ARTS

This is from The Progressive Review......

http://prorev.com

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PASSINGS: MAX ROACH
Friday, August 17, 2007

RICHARD HARRINGTON, WASHINGTON POST - In the last half of the 20th
century, there was no more influential drummer in jazz, no greater
master of melody in the rhythm mode, than Max Roach. Thanks to his total
command of polyrhythms, dynamics and coloration, you could easily
understand why he was once chosen in a poll of his musical peers as
"Greatest Ever, Drums." Roach, who finally stopped keeping time
yesterday at age 83, helped elevate the drum from its traditional
accompanying role to equal, frontline status with other instruments. . .
 

"If my contribution has been anything, it's taking the drum out of the
basement and putting it in the front line," he told me in an interview
more than 20 years ago. "You know, the drum set is one of the few
indigenous American instruments, though it's not recognized as such. In
no other society do they have one person play with all four limbs. In
the classical orchestra, they have three or four men in the percussion
ensemble. It's the same in the African ensemble. And they're all hand
players.

"This foot thing came out of the U.S.A.," he went on, sounding very much
like the professorial advocate of the genre that he always was. "The
jazz drum set itself is uniquely American, yet the drummer has always
been treated as a second-class citizen. I've tried in my own humble way
to say that this instrument can create sound design that can be
arresting and interesting, intellectual, full of feeling.". . .

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/16/AR2007081602560.html


YOUR EDITOR was a drummer for two and a half decades beginning in the
1950s (before switching to piano) and considered Max Roach one of his
patron saints. Key to Roach's drumming was his high level of independent
coordination - the ability to do separate things at the same time with
each of two feet and two hands. The result was not only impressive to
the audience but emotional for the player. As engineer John Donovan
wrote about it, "I still remember the transcendent feeling when the
music was flowing through me and out of my drums. It was unlike anything
I'd ever experienced. . . I suspect the cognitive processing loads
resulting from the independent coordination required to play a drum kit
puts the brain into an altered state of consciousness. I knew of several
marching band drummers who never could play a full kit, they couldn't
master the independent coordination required."

MAX ROACH VIDEO
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9wnW2KLWE-g

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