think he also proved that to be a great drummer means not only having great chops, but you need to play WITH the music/composition as well. “We Insist: Freedom Now!” has been one of my favorite jazz records for a long time. R.I.P.
Yulun // Aug 25, 2007 at 12:45 pm
Cecil Taylor is such an indomitable presence that he has a tendency to roll over anyone who shares a stage with him. Sometimes I feel sorry for those trying to keep up. Not so with Max Roach. I remember their performance in Low Plaza at Columbia University in 2000 not so much as an exercise in sympatico collaboration, but as a heavyweight bout between two giants. Roach is the only person I’ve ever seen take on Taylor head on, matching him blow for blow. Forget about the musicality (of which there was much, of course), the concert was the closest I’ve come to seeing a live music performance as an athletic event.
gogoggo // Aug 26, 2007 at 12:20 am
I just relistened to the the track with Taylor, and it strikes me that one thing that makes the recording special is that, for the most part, Max is keeping a steady pulse – indeed a rock steady one, for all he disguise it rhythmically as he respond’s to Cecil. Most of Cecil’s latter-day drummers let him pull them away from pulse, but Max keeps pulling him back in, so his playing is unusually focused. Of course it also helps that Max plays, and thinks, at least as fast as Cecil.