He was the keeper of a new jazz beat
Max Roach, 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, died Wednesday after a long illness. He was 83.
The self-taught musical prodigy received his first musical break at age 16, filling in for three nights in 1940 when Ellington's drummer fell ill.
That led him to the legendary Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, where he joined Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in the growing bebop movement. In 1944, Roach, Gillespie and Coleman Hawkins did one of the first bebop recording sessions.
Roach distinguished himself with 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.
"One of the grand masters of our music," Gillespie once observed.
In 1988 Wynton Marsalis called Roach a peerless master: "All great instrumentalists have a superior quality of sound, and his is one of the marvels of contemporary music," Marsalis wrote.
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 kept 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, 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.
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 taught, went to Ghana in search of new music and performed with groups from Japan and Cuba. He formed an all-percussion ensemble known as M'Boom, a quartet and double quartet that included his daughter, Maxine, 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."
In 1988 Roach became the first jazz musician to receive a MacArthur Fellowship "genius award." He was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1995.