”I was teaching a week at the University of Massachusetts last month, and I was given a message with a 312 area code on it,” said drummer Max Roach.
”I thought it had something to do with the Chicago Jazz Festival, which is something I`ve always wanted to play at.”
Roach, usually controlled, disciplined and a bit reserved, started punctuating his sentences with laughter. ”So I called, and the secretary said that a Dr. Kenneth Hope wanted to talk to me. He came on and told me I had won a MacArthur grant and that I`d be getting $372,000.
”I was stunned. I was speechless. He wanted my Social Security number, and he wanted to send me the details, by Federal Express, and he wanted to know whether to send it to the school or to my address in Manhattan. I`m barely able to talk, so I say, `Send it to all three places!` ”
Getting one of the awards, created by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago eight years ago to let talented people develop their potential without economic constraints, is enough to unsettle anyone. But confusion is not a natural state for Roach, 63.
Since the mid-1940s, when he first started working with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, he`s been making his way through generation after generation of new musicians, doing more than keeping up with changes in jazz. Along with drummer Kenny Clarke, he took the steady beat of jazz drumming and turned it into the rhythmically acrobatic, risky business of be-bop.
And while many of his contemporaries from the be-bop era have stayed within the confines of that idiom, Roach has moved on, working with dancers, learning new rhythms, playing unusual time signatures and constantly reinventing the language of jazz. More than anything, Roach has been a symbol to musicians that jazz can be a changing art, an art in which age need not dictate a musician`s direction.
By the mid-`50s, he was leading a highly influential group with trumpeter Clifford Brown and tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins that captured the brawling power and sophistication of post-be-bop jazz. Five years later he had started composing large-scale works: ”Freedom Now Suite,” ”It`s Time” and ”Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which were politically concerned, linking racial discrimination in the United States with apartheid in South Africa.
Using a chorus and massed percussion-then a radical notion-as often as playing duets with his wife at the time, singer Abbey Lincoln, Roach combined music and words into a powerful political statement.
Had he stopped in the `60s, his progress would have been considered extraordinary. But through the `70s and `80s Roach has continued to experiment with his own groups, including one that integrated a string quartet into his regular ensemble and formed an innovative drum group, M`Boom. More recently, he has improvised with rappers.
”I`m the first living guy we`re celebrating at Lincoln Center” in New York, Roach said, again with a laugh before a recent concert there. ”So I`d better be careful. I`m doing things from four different periods of my music, concentrating on the choral pieces, the protest period, like `Freedom Now Suite,` some contemporary things. I`ll also do some things from the repertory Abbey and I did when we were together.”
”It`s odd,” Roach said, musing. ”The political music worked in the
`60s, and the material still works today. Consider man`s continued inhumanity to man in places like South Africa.”
Roach, along with Lincoln, is taking the ”Freedom Now Suite” on a European tour. ”The music we used for the piece, the gospel music, sprirituals, sorrow songs, they came out of the Old Testament, and they were filled with double-entendres,” he said. ” `Were you there when they crucified my Lord?` is about a lynching; `Keep your lamps trimmed and burning` meant always be prepared, but couched in the language of the New Testament.” First recorded in 1960, the ”Freedom Now Suite” was charged with Roach`s persistent, almost antagonistic drumming. Saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, brash and hard, plays his bluesy parts opposite Lincoln`s singing. On
”Tryptich: Prayer/Protest/Peace,” a wordless duet between Roach and Lincoln, the singer screams and howls as if in pain. On ”Tears for Johannesburg” and ”All Africa,” a wall of African and Latin percussion supports Lincoln, again anticipating many of jazz`s later experiments. It is a piece that sounds, with all its different influences, utterly contemporary. It is social protest in a purely American form.
”It`s amazing that after all these years, conditions have gotten to the point that all of a sudden a piece like `Freedom Now Suite` is relevant again,” Roach said.
”When I was growing up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn,” he continued, ”there was always an instrument a student could take home from school, or if a student wanted to study rhetoric, he could.
”That`s all been wiped out; our urban centers are in shambles, despite all the obvious wealth. I`d like to use the MacArthur money to start something on the high school level, let a seed sprout. If a few lives are saved, we`re all better off.”
