RIP: Max Roach

Hola Everybody,

Saturdays I dedicate to the arts and stuff like that...

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En Memoriam: Max Roach
Drums
January 10, 1924 -- August 16, 2007

Most people don't know that I had wanted to be a musician early in my life. I grew up with a lot of music in my background. My uncle was a bandleader. He was an interesting man. He was a musician, an athlete, and a natural born organizer. Growing up, it wasn't uncommon for me to find my teachers hanging out in our Lower East Side living room. One of the most common visitors to our living room was Mr. White, an African-American music teacher at our elementary school. Accompanying the heated political and intellectual discussions was usually some jazz -- Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk, for example. It was here where I learned to love the music we call jazz.

Jazz is particularly difficult to define, but I can tell you what it ain't: it ain't Kenny G!

I consider the body of work known as jazz as the single most significant American contribution to the world of art. The irony being that it's an art that has as its roots the black experience in America. The other irony being that outside the US, this form of expression is held in the highest esteem.

In my teens, I decoded I wanted to pursue a life as a musician and I picked up percussion (congas and timbales, mostly) and taught myself to play by listening to master percussionists. Later, I would pick up the trombone and play with various bands. One band, called the Newbreeds (think a Black Chicago with a hard rock rhythm section), actually cut a demo. I can be heard on that demo playing congas. The Brooklyn neighborhood I grew up in spawned many popular black and Latino bands. Mandrill was right around the block from us (on Polk St.) and the Lebron brothers, a famous salsa band, was maybe three blocks down Broadway. There was also the soulful ballad band, Blue Magic. The drummer from the Newbreeds would eventually tour with Gloria Gaynor and some of the horn players would move to BT Express when we broke up.

During that time, walking down a Latino/a neighborhood in the summer sounded like the soundtrack to a Tarzan movie. There were drums everywhere. Some of the nastiest congueros I ever heard played on the streets and in Central Park every Sunday tens of thousands of people would gather around the Bethesda Fountain to listen to the musicians who congregated there. Only the best drummers would dare throw down and it was truly amazing to see that mixture of Black Jazz and Latino salsa musicians get together and crate hybrid sounds.

I loved music and it was an exciting time to be involved in the then nascent movement that would eventually explode internationally as Salsa. Salsa is an urban folklore that has its roots in the Latino/a and Black neighborhoods of NYC.

But my true love was Jazz and I hung out with older Jazz musicians who would play with salsa bands in between jazz gigs. This brings me to Max Roach, one of the great jazz drummers who passed away August 16th. If jazz is the greatest uniquely American artistic expression, then Bop (and post Bop) was jazz's greatest musical revolution and Max Roach was at the center of that revolution. He played drums for all the major innovators of this musical genre: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Clifford Brown, who was arguably the greatest jazz trumpeter ever.

But Roach was more than a musician, he was also a civil rights activist and used his art to further the rights of the oppressed and in that way for all of humanity. I understand the term Civil Rights, but in actuality the largely Black and Latino/a civil rights movements of the 50s and 60s was in actuality a fight for human rights. It's particularly troubling for me to stomach the actions of entertainers today. In the 60s, black and Latino/a athletes and artists who may have been deeply flawed human beings but who, nonetheless, fought alongside their brothers and sisters for civil rights causes. Today Black and Latino/a athletes sell sneakers manufactured in Third World sweat shops that brutalize its workers without even thinking about it.

Max Roach was a musical genius who never lost sight that a gift comes with responsibility and he committed himself fully not just to his art, but to his responsibility. I never became a real musician because I wasn't willing or able to commit to my gift in that manner. I have no regrets, I love what I do and I know that what I do is my calling. But I often say that art saved my life, because whenever I thought jumping off a bridge or putting a bullet in my skull was a good idea, it was the art created by people like Max Roach that reminded me that this world is also capable of transcendent beauty.

Thank you Max...

Love,

Eddie