Early life and career Max Roach was born to Alphonse and Cressie Roach in the Township of Newland,
Pasquotank County,
North Carolina, which borders the southern edge of the
Great Dismal Swamp. The Township of Newland is sometimes mistaken for Newland Town in
Avery County, North Carolina. Roach's family moved to the
Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of
Brooklyn, New York, when he was four years old. He grew up in a musical home with his
gospel singer mother. He started to play
bugle in parades at a young age. At the age of 10, he was already playing drums in some gospel bands. In 1942, as an 18-year-old recently graduated from
Boys High School in
Brooklyn, he was called to fill in for
Sonny Greer with the
Duke Ellington Orchestra performing at the
Paramount Theater in
Manhattan. He started going to the
jazz clubs on
52nd Street and at 78th Street &
Broadway for Georgie Jay's Taproom, where he played with schoolmate
Cecil Payne. Roach's first professional recording took place in December 1943, backing
Coleman Hawkins. Roach was one of the first drummers, along with
Kenny Clarke, to play in the
bebop style, and he performed in bands led by
Dizzy Gillespie,
Charlie Parker,
Thelonious Monk,
Coleman Hawkins,
Bud Powell, and
Miles Davis. Roach played on many of Parker's most important records, including the
Savoy Records November 1945 session, which marked a turning point in recorded jazz. His early
brush work with Powell's trio, especially at fast tempos, has been highly praised. Roach nurtured an interest in and respect for
Afro-Caribbean music and traveled to
Haiti in the late 1940s to study with the traditional drummer
Ti Roro.
1950s Roach studied
classical percussion at the
Manhattan School of Music from 1950 to 1953, working toward a
Bachelor of Music degree. The school awarded him an
Honorary Doctorate in 1990. In 1952, Roach co-founded
Debut Records with bassist
Charles Mingus, one of the first artist-owned labels. The label released a record of a May 15, 1953, concert billed as "the greatest concert ever", which came to be known as
Jazz at Massey Hall, featuring Parker, Gillespie, Powell, Mingus, and Roach. Also released on this label was the groundbreaking bass-and-drum
free improvisation,
Percussion Discussion. In 1954, Roach and trumpeter
Clifford Brown formed a quintet that also featured tenor saxophonist
Harold Land, pianist
Richie Powell (brother of Bud Powell), and bassist
George Morrow. Land left the quintet the following year and was replaced by
Sonny Rollins. The group was a prime example of the
hard bop style also played by
Art Blakey and
Horace Silver. Later that year, he relocated to the Los Angeles area, where he replaced
Shelly Manne in the popular Lighthouse All Stars. Brown and Richie Powell were killed in a car accident on the
Pennsylvania Turnpike in June 1956. The first album Roach recorded after their deaths was
Max Roach + 4. After Brown and Powell's deaths, Roach continued leading a similarly configured group, with
Kenny Dorham (and later
Booker Little) on trumpet,
George Coleman on tenor, and pianist
Ray Bryant. Roach expanded the standard form of hard bop using
waltz rhythms and modality in 1957 with his album
Jazz in 3/4 Time. During this period, Roach recorded a series of other albums for
EmArcy Records featuring the brothers
Stanley and
Tommy Turrentine. In 1955, Roach played drums for vocalist
Dinah Washington at several live appearances and recordings. He appeared with Washington at the
Newport Jazz Festival in 1958, which was
filmed, and at the 1954 live studio audience recording of
Dinah Jams, considered to be one of the best and most overlooked
vocal jazz albums of its genre.
1960s–1970s In 1960, Roach composed and recorded the album
We Insist! (subtitled ''Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite)'', with vocals by his then-wife
Abbey Lincoln and lyrics by
Oscar Brown Jr., after being invited to contribute to commemorations of the hundredth anniversary of
Abraham Lincoln's
Emancipation Proclamation. In 1962, Roach recorded the album
Money Jungle, a collaboration with Mingus and
Duke Ellington. Inkblot magazine regarded this as one of the finest trio albums ever recorded. During the 1970s, Roach formed
M'Boom, a percussion orchestra. Each member composed for the ensemble and performed on multiple percussion instruments. Personnel included Fred King,
Joe Chambers,
Warren Smith,
Freddie Waits,
Roy Brooks, Omar Clay,
Ray Mantilla, Francisco Mora, and Eli Fountain. He taught at the university until the mid-1990s.
1980s–1990s , San Francisco, 1979 In the early 1980s, Roach began presenting solo concerts, demonstrating that multiple percussion instruments performed by one player could fulfill the demands of solo performance and be entirely satisfying to an audience. He created memorable compositions in these solo concerts, and a solo record was released by the Japanese jazz label Baystate. One of his solo concerts is available on a video, which also includes footage of a recording date for
Chattahoochee Red, featuring his working quartet,
Odean Pope,
Cecil Bridgewater, and Calvin Hill. Roach also embarked on a series of duet recordings. Departing from the style he was best known for, most of the music on these recordings is free improvisation, created with
Cecil Taylor,
Anthony Braxton,
Archie Shepp, and
Abdullah Ibrahim. Roach created duets with other performers, including: a recorded duet with oration of the "
I Have a Dream" speech by
Martin Luther King Jr.; a duet with
video artist Kit Fitzgerald, who improvised video imagery while Roach created the music; a duet with his lifelong friend and associate Gillespie; and a duet concert recording with
Mal Waldron. During the 1980s, Roach also wrote music for theater, including plays by
Sam Shepard. Roach was composer and
musical director for a festival of Shepard plays, called "ShepardSets", at
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in 1984. The festival included productions of
Back Bog Beast Bait,
Angel City, and
Suicide in B Flat. In 1985, George Ferencz directed "Max Roach Live at La MaMa: A Multimedia Collaboration". Roach found new contexts for performance, creating unique musical ensembles. One of these groups was "The Double Quartet", featuring his regular performing quartet with the same personnel as above, except Tyrone Brown replaced Hill. This quartet joined "The Uptown String Quartet", led by his daughter Maxine Roach and featuring Diane Monroe, Lesa Terry, and
Eileen Folson. Another ensemble was the "So What Brass Quintet", a group comprising five brass instrumentalists and Roach, with no
chordal instrument and no bass player. Much of the performance consisted of drums and horn duets. The ensemble consisted of two trumpets, trombone,
French horn, and tuba. Personnel included
Cecil Bridgewater, Frank Gordon,
Eddie Henderson, Rod McGaha,
Steve Turre,
Delfeayo Marsalis,
Robert Stewart, Tony Underwood, Marshall Sealy, Mark Taylor, and Dennis Jeter. Not content to expand on the music he was already known for, Roach spent the 1980s and 1990s finding new forms of musical expression and performance. He performed a
concerto with the
Boston Symphony Orchestra. He wrote for and performed with the Walter White gospel choir and the John Motley Singers. He also performed with dance companies, including the
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the
Dianne McIntyre Dance Company, and the
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. He surprised his fans by performing in a
hip-hop concert featuring
Fab Five Freddy and the New York Break Dancers. Roach expressed the insight that there was a strong kinship between the work of these young black artists and the art he had pursued all his life. In 1994, Roach appeared on
Rush drummer
Neil Peart's
Burning for Buddy, performing "The Drum Also Waltzes" Parts 1 and 2 on
Volume 1 of the two-volume
tribute album during the 1994 All-Star recording sessions.
Death In the early 2000s, Roach became less active due to the onset of
hydrocephalus-related complications. Roach died of complications related to
Alzheimer's and
dementia in Manhattan in the early morning of August 16, 2007. He was survived by five children: sons Daryl and Raoul, and daughters Maxine, Ayo, and Dara. More than 1,900 people attended his funeral at
Riverside Church on August 24, 2007. He was interred at the
Woodlawn Cemetery in
The Bronx. In a funeral tribute to Roach, then-
Lieutenant Governor of New York David Paterson compared the musician's courage to that of
Paul Robeson,
Harriet Tubman, and
Malcolm X, saying: "No one ever wrote a bad thing about Max Roach's music or his aura until 1960, when he and Charlie Mingus protested the practices of the
Newport Jazz Festival." ==Personal life==