An Appraisal: A Musical Pioneer Who Never Stopped Searching

It happens all the time. Friends hear jazz that veers toward the traditional, or toward the refinement of a basic form, and they say something like this: Its good, but isnt jazz supposed to be looking for something new?

Whether they know it or not, theyre thinking within a system of expectation that Max Roach helped create. Mr. Roach, who died yesterday at 83, was in on the ground floor of aesthetic change for much of his working life. He just kept on being involved in whatever mattered most, zeroing in on particular regions of his drum kit and reshuffling rhythms, inventing percussive patterns that helped move jazz away from typical swing.

Some of these were tiny details of accent or phrasing that enjoined choruses or displaced a rhythm, and they worked like secret coding for the hungry musicians of the time. (The great drummer Roy Haynes, who is slightly younger than his friend Mr. Roach, said that when he heard him playing on Coleman Hawkinss 1944 recording Woodyn You, it was like someone talking to him.) But some of the gestures were much bigger. Eventually Mr. Roach started a label, Debut, with Charles Mingus. He connected jazz to American social concerns, he set the standards for solo and duo improvisations, and he accomplished much else.

Again, some of these things might now seem like what jazz musicians do, often with some grant money and a clearly articulated press release. But Max Roach got there had already made it seem natural. He was in Hawkinss band at the age of 20 in 1944, recording proto-bebop. He was part of Charlie Parkers quintet from 1947 to 1949, a band that changed jazz through its recordings on Savoy and its performances at the Three Deuces and the Onyx Club in New York. He was probably the greatest percussive foil for Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins. (That alone ...) He played on Miles Daviss Birth of the Cool sessions in 1949 and 1950, the manifestolike recordings of a new, chastened, chamberlike jazz. The group he led with the trumpeter Clifford Brown — which for a time included Mr. Rollins — was one of the greatest things about jazz in the 1950s, making beautifully constructed studio records and fascinatingly intense, though still little-heard, live recordings.

He played compositionally, complementing the work of jazz improvisers who also were master writers; this made his work with Booker Little, Herbie Nichols and Hasaan Ibn Ali special. (Its also why, when he played an aggressive Cuban rhythm with Powell in Un Poco Loco, or in 4/4 against the waltz time of Carolina Moon with Monk, or in 5/4 on As Long As Youre Living with his own group Max Roach Plus Four, he made it work within the piece, made it all sound natural.)

In his collaborations with Abbey Lincoln, Mr. Roach made civil rights issues ringingly explicit. He worked with percussion ensembles and strings and gospel choirs, always as original aesthetic choices rather than following the dimensions of established formats. With the pianist Cecil Taylor, among others, he played some highly rhythmic duo concerts — the last in 2000, at Columbia University — that were among the most memorable performances I have ever seen and heard. He had no second thoughts about working with the putative jazz avant-garde, or with hip-hop; he dived right in. And finally that may be his legacy to jazz: He seemed to have no fear.

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