Indigenous Music
INDIGENOUS MUSIC Max Roach: the unsubservient drummer NatHentoff He always looks ready. Physically ready to expend the habitual enormous energy he puts into each piece he plays. It is a fiercely...
...Democratic as jazz has always been, Max did have a political problem when he was coming up...
...But Wild Bill still drives on...
...rural delights ("The Winding Stream"), love songs (that aggravating beauty, "Lula Walls"), and invincible homesickness ("When the Roses Bloom in Dixieland...
...European music, on the other hand, is essentially imperialistic...
...I knew that in other cultures the-drums played a much more important role, so—on foundations laid by Jo Jones, Big Sid Catlett, and Chick Webb—I developed a way of improvising that put the drums in the front line with horns...
...That sound, that sound said more than all the pyrotechnics I was doing...
...Max agrees they should be...
...He looks at least a decade younger, because that discipline keeps him lean and fit for combat...
...And the literal disappearance of such nonpareils as Condon and Pee Wee...
...His most volcanic work is the Freedom Now Suite, first recorded in 1960 under the entirely nominal "supervision" of this writer and including Coleman Hawkins, Abbey Lincoln, and the late Booker Little...
...It's ruled by two people—the composer and the conductor...
...The snare vibrates, you know...
...I was not about to stay in the background...
...In an admirably knowledgeable, fresh-spirited, and gently compelling tribute, Meeting in the Air: Songs of the Carter Family (Flying Fish), three player-singers (Jim Watson, Mike Craver, and Tommy Thompson) have chosen fourteen flavorsome songs from the Carter repertory...
...Everybody involved in it has something to say, has the freedom to express himself...
...Not flashily, mind you, but more like the sometime professor of music he is at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst...
...A considerably more independent woman, Amina Myers, is one of the relatively few improvisers of her gender to have won a valued place among current jazz frontier-expanders...
...Max, the newly crowned king of bop percussionists, went into a swift, dazzhngly complex break...
...Another kind of irresistible momentum is that of Wild Bill Davison, the perennially blazing cornetist who could propel three Army bands and have wind left over for a dozen combos...
...Having grown up on scores, maybe hundreds, of Sunday afternoon jam sessions of just this ambiance, I am impelled by this set to mourn all the more the near-disappearance of these freewheeling bouts of improvisation...
...Choice cuts: No one family has more pervasively influenced country music than the Carter clan (originally, A.P., Sara, and Maybelle...
...It was produced, of course, by Professor Roach...
...I heard him not long ago on a New York riverboat and he was still blowing up a magnificent storm...
...Spurred by the then emergent civil rights movement, the work has since been performed in many countries and has recently been reissued here (Columbia) because it clearly is no less germane now than it was two decades ago...
...At one point...
...And all he did was blow on it...
...On two recent sets on the Leo label (distributed here by JCOA/New Music Distribution Service, 500 Broadway, New York, New York 10012), Myers reveals a distinctive mastery of lyrically swinging, clear-as-springwater piano and electric organ (Song for Mother E) and, in addition, an incisive, pungent, justifiedly self-assured blues voice (Amina Claudine Myers Salutes Bessie Smith...
...Furthermore, if some still exist who think women can't swing as deeply as men, try these records on them during a blindfold test...
...Our music," he points out, "is so fundamentally democratic a form...
...For a fascinating, emotionally riveting illustration of the continually challenging democracy of Max's current quartet, there is Picture in a Frame (Soul Note, distributed in America by Rounder Records, 186 Willow Ave., Sommer-ville, Massachusetts 02144...
...That, as Max will tell you, is what jazz is all about...
...You can't be ready unless you're ready all the time...
...There is extensive space for improvising, and each of the sidemen is free to project as powerNat Hentoff writes regularly about music for The Progressive...
...Live...
...If you don't do their will, you lose your job...
...The un-subservient sidemen are trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater, tenor saxophonist Odean Pope, and bassist Calvin Hill...
...As in the current, astonishingly vaMax put the drums upfront with the horns negated percussion-orchestra set, M'Boom (Columbia...
...Meanwhile, RCA has released a set by The Original Carter Family, with an illustrated booklet written by Johnny Cash, husband of that very pretty Carter, June, who, if truth be told, is a much more satisfying singer than he is...
...Along with Wild Bill are Eddie Condon, Lou McGarity, and the most continually intriguing clarinetist in all of jazz history, Pee Wee Russell...
...Jazz roots, for instance...
...The discipline extends to dress...
...It is a fiercely disciplined energy, for he is continually improvising designs fueled by intricate cross-rhythms, finely shaded textures, and marvelously subtle dynamics...
...Max developed into a composer because there were some things even he couldn't say on the drums alone...
...He tells how, as a cocky youngster in the mid-1940s, he played with Dizzy Gillespie opposite a "traditional" jazz combo with Sidney Bechet and New Orleans drummer Baby Dodds...
...That work goes deeply to the roots of the Afro-American experience, roots being a preoccupation of Max's...
...Like the other graduates of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music, Myers has absorbed the entire tradition of black American music and so, when she tells her own stories, she's building .on an extraordinarily firm and rich foundation...
...He not only throws thunderbolts, but his cymbals can also whisper, shimmer, and sensuously dance...
...fully individual a musical personality as he can forge from his resources...
...Yet, with his own band, Max does not keep the reins tight...
...He seldom raises his voice, but he is never out of command...
...There is country gospel ("The Wayworn Traveler...
...Miami Beach (Pumpkin, P.O...
...Max produces his own record sessions, usually owns the masters, and intimidates rather than is intimidated by television producers and other agents...
...He will not bend to those traditional conventions of the jazz business that treat musicians as talented chattel...
...In answer, Max recalls, "Baby just reached for his snare drum...
...Box 557963, Miami, Florida 33155) is a record of a club session in 1955...
...It was so human...
...Max Roach, who started playing with Charlie Parker before he was even graduated from high school, is fifty-six now...
...But June is a dutiful wife...
...And being Max, he keeps on learning...
...With a background in Little Rock church music and blues, she became affiliated with the influential Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Music, and has gone on to work with such searing luminaries as Lester Bowie and Muhal Richard Abrams...
...Even at rehearsals, Max is crisply attired...
...I learned a lot that day...
...And while some players coast at rehearsals, Max is as intensely ordered as if the room were filled with paying customers...
...When he plays in Europe, Max tells me, the younger musicians in symphony orchestras often tell him how envious they are of jazz musicians...
...I had to fight," he says, "against the tradition of the drummer as a subservient figure, just playing rhythm...
Vol. 45 • May 1981 • No. 5
