By: Jaclyn Breeze —
Jazz drummers play on a drum kit, which is a collection of drums and cymbals and is part of the rhythm section. The drums and cymbals that are used vary from player to player as well as through genres. The player usually uses sticks or brushes to play the drums with their hands and pedals on the floor to play the bass drum and hi-hat with their feet.
Max Roach was a drummer and composer born in North Carolina in 1924 to a musical family. His family moved to Brooklyn, NY when he was 4. He was in his first band at age 10, and by the time he was 18, he had played with some of the most well-known jazz musicians at the time all over the city. He did his first professional recording at age 19. He started studying classical percussion at the Manhattan School of Music a few years after graduating high school and co-founded a record company while he was there with bassist Charles Mingus. One of his most significant innovations to jazz drumming came when he started keeping time on the ride cymbal instead of in the bass drum, which allowed the soloists to play more freely and the drummer to add more dramatic accents to the music along. Drummer Stan Levey commented on this saying, “I came to realize that, because of him, drumming was no longer just time, it was music.” He died in 2007 of health complications. Max was inducted into the the International Percussive Art Society’s Hall of Fame, and the DownBeat Hall of Fame, received eight honorary doctorate degrees, and was the subject of a PBS documentary titled Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes.
Listen to some of his work:
Joy Spring (with Clifford Brown)
Documentary: Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes
The full documentary is available to PBS members here: Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes
Watch an excerpt of it here: How Max Roach Fused Jazz And Hip Hip (PBS)
