To The Max!
Friday is about music, so links and playlists galore. Today, one of my all time favourite jazz albums from one of my favourite musicians.
My first favourite jazz drummer was Buddy Rich. Which makes sense. He’s the guy. Towering above all. He was a monster player, monster personality, and quite possibly a monster. You might know about those famous tapes of him chewing out his musicians on the tour bus — they were passed about the New York comedy scene in the 80s like a special sauce. If you don’t know, off to YouTube you go…
There are so many extraordinary jazz drummers from that era, and today of course. The game completely changed now, and so many innovations, so many unique ways of playing. The jazz drummers of today are often largely inspired by hip-hop, which is a nice twist, given so much of hip-hop’s roots are entangled in the samples of great jazz.
I was soon listening to Louie Bellson, Tony Williams, Jack DeJohnette (R.I.P.), Lenny White, Kenny Clarke, Papa Jo Jones, and many others.
But the guy that really caught my attention, and has held it ever since, was Max Roach.
Buddy was all blistering pace and ego, and chops galore. And of course he was phenomenal, and there was more heart and soul in his playing than many casual tourists will stop to see and hear.
But Max. He was so innately musical. Max was a pioneer of bebop, playing with legends like Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and then on to people like Abbey Lincoln (who he was married to for a time), and Dinah Washington, and Eric Dolphy. The list is endless. And hugely impressive.
But Max became not only a drummer, but a percussionist, composer, producer, and drum soloist.
He would create drum compositions, making melodies across the toms and cymbals, playing just the hi-hat, making those cymbals not only swish, but sway, and sashay; his drums weren’t just there to make people dance. His drums were the dance. He made them dance.
I first heard Max Roach very late in his career. The double album To The Max! It’s an intriguing showcase of so many styles, from quartet jazz to unaccompanied drum solos, via the unique setting of the “Double Quartet” which is a jazz quartet with, erm, strings attached — a string quartet that is:
To The Max! is a composer’s showcase in a way, it’s also the jazz-drummer’s version of the Heavy Metal or Hard Rock Double Live Album.
It’s Max Roach Comes Alive! It’s Max Roach At Fillmore East. It’s Max Roach’s Many Decades of Aggression.
You will hear the Ghost Dance which starts with Max and his band, a full big band orchestra:
On the full live version, which you can hear at the top of this post (and I’ll embed it again at the bottom) there’s a Chorus too — it’s basically gospel jazz. Then the band falls away and we hear Max’s percussion ensemble, M’Boom:
The third moment of the Ghost Dance — is one of Roach’s unaccompanied solos:
The four sides of vinyl or cassette — and the two long CDs of the double-disc package — feature the different configurations, from M’Boom again, to Max and orchestra, Max leading a quartet in a kind of nod back to bop, and Max performing more of his legendary solos.
One of my favourite pieces is this moody little M’Boom gem:
But you can’t beat one of Max’s finest solo drum compositions, Drums Unlimited:
So To The Max! grabs from all across Roach’s rich career and catalogue, but these versions — not represented in the clips I’m sharing her, only on the full album at the top (and bottom) — are all recorded live or in the studio across 1990 and 1991.
I’d actually bought a $2 Max Roach tape in about 1989. I’d been reading about him in Modern Drummer. I knew he was one of the GOATs. I couldn’t wait to hear him. My mind was blown that the cheap tape I bought featured a band that included Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis. And other recordings that had Charles Mingus on bass. These were all names I was just getting to know. All jazz legends.
A couple of years after thrashing that tape for all it could give, I found To The Max! A doubles cassette tape on a trip to Wellington to see the band Faith No More. We tried playing it in the car, but I didn’t have the right audience. My mate that was down for the concert with me was not a jazz fan. My mum was driving us, and though she was a jazz fan — and had given me my first Buddy Rich album — To The Max! was too much (and too much Max) for her in that context. She wanted something gentler for the Rimutakas. And so we probably played Fine Young Cannibals or something.
I regret getting rid of my double To The Max! tape. On my first trip to American in 2012 I finally found the very same album on CD. I had to have it. I played it for a while of course, but then foolishly ditched it. And I’ve never seen it again. I didn’t ever own it on vinyl, but I saw it one time and it cost too much.
Now, I go onto YouTube a couple of times a year and play it. For the memories.
I went on to buy many of the great Roach albums on vinyl, and CD. He’s still one of my all time favourites. He is there on so many of the great jazz albums by other artists too.
He’s on most of Miles’ Birth of the Cool.
He’s on Monk’s Brilliant Corners.
You’ll hear him on just about all of the great Charlie Parker sides, on so many Sonny Rollins records, with Bud Powell, Abbey Lincoln of course, and just many other wonderful players. You might be reading this thinking you don’t know Max Roach, and yet you’ve probably heard him if you’ve listened to any jazz.
And with Duke Ellington and Charlie Mingus, he made one of my all time favourites albums — Money Jungle. My god that record swings so hard!
It might be the great argument that jazz is soul music is all music.
Anyway, I love so much of what Max Roach gave the world. And the 2023 PBS doco, The Drum Also Waltzes is a must-watch, possibly for the politics as much as the music:
But through it all, I have this special connection to the album, To The Max! I love it so much. And I think it really was one of the records that shaped me into the listener I am today. It blew my tiny little teenaged mind. That’s for fucking goddamn sure. And I’m super glad it did!
Now, it’s Friday, so apart from all that good Roach for you to smoke, I’ve prepared a more ambient dose in the regular playlist.
Here’s A Little Something For The Weekend…Sounds Good! Vol. 255
