| Aug. 18th, 2007 @ 11:29 am Drums unlimited |
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Current Mood: feh
Current Music: The WKCR Max Roach Memorial Marathon
Through attrition, the only childhood Max Roach album that remains in memory (and in physical reality, sitting somewhere in New Jersey or North Carolina) is Lift Every Voice and Sing, from 1971. In an era when jazz musicians were "exploring" soul, rock, and funk, as a means of maintaining some semblance of commercial viability (and while Jackie McLean would lampoon it, even he recorded a disco LP for RCA a few years later), Max did this relatively-scholarly album with a gospel choir, plus William Bell and Max's newly-ex-wife, Abbey Lincoln.
It isn't the greatest introduction to his music (or to Billy Harper, who played tenor in his quintet back then), but how many kids these days get introduced to (t)his music at all? Or even recognize it as music?
I figured we wouldn't have Max around much longer; Phil Schaap, months ago at least, stopped doing his trademark yell, GOOD MORNING, MAX! at the first, inevitable, mention of Max's name during his daily "Bird Flight" radio show (yelling because I presume Max, like Art Blakey, another drummer/bandleader who launched dozens of musicians' careers, had drummed himself into the ranks of the hard-of-hearing); Joe McPhee stopped just short of eulogizing him at the end of a Trio X gig this past winter or spring.
We've lost a living encyclopedia of percussion, someone who kept learning and learning, growing and growing, teaching and teaching, from the Swing Era through numerous Jazz-Is-Dead eras in the subsequent decades.
I'm slogging through Stanley Crouch's anthology Considering Genius; in an essay devoted to Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall, he tells the story of how Max interrupted the 1961 concert, a benefit for the African Medical Education and Research Foundation, in a one-man protest against what he believed was a pro-apartheid, pro-colonialist organization. That Miles would abandon the concert, half-finished (tho' the show did eventually Go On), is emblematic of the respect he had for his former bandmate; that Max would do this at all was emblematic of the extent (especially in those days) to which he didn't let his activities as a public citizen fall subservient to his activities as a Bankable Name.
I can't imagine Jay-Z or Beyoncé (a bubblegum Max-and-Abbey for the hypercorporate age) disrupting someone else's gig for anything except self-promotion.
We've lost more than a living encyclopedia of percussion. |
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