Here are some pretty remarkable videos of Max Roach playing live. The first is in Norway in 1977. The tune with the group, “It’s Time”, is fast, and 20 minutes long, including a solo played just on the hihat— which Roach did at that time as a solo piece, entitled Mr. Hihat, a tribute to Papa Jo Jones. He also speaks to the audience, and there is an interview.
My first interest here is that we get to see him playing one of those insanely fast tempos we know him for— it’s about in the 400 bpm range, whole notes at about 100.
It’s a little disturbing to hear what he’s playing, and they cut to him and he’s moving like he’s playing a fraction of the actual tempo. Like with the Ed Blackwell video, the sticks are up in the air, he’s not locking down, or doing anything out of the ordinary with his technique. By the time we get to the solo he has just started breaking the slightest sweat.
Reggie Workman— that’s the bassist— is something else here, just pure power. It’s scarily easy to imagine yourself in this situation and getting completely plowed under, if you didn’t find a way to get pulled along by him.
Here’s Max’s group a fews years later, playing the same tune:
You can see he’s not just playing meticulously rendered bebop the whole way, with a nice crisp cymbal beat and hihat and everthing. He gets off the cymbal a lot, really nailing down the time structure on the drums. The punctuations on the drums are what’s key to holding it together, and they’re irregularly timed. There’s a quote to that effect in Billy Hart’s book-you-should-own, where he was told to think of the time as something like “one…. …. one… … … …. one… one… … .”
The big sounds out of the cymbals help out, that long sound carries over a couple of measures— at a few points you can see him hang out for a second before getting back into the time.
What the heck, here’s another one, playing Giant Steps in Berlin, 1984:
We think of Max as this intellectual, melodic, musical guy, which he is, but this is the drums he’s playing here, percussion sounds, for impact and energy. We can be a little effete about the musicality aspect lately.
Finally maybe, what’s happening here is to me the real center of jazz— not just because Max Roach is the epicenter of the development of modern drumming, that he was. There’s air in the time, in the execution, in the technique— this form of the music developed on stage through countless hours of very full on playing. It’s not locked down groove in the R&B or funk sense, or swing in the dance band sense, it’s not high technique, high polish music, it’s something else.
I am happy to help you with any of the materials on the site, and with anything else drumming related— contact me for private lessons, online world wide, or in person in Portland, Oregon. All levels of players, and all people, are welcome.
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