Max Roach

Max Roach rebuilt how jazz drums worked. In the swing era the bass drum kept the steady beat; Roach and his peers moved the timekeeping up to the ride cymbal, freeing the hands and feet to punctuate, accent, and converse with the soloists. That shift made bebop’s speed and flexibility possible. Without it the music doesn’t exist.

He was a melodic drummer, which sounds like a contradiction until you hear him. He tuned his drums, thought in phrases, built solos with real shape and logic instead of just flash. He could play a whole chorus that felt composed. Drummers still study how he made the kit sing.

In the mid-1950s he co-led a fiery quintet with the young trumpet star Clifford Brown, one of the great hard-bop bands, until Brown’s death in a car crash devastated him. Roach kept going, and kept growing more ambitious.

He also refused to keep politics out of the music. His 1960 We Insist! Freedom Now Suite put the civil rights struggle front and center, a landmark of jazz as protest. For the rest of his life he treated the drums as an instrument equal to any other, capable of carrying ideas as large as freedom itself.