Max Roach Beating the Drums for His Ilk

Call Max Roach a crusader for rhythm. The peerless jazz trapsman who--with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk was an innovator of the be-bop style--has never tired in his efforts to upgrade the role of the drummer.

“The drummer has long been treated like a 20th-class citizen, even among the musicians,” he said in a phone interview from a tour stop in Vancouver, B.C.

“Horn players put us in the background, saying, ‘OK, buddy, just keep some time for me.’ The historians always talk about the front line; they don’t talk about the rhythm line. If something’s written about Louis Armstrong, they don’t mention Baby Dodds. If someone writes about Basie, they don’t write about Papa Jo Jones.”

Roach, vital and exuberant at 63, pointed out that rhythm has been at the root of every style change in popular music and jazz--which he calls “instrumental music of the U.S.A.” and which he says is “alive and very healthy.”

“You identify Dixieland and New Orleans or Swing (styles) by the rhythm,” he said. “Kenny Clarke was just as important to be-bop as Monk and Dizzy and Bird (altoist Parker). Elvin Jones had a lot to do with the way John Coltrane sounded. This music is a collective creative effort, it’s not just one person.”

Raising “drum consciousness” has not been an easy process. Roach recalled with levity an incident that occurred during the mid-’50s, when he and trumpeter Clifford Brown were leading a quintet that featured sax great Sonny Rollins.

“The rhythm section would be working our tails off behind these guys, setting them up during their solos, but as soon as the bass or the drums had a solo, everybody would lay out,” he said.

“So I suggested to Brownie and Sonny, ‘Hey, why don’t you accompany me sometimes,’ and Rollins said, ‘Well, why don’t you write it out, Roach?’ (Laughter.) So on that LP, ‘It’s Time’ (Impulse), with chorus and orchestra, I wrote it out.”

To further his own personal expression, the multifaceted musician--who’s a composer of stature, a professor of music theory at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a bandleader whose longstanding quartet appears Monday at CalArts Modular Theatre--long ago began developing a concept for unaccompanied drum pieces, the first of which, “Conversation in Drums,” was recorded in 1949.

“I found that the instrument can sustain its own even though we’re not using harmony and melody,” he said. “With drums, you’re dealing with a world of sound that has no boundaries. What we know as music is only a small part of the world of sound, and I make music with the drums.”

Roach is an active writer, often crafting new compositions not only for his band but for such diverse ensembles as San Diego Repertory Theater, whose production last fall of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” utilized his score, and for the Carme Chamber Orchestra of Milan, Italy, whose commission of “Toot Sweet,” a suite in five movements for trap set and chamber orchestra, was premiered in Milan last month, with the composer conducting from the drums.

Roach sees composition, which was his major when he attended the Manhattan School of Music in the ‘40s, as simply part of being a musician.

“Musicians should be as fine an instrumentalist as they can be, but they should also be able to compose, orchestrate, whatever else, in order to survive.”

Though originally a pianist, Roach found the drum kit irresistible, and taught himself to play.

“I learned about percussion by watching people like Papa Jo Jones and Gene Krupa when I was a kid,” he said. “I became enamored with it, and it was ‘never mind the piano.’ Still, I used to play piano gigs with Art Blakey on drums and Zoot Sims on saxophone.”

The drums are Roach’s passion.

“I’m about playing the set,” he said. “It’s the only percussion instrument that I know of that you play with all four limbs. It’s a uniquely American innovation, and playing it is like creating a new language.”

It really was a new language that Parker, Gillespie and Roach were inventing in the early ‘40s, and as the drummer sees it, Parker, with whom Roach performed and recorded extensively, was its unparalleled master.

“Playing with Bird was so exciting,” he said. “He used to open with the fastest thing we’d play all night, and he’d destroy us. Miles (Davis) would be sputtering, I’d be sweating, never really getting it. After that, it was slower stuff like ‘Slow Boat to China.’

“When he died in 1955, Miles and I were commiserating. Miles said in his cryptic sense of humor, ‘He died before we could get even with him.’ It was true, because we couldn’t play in that stratosphere with him.”

A Roach performance today may include a be-bop tune or two, but the style will definitely be modern.

“People always want something new, so you have to come up with new directions and combinations so you can stay out there,” he said. “If you want to hear my old bands, you have to buy the records.”