It has been nine years since legendary drummer Max Roach last played at the Chicago Jazz Festival and, as if to make up for lost time, his return as the festival`s headliner this year will be marked by his customary swirl of activity.
Next Friday, in ”A Salute to Max Roach,” he`ll appear with two ensembles: the Max Roach Double Quartet, which is the longtime Max Roach Quartet joined by the Uptown String Quartet, and M`Boom, which is Roach and seven other drummers. For the festival, they`ll be joined by the World Saxophone Quartet.
Appearing with two expanded bands on one evening is not unusual for Roach, who sometimes seems to be in motion perpetually. For example, just this summer he has been:
– Improvising duets with reedman Anthony Braxton, at Verona, Italy.
– Producing the first album by the Uptown String Quartet. Roach`s violist daughter, Maxine Roach, founded the quartet and Johnny Carisi is among the composers who contributed to its repertoire.
– Playing jazz festivals with his Double Quartet, the most significant working union of jazz and string instruments since Stan Kenton`s early `50s Innovations band.
– Playing festivals and clubs with M`Boom. ”This is an auspicious year for us. The same eight guys have been together for 20 years.”
– Composing the music for a theater work by Amiri Baraka titled ”Bumpy, A Bopera.” ”It`s really a musical comedy, the first he`s written,” says Roach.
”And then, of course, I have several things with chorus and orchestra, and with large orchestras. I still teach at U Mass part-time, as well. In this business, you soon learn you can`t repeat yourself. If you want to stay alive, you`re always looking for new ideas, new things.”
Indeed, from the beginning of his career, Roach actively pursued avant-garde ways of playing jazz.
Born in North Carolina in 1924, he grew up in New York during the Depression and learned to play drums in churches that were turned into day care centers during the week. He was among the early `40s musicians who evolved the bebop idiom, and says, ”I think the catalyst for us all getting together was Dizzy Gillespie. `Cause he was traveling with big bands, and he`d come back and tell stories like `I heard a saxophone player in Kansas City, Charlie Parker, who`s frightening,` or, `I heard a bass player in Oklahoma, Oscar Pettiford, who was, whew!` Eventually, they`d all flow into New York.” When alto saxophonist Parker formed the era`s most important jazz combo in 1945, he included Roach. Parker`s innovative broken rhythms, fractured melodies and asymmetric accenting called for innovation from his drummer. So Roach began punctuating Parker`s lines with irregular cymbal taps, snare drum raps and bass drum ”bombs,” above and beyond the drummer`s traditional duty of maintaining the beat.
Bebop was a music of intoxicated flights and raw nerves; the Parker Quintet, with Roach, exacerbated that rawness, shattering jazz conventions with impulsive rhythmic dislocations. Moreover, Roach`s drumming was turning into more than just accompaniment: He began to evolve a system of accenting that made him an equal participant with the soloist, as heard in Parker`s 1948 ”Crazeology.” It was a major development in modern jazz, one that Roy Haynes, then Art Blakey and Roach himself would expand on, leading to the hard bop idiom of the 1950s.
During the `50s, Roach became a leader, forming a quintet with the brilliant young trumpeter Clifford Brown, whose gleaming designs drew their inspiration from the drummer`s ongoing interplay. Also, for much of the decade, Roach and bassist-composer Charles Mingus operated Debut Records;
among their releases was a near-great album of a 1953 concert by an all-star quintet: Roach, Mingus, Parker, Gillespie and pianist Bud Powell.
”We never would have recorded it if Mingus hadn`t suggested to me-`Let`s just take an engineer and some tapes up there without anybody knowing it`-
Charlie Parker was the only one of us who was signed to a record company. So we said, `Bird, ask your man, (record producer) Norman Granz, if he`s interested in this tape.`
”Naturally, Norman was interested. So Mingus, Charlie Parker and I went down to his office and he asked us what we wanted. Bird said, `$100,000.`
Norman very calmly said, `Well, leave the tapes here so I can listen to them.` Mingus objected to that strongly. Wonderful as he was, he thought everybody was out to get him. So we put out the tapes on our little company.”
The `60s brought the era of free jazz, and new challenges that Roach loved. One of his major solos is in ”Mendacity,” an improvisation without reference to the song`s tempo or structure. Each phrase is followed by silence, a dramatic effect. Musical lines emerge from his sound colors and patterns as he mounts his highly detailed work; it`s so unified that it could be a free drum composition.
That`s on his ”Percussion Bitter Sweet” album, which also includes his dedications to Marcus Garvey and to the freedom riders. At the height of the civil-rights movement, that album and others, such as his ”We Insist! Freedom Now Suite” reflect his solidarity with black ideals. By then, his musical interests had grown beyond the confines of small combos, and it was also in the `60s that he first recorded with a choir and formed M`Boom.
His special affinity for maverick pianists who created daring spaces for their drummers is obvious in his important albums with Hassan Ibn Ali and Herbie Nichols. Nevertheless, the Max Roach Quartet of the `70s and `80s lacks a piano player. Ex-Chicagoan Cecil Bridgewater is his long-time trumpeter, and Odean Pope, saxophones, and Tyrone Brown, bass, are the other quartet members. Roach has gone even farther since 1978, paring down the jazz ensemble to its most basic elements-a melodic improviser with a drummer-in duets with multi-woodwind virtuoso Braxton, tenor saxist Archie Shepp, pianist Cecil Taylor and, in an album to come, trumpeter Gillespie. ”We didn`t rehearse-these things are improvised. If you have a rhythm section with a bass and piano, you (the melodic improviser) have to go along with the harmonic progression. Whereas with just drums, you can extend the harmonic variations any way you want to. What I do is set up time frames and rhythms and colors, and Dizzy zeroes in.”
The newest Roach adventure is his stage collaborations with director George Ferencz. In the 1984-85 season, Roach won an Obie award for the music he wrote to ”Shepardsets,” three Sam Shepard plays. He has also composed a musical version of Shakespeare`s ”A Midsummer Night`s Dream,” and electronic music for Eugene O`Neill`s ”The Hairy Ape.” ”Bumpy, A Bopera,” another collaboration with Ferencz, is scheduled to premiere in the spring of 1990.
Says Roach, ”If you saw the movie `The Cotton Club,` Bumpy Johnson was the guy who threw the stink bomb into the club because of their attitude toward blacks. All this is historical fact. He`s this guy who defied all the Mafia heavyweights in the `20s-the Lucky Lucianos and these guys who were moving on Harlem with rackets and drugs. Bumpy Johnson was a gangster himself, involved with numbers and all that stuff, but he was like a hero of the period.”
Which is not to suggest that Roach himself is in any danger of becoming a period piece. As his Jazz Festival appearance confirms, he should be blazing musical trails into the 1990s.
