Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes (Max Roach Film LLC, Black Public Media, American Masters Pictures, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the 1930 comedy Soup to Nuts my husband Charles and I watched a show on KPBS I was really looking forward to: Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes, an American Masters episode about the great drummer and civil-rights activist Max Roach. Born in January 1924, Roach, along with the older Kenny Clarke, was the pioneer of the bebop drumming style. He got his first big break at age 18 when he was hired as a substitute for Duke Ellington’s regular drummer, Sonny Greer, at the Paramount Theatre in Manhattan. In December 1943, at age 19, he made his first recordings with a quartet led by tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, and by March 1944 he was recording with a Hawkins-led big band that also featured trumpeter John “Dizzy” Gillespie. Bebop revolutionized jazz with its advanced harmonies and rhythms, and one of the key changes Clarke and Roach made in playing jazz drums was to transfer the basic pulse of the song from actual drums to cymbals (though before either of them, Jo Jones, Count Basie’s drummer, had been toying with that) and using drums to accent the soloists and give an overall lift to the performances. Bebop drummers became known for “dropping bombs” – playing loud thuds on the bass drum instead of using it to keep time. In 1947 Roach landed the dream job for a bebop drummer, playing in the Charlie Parker Quintet alongside Parker’s alto sax and the young Miles Davis’s trumpet. He recalled that Parker would warm up the band by calling the fastest tunes in his repertoire as the very first numbers of a performance. The Drum Also Waltzes did a good job covering the basics of Roach’s career; directors Samuel Pollard and Ben Shapiro started making the film in 1993, while Roach was still alive and active, and shot extensive interviews with him. Then they ran out of money and had to put the project aside, completing it well after Roach died in 2007 and interviewing three of his five children (son Daryl and daughters Maxine and Aya) as well as various musical associates, including fellow bebop pioneer Theodore “Sonny” Rollins (one of two musicians who recorded commercially with Charlie Parker who are still alive; drummer Roy Haynes, who replaced Roach in Parker’s band in 1949, is the other); the late singer Harry Belafonte; bandleader, trumpeter, arranger and record producer Quincy Jones; rapper Fab Five Freddy (Roach’s godson, with whom he collaborated on records); Roach’s ex-wife, singer Abbey Lincoln; pianist Abdullah Ibrahim; and Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson.

The show hit most of the high points of Roach’s career, though one major story it left out was the formation of his own record label, Debut, from 1952 to 1957. Debut Records was a co-venture of Roach and bassist Charles Mingus; I’d read one report that the seed capital came from a rich white woman Roach was then dating, but the Wikipedia page on the label says it actually came from Mingus’s mother-in-law. Mingus and Roach played on almost all the Debut releases, and in later years Mingus said that the reason the label flopped was that in the 1950’s the Mafia controlled record distribution in the U.S., and they didn’t want a label owned by two African-American jazz musicians to succeed. Roach led his own bands through most of the 1950’s, and his most successful group was the one he co-led with trumpeter Clifford Brown from 1954 until Brown’s death in an auto accident in 1956. The accident also claimed the life of Richie Powell, Bud Powell’s brother and a fine pianist in his own right, and it apparently occurred because Powell let his wife Nancy drive at night even though she was terrible at it. Roach was devastated by Brown’s death – and later by the early death (through illness) of his next trumpet player, Booker Little. In the show there’s a haunting scene of Roach sitting at a piano and singing and playing a lament for Brown. Though Roach had taken himself off heroin, the drug of choice among a lot of the bebop pioneers (most notably Charlie Parker), he responded to Brown’s demise by drinking a lot and lashing out suddenly at his children, his bandmates and anyone within range. Ironically, things turned around for him thanks to his increasing involvement with the African-American civil-rights movement and his determination to use his music as a weapon in the fight for justice and equality. In 1958 he joined forces with Sonny Rollins and bassist Oscar Pettiford to record an album called The Freedom Suite, and two years later Roach and his fiancée, singer Abbey Lincoln, took the theme even farther with an explicitly anti-racist concept album, We Insist! Freedom Now Suite. (In making his music explicitly political, Roach was following a trail blazed by Duke Ellington, who in 1941 had written a musical called Jump for Joy which was supposed to explode the racist stereotypes of Black culture once and for all. In 1943 Ellington followed this with a 45-minute jazz symphony called Black, Brown and Beige, a misunderstood masterpiece which he billed as a “tone parallel to the history of the American Negro.”)

We Insist! opens with a visceral lament against slavery called “Driva Man,” sung by Lincoln with incredible power and authority and backed by Roach and a band that included Coleman Hawkins (the star tenor saxophonist from the 1920’s that had taken up bebop and hired Roach and Thelonious Monk for their first recording dates) and trombonist Julian Priester, another interviewee on the program. Abbey Lincoln had been a Black pop singer working the nightclub circuit, and the film features a pre-Roach clip of her singing a faux gospel song called “Spread the Word” from the 1956 film The Girl Can’t Help It, wearing a tight-fitting red gown. She’d been deliberately instructed by her management to wiggle under the gown so her breasts would bounce up and down as she sang. Then she started dating Max Roach, and he pressed her into service as the singer for his civil-rights anthems, including a song on We Insist! called “Tears for Johannesburg” in which she does the sort of wordless “extended vocal” screaming Yoko Ono became notorious for later. Lincoln also started wearing the so-called “Afro” or “natural” hair style instead of trying to straighten out her hair as previous Black women entertainers had done, and she was largely responsible for starting that fashion trend. Lincoln and Roach married in 1962 and divorced in 1970 – though the film doesn’t mention their breakup other than asking Roach’s children if they had any idea about why, which they didn’t. Roach continued to innovate and push himself in particular and jazz drumming in general (though he didn’t approve of the word “jazz” to describe his music; at the start of the film Roach says in one of his interviews that he equates the term “jazz” with the “N-word” and says it should be called “African-American instrumental music” – once again, he was following in the footsteps of Duke Ellington, who in 1928 approached Fletcher Henderson and suggested they insist that their music be called “Negro-American Music”).

He started an all-percussion ensemble called M’Boom that featured vibraphone and steel drums to provide melodic content, as well as the So What Quintet, which featured him and four brass players – no reeds, piano or rhythm. Roach also turned Martin Luther King, Jr. into a rap artist by recording a drum accompaniment to the “I Have a Dream” speech, and he recorded with the rapper Fab Freddy Five. His weirdest experiment might have been Lift Every Voice and Sing, an album he recorded at the behest of Atlantic Records. It was the late 1960’s, just after Miles Davis had recorded the rock-influenced album Bitches’ Brew, and the “suits” at Atlantic were pressuring Roach for a crossover project that would jack up his record sales the way Bitches’ Brew had done for Miles. Roach pointed to the enduring popularity of Black spirituals and recorded an album featuring him and his avant-garde jazz group along with a gospel choir. It’s obviously unfair to judge this entire album on the basis of the minute or so heard here, but it sounded to me like someone playing a gospel album on one player and an avant-garde jazz album on another player simultaneously, not my idea of a good time. Still, Max Roach deserves credit for continually exploring new ideas in rhythm and sound – including pioneering the art of playing entire pieces, both live and on records, as extended drum solos without any other instruments. Many other jazz (sorry, but I can’t help using that term) musicians who’ve had long lives rested on their laurels and played pretty much the same music as they had their whole lives; like Duke Ellington and Coleman Hawkins, Roach wasn’t afraid to move with the times and take his art in new directions over a long and productive life and career.