Max roach biography drummer magazine

Max Roach’s death last Wednesday, at age 83, marks another step toward the end of the modern jazz world’s greatest generation. Only a few remain among the giants who were present alongside Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie as they created the harmonically adventurous, rhythmically turbulent postwar music called bebop.

There’s still Sonny Rollins, 76; Roy Haynes, 82; Hank Jones, 88. A few of their immediate successors remain active as well: Lee Konitz, 79; Ornette Coleman, 77.

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But there aren’t many more.

Roach made his mark in the mid-1940s playing in the Gillespie-Parker quintet, and it takes only a few seconds to understand the impact his presence made. Here, for instance, is a fragment of “Groovin’ High,” taken from one of the band’s earliest studio sessions, recorded on Feb.

28, 1945, and featuring Cozy Cole on drums. Cole was a swing drummer; he taps the drums on each 4/4 beat—tap-tap-tap-tap—and the song (which would evolve into a bebop anthem) sounds, at this