Max Roach has died. His friend and personal alarm clock (“Good morning MAX!!”) Phil Schaap has scheduled a week-long marathon memorial on WKCR.
I am not the man to eulogize Max Roach. I’ll just say that he was the beat of bebop and, if you check your favorite jazz albums, you’ll find that he’s playing on 9 out of 10 of ’em.
I saw him perform a few times. Once in a “supersession” environment at the Blue Note, where he played it stylish and cool. Similarly at the Charlie Parker fest in Tompkins Square. But I’ll never forget the time, late in the evening midsummer on the campus of Columbia University – he and Cecil Taylor, neither of them young men, got up on the bandstand and just fuckin’ wailed for a breathless forty-five minutes. No charts, no pause, no mercy. Absolutely unbelievable.
Max Roach was an artists, a civil rights leader and a very cool New Yorker. It was cool knowing he was always around, ready to call Phil Schaap up and give him shit, and still working the clubs. With Max Roach gone there are perhaps no true living links to the golden age of bebop still around. Listen to Max Roach.
