Max Roach Research Paper

On January 10th, 1924, or January 8th, 1925, in Newland, North Carolina, Max Roach was born. Roach had died at the age of eighty three on August 16th, 2007. You may be asking, who was Max Roach and what has he done that caught my attention? Max Roach was not only an American jazz percussionist, drummer, and composer, he was and is still now an inspiration to many musicians. Most people these days think that the music that is listened to today just came up as an idea in someone’s head, or it magically popped out of nowhere. But what not many people knew, was that all of this type of music was originated from musicians from the 1940’s or 50’s. One of the many creators of this type of music was a jazzy bebop drummer named Max Roach. Bebop is a

One of his most important innovations came in the 1940s. Max Roach and another jazz drummer named Kenny Clarke had devised a new concept of musical time. They had figured out a way for the soloists to play freely. Instead of playing four on the floor, they had played the beat-by-beat pulse of a standard 4/4 time on the sizzling ride cymbal. This had also given the drummers some space for comping on the snare drum or playing around the drums at any time. Roach had also figured out a new way to solo by using any tunes melody. Sometimes, he had shifted the dynamic from one part of his drum set to another inside a single phrase, creating “a sense of tonal color and rhythmic surprise.” Roach had once observed “In no other society, do they have one person play with all four limbs.” A jazz critic named Burt Korall once said about Max Roach, is that he develops “a highly responsive, contrapuntal style, engaging his fellow musicians in an open-ended conversation while maintaining a rock-solid pulse.” Roach thought the drum set has much more of a meaning than keeping the beat. He saw himself as a full-fledged member of the front line, not simply as a supporting player. Most of those approaches are common today, but when Clarke and Roach had first introduced the new style in the 1940s, it was a huge musical advance. Jazz historian Burt Korall once wrote in the Oxford Companion to Jazz, "When Max Roach's first records with Charlie

Max Roach had had a family. Two children with his first marriage, Mildred Roach in 1949, a boy and a girl. His son’s name was Daryl Keith Roach, and his daughter’s name was Maxine Roach. He had continued to study composition at the Manhattan school of music until he graduated in 1952. In 1958 he met a singer named Barbara Jai (Johnson) and he had fathered another son, Raoul Jordu. Roach was married for the third time to Janus Adams Roach and had twin daughters in 1971, Ayodele Nieyela and Dara Rashida. Max Roach had become a grandfather and had four grandchildren, Kyle Maxwell Roach, Kadar Elijah Roach, Maxe Samiko Hinds, and Skye Sophia Sheffield. In 1972 Max Roach was enlisted to the faculty of the University of Massachusetts Amherst by Chancellor Randolph