Roach Mixes Jazz, Strings in Double Quartet : Roach Mixes It Up With Jazz, Strings in Double Quartet : Music: The drummer follows a new jazz ensemble trend, with help from daughter Maxine.

String quartets and jazz musicians? Improvising together? Max Roach--the master drummer and an icon of modern jazz--working with four string players? What’s going on around here?

A mini-trend apparently. Roach’s engagement through Sunday at Hollywood’s Catalina Bar & Grill with his Double Quartet is only the latest example of a surprisingly active jazz/pop string quartet scene.

Roach, who has just returned from a European tour with the group--which combines his regular jazz quartet with the Uptown String Quartet--waxes enthusiastic about the unique ensemble.

“I think it’s wonderful,” he said during a phone conversation from West Germany last week. “We put the string quartet right out there in front with everybody else. And, believe me, they’re not just playing background music. They’re improvising too, and they challenge us.”

The Double Quartet’s repertoire ranges from jazz and blues to spirituals and ragtime. Playing viola in the ensemble is Roach’s daughter, Maxine, already a young veteran of the American Symphony Orchestra and a long list of pop performers.

Roach’s voice glowed with pride as he spoke of his talented offspring, but it was clear that he demands the same musical perfectionism from her that he does from all his players.

“When we started to dabble around with the various possibilities of doing something together, the Double Quartet just kind of grew out of that,” he said.

“But I told her that my thing is playing things in tempo, and I wanted the quartet to be an integral part of that. I wanted them to be up on stage, a complete part of the all the music. Fortunately, Maxine is a very talented musician, and she had no trouble at all understanding what I wanted to do.”

Roach had worked with string quartets before, most notably with the Kronos Quartet, the group that pioneered the exploration of jazz and pop music for classically trained ensembles.

Other quartets have followed Kronos’ lead. Among the recent entries have been the Beaux Arts Quartet, performing on a Concord Records album with trumpeter Warren Vache. But, despite their receptivity to unfamiliar musical forms, both Kronos (which appears Saturday night at the Wadsworth Theatre) and the Beaux Arts have performed those works in traditional fashion, as concert artists interpreting written scores.

Ensembles like the Uptown String Quartet, the Turtle Island Quartet and the Greene String Quartet, on the other hand, have all taken their music well past the written notes into serious improvisations. Class, a violin trio working with John Handy, has gone even farther. Their new Milestone Records release with alto saxophonist Handy finds the group simultaneously singing and playing the title track--Harry Edison’s classic “Centerpiece.”

Why all this surprising activity from classically trained musicians? Violinist Richard Greene feels it traces to a change in attitudes and receptivity.

“This last decade of string players has been tremendously influenced by rock and jazz,” he said last week. “Before 10 or 15 years ago, that was almost unheard of. But there is a significant number of string players around now who understand improvisation and who know how to do it, and do it well.”

It is characteristic of Max Roach’s ever-alert musical antennae that he is one of the first jazz men of his generation to become aware of this developing trend. Two recordings by the Double Quartet have already been released on a European label, and he has produced the first, self-titled album by the Uptown String Quartet.

The first jazz artist to win a coveted McArthur Fellowship award, he continues his multifaceted career with workshops, lectures, appearances with his percussion group, M’Boom, and original compositions for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and the San Diego Repertory Company.

No matter how full his plate may be, however, Roach views the Double Quartet as his present main course.

“I’m bringing the Double Quartet out to Los Angeles because it’s a new approach to jazz, and one that I want to be heard,” he said.

“New York thinks it’s the only place where new ideas can be appreciated, and I just don’t think that’s true. I’m very optimistic that there’s an audience out here--and elsewhere--for this new music we’re making. Once they hear it, I think they’ll be as excited about the Double Quartet as I am.”