TT 361: Max Roach in 1958/1959

Three Albums with Booker Little and George Coleman

The Max Roach centenary occurred a few weeks ago in January. Belatedly, I’d like to shine a light on one corner of his marvelous discography as a leader. Three LPs were tracked in five months for three different labels; the instrumentation is distinctive for the era, for there’s no piano and the first two feature Ray Draper on tuba.

Deeds, Not Words (recorded September 1958, released on Riverside) with Booker Little, George Coleman, Ray Draper, Art Davis.

Award-Winning Drummer (recorded November 1958, released on Time) with the same personnel.

The Many Sides of Max (recorded January 1959, released belatedly in 1964 on Mercury) with same personnel but Julian Priester on trombone replacing Ray Draper.

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This same band can first be heard in the summer of 1958 on Max Roach + 4 at Newport. The purpose of the ensemble at that juncture seemed to be about playing as fast as possible, or what they called “the Max Roach tempo.” Probably the one person who always sounded good way up there at the Max Roach tempo was incandescent Sonny Rollins, who recorded definitive examples “B. Swift” and “B. Quick” on Tour De Force with Roach on drums.

For the Newport set, the band plays three tunes at the Max Roach tempo, “La Villa,” “Tune Up,” and an impressively abstract “Love for Sale.” The leader sounds inspired by the festival crowd and young virtuosos Booker Little and George Coleman are dealing as well as they can, but frankly tuba solos at the Max Roach tempo are a little silly.

The band is practicing in public, getting their etudes together. Things settle down for the well-paced studio trilogy in the fall and winter.

Max Roach had been with Clifford Brown in one of all-time great groups in 1954 — 1956. In some ways the music of Brown/Roach shares a similar aesthetic to the Miles Davis, Art Blakey, and Horace Silver groups of the same era. It was the dawn of what the critics called “hard bop”: bebop language but with more gospel and dance in the mix. In the 40’s, Roach and Blakey backed the brilliant horns of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. In the 50’s, these drummers became more prominent, playing more aggressively behind solos and featuring Afro-Cuban inspired ensemble feels and drum cadenzas.

As the decade moved on, Blakey and especially Silver would double down on being funky. Davis would feature simpler and simpler themes to showcase John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the dawn of modal thinking, culminating in the genre-defining Kind of Blue in August 1959.

Roach’s cerebral and stark records with Booker Little and George Coleman stand far apart from Silver, Blakey, or Davis. The main influence seems to be within the band: By several accounts, Booker Little was almost the musical director of the ‘58/’59 Roach group. Indeed, there is a smooth thread from the Roach/Little records to Little’s most fully realized album as a composer, 1961’s Out Front, which also features three horns plus Max Roach.

Before we get to Booker Little further, let’s consider another antecedent. To my ears, the ‘58/’59 Roach trilogy seems to be some kind of extension of Birth of the Cool, the famous Miles Davis sessions from 1949 with either Max Roach or Kenny Clarke in the drum chair. Birth of the Cool offered modernist compositional gambits and acres of tight arranging boasting a somewhat specialized low instrument, the tuba.

While early brass band jazz depended on the tuba for a basic bass line, the instrument was replaced by string bass. The tuba was generally not part of the horn section in swing era big bands; the exception was Claude Thornhill’s group, known among musicians as the “experimental” big band, where a tuba blended into the brass section as a low voice not unlike the baritone sax in the reed section.

(Three weeks ago, Billy Hart was interviewed on the Jazz Cruise. Hart played on the experimental Miles Davis album On the Corner, and when Shelly Berg asked Hart about that session, Hart said, “It was the combination of Claude Thornhill and Les McCann.”)

Gil Evans wrote for Thornhill; Gil Evans was also part of the Birth of the Cool brain trust. There’s tuba in the Birth of the Cool ensemble, on the 1957 Miles Davis/Gil Evans collaboration Miles Ahead, and on many other Gil Evans projects. Indeed, it can be argued that nobody did more for modern jazz tuba than Gil Evans.

However, the Roach trilogy at hand doesn’t really relate to the impressionistic soundscapes of Gil Evans, and in truth a rich Gil Evans-style palette is hard to achieve with only three horns and no piano.

Instead, a major influence on Roach seems to be certain aspects of John Lewis, who had contributed charts and played piano for some of the Birth of the Cool sessions. For Award Winning Drummer, Roach does a complicated contrapuntal arrangement of Lewis’s “Milano,” and the liner notes state, “A former student at the Manhattan School of Music, Max also had private lessons with Vittorio Giannini, head of that department at the school and a man with whom John Lewis has also studied.” One gets the impression that John Lewis and Max Roach compared notes from their shared teacher.

(Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, a noted composer and future Roach collaborator, also studied with Vittorio Giannini. On the Giannini Wiki page, Herbie Hancock also gets a name-check as a Giannini student.)

John Lewis remains best known for a lifetime of Modern Jazz Quartet with Milt Jackson, Percy Heath, and Connie Kay. The MJQ is fabulous, but it also usually fairly conservative in outlook. However, in his early years, Lewis was occasionally aligned with those seeking to put a few esoteric and idiosyncratic spikes and burps into bebop, including Miles Davis, Max Roach, George Russell, Gil Evans, Gunther Schuller, Lennie Tristano, and others.

The two Lewis pieces that seem to lead into the ‘58/’59 Roach trilogy both feature Miles Davis.

“Morpheus” is a wild blues recorded in 1951 with Roy Haynes on drums. I first learned of this track in the Haynes interview with Amiri Baraka collected in Black Music. Haynes plays the work for Baraka on his home stereo, and the critic calls it “amazingly avant-garde.”

The whole track is excellent, but it is also fair to say there’s a disconnect between the aggressively modernist ensemble from Lewis’s imagination and the comparatively straight blowing on a Charlie Parker-style bebop blues. At any rate, Haynes’s drum breaks complete the theme statement in a manner that foreshadows many future Max Roach tracks, for example Roach’s own “Pies of Quincy” on Award-Winning Drummer.

(Other modernist John Lewis pieces on record include film music for Odds Against Tomorrow, “Exposure” for MJQ plus chamber ensemble, and “Sumadija” for the Harold Farberman tribute project Dedicated to Eric Dolphy.)

“Three Little Feelings” is the other John Lewis composition that seems notably relevant to the ‘58/’59 Roach group. Recorded in 1956, this superlative piece for Miles Davis, brass ensemble, Milt Hinton and Osie Johnson should be better-known.

Tuba maestro Bill Barber played with Claude Thornhill before holding the low end down on Birth of the Cool and Miles Ahead. Barber is also large and in charge on “Three Little Feelings.”

The opening movement of “Three Little Feelings” is Neo-Baroque, somewhat like J.S. Bach. Compared to the abstract “Morpheus,” this Neo-Baroque approach might more of the kind of thing we usually expect from John Lewis, for it relates to stately Lewis melodies like “Django” and Lewis fugues like “Concorde.”

It is telling that there is little piano on the head of “Morpheus” and no piano on “Three Little Feelings.” Lewis’s lean and contrapuntal conception seems to be a key aspect of the sound of the piano-less 1958/’59 Max Roach group. The opening track of Award-Winning Drummer, “Tuba de Nod,” was composed by Roach himself in a Neo-Baroque style.

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Everything discussed on the page so far is “brainy.” It’s “hit the books,” it’s “go to your room and practice those fast tempos.” But there’s another side to the Max Roach aesthetic, a side that might be summed up by the word “community,” meaning of course “African-American community.”

“Community” doesn’t just mean musical techniques like “blues,” “swing,” “soul” and so forth. “Community” also means “bring the kids along.” The band is young. Booker Little is 20, George Coleman is 23, Art Davis is 24, Ray Draper is all of 17.

In the liner notes to Award Winning Drummer, Roach says of Draper:

I think he’ll do it if he’ll stick with it long enough and concentrate. Physically, it will also take him time to get the chops necessary for the instrument. The tune [“Tuba de Nod”] means more or less “sleepy tuba.” Ray’s made a lot of progress on the instrument, and already is proving his point that its potential is much more than has been indicated in jazz history so far. Now he must make it a living entity.

In the above quote Roach is honest, essentially saying, “Draper isn’t there yet, but he’s trying.” Roach is right. The tuba in the ensembles is delightful, but the tuba improvisations are more like a wacky special effect. Roach gave the kid a chance, including recording Draper’s own charming composition "Filidé," but moved on fairly quickly. When Julian Priester (only 22 at the time) takes over for Draper on The Many Sides of Max, the ensembles are still rich but the Priester trombone solos make more sense then the Draper tuba solos.

Perhaps Ray Draper relates a bit to Richie Powell in the famous Clifford Brown/Max Roach group. Richie Powell doesn’t rate many column inches in most jazz history books, and frankly the piano solos on the famous records with Clifford Brown/Harold Land or Clifford Brown/Sonny Rollins are not giving the heavy horns much competition. However, Clifford Brown and Max Roach must have thought, “Let’s give Bud’s younger brother a chance.” It was a good decision: McCoy Tyner was directly inspired by Richie Powell’s suspended chords on “Delilah,” Harold Mabern learned the piano intro to “Joy Spring” note-for-note. (I transcribed these significant Richie Powell moments here.)

“Community” means “let people make their contribution.” It’s not at all like European classical music, where a composer writes the notes in isolation and the players treat the score as a complete set of instructions. “Community” means, “Let’s hear from the kid brother and that young man toting the big tuba.” Over the course of jazz history, countless crucial additions to common practice have been made by people who never saw their name on a marquee.

(The Miles Davis album On the Corner already appears on this page. Corner! Both McCoy Tyner and Dewey Redman wrote tunes about this aspect of the community: Tyner with “Blues on the Corner” and Redman with “Corner Culture.” Redman said the “corner” should have actually been called “the communications center.” Perhaps I’m being overly romantic, but I wonder how many gigs in this music were assembled “on the corner,” for example when a quasi-elder showed up to ask the crew a question like, “Anyone play bass?”)

“Community” doesn’t just mean give the players a chance, it means gives the composers a chance. Deeds, Not Words feature two sophisticated pieces from Bill Lee, who went on to be a noted session bassist, film composer, and the father of Spike Lee. Talented family: The Many Sides of Max feature two equally sophisticated pieces from Bill’s sister Consuela Lee Moorehead.

“Deeds, Not Words” by Bill Lee:

“Prelude” by Consuela Lee Moorehead:

The siblings seem to share some of the same sort of dark, dissonant contrapuntal ideas. Tadd Dameron taken a step further. Just gorgeous writing from both.

The Many Sides of Max also includes a piece from Richard Abrams, “Lepa,” a hard-bop charger in the manner of something like Clifford Brown’s “Daahoud.” It would be hard to guess this piece as coming from the pen of Abrams, who is so much better known as Muhal, the patriarch of experimental sounds emanating from the AACM.

The horns don’t improvise on “Lepa.” Roach takes center stage instead, playing one of his trademark melodic drum solos against Art Davis’s walking bass line. This must be one of the earliest occasions when this particular texture was captured on record.

Of course, most of the tunes on all three albums do feature horn blowing. George Coleman and Booker Little were part of the powerful Memphis contingent but met Roach in Chicago. In terms of heat and light generated in a studio environment — not always a sure thing — Deeds, Not Words might be the most intense. “You Stepped Out of Dream” burns bright with brilliant playing from tenor and trumpet. The key is D major. The tempo is brisk but they have time to think about what they are playing, it is not quite the breakneck velocity of the fabled “Max Roach tempo.”

George Coleman was always nothing less than perfect, and still sounds great today. His tenor saxophone lines are secure within the language.

Booker Little was a forward thinking musician. The trumpet solo on “You Stepped Out a Dream” displays a deeply personal and creative attitude.

Little was just at the beginning of a tragically short but very important career. In the 1960s, participated in more music led by Roach including the landmark albums connected to the Civil Rights movement, We Insist! and Percussion Bitter Suite. A crucial collaboration with Eric Dolphy yielded amazing albums both live and in the studio. And, of course, Little’s own albums are of vital interest, especially his unusual modernist monument, Out Front.

The word “out” seemed important. Little said, Out Front. Dolphy said, Outward Bound, Out There, Out To Lunch.

Little’s spectacular solo on “You Stepped Out of Dream” is striving to break out of convention. First know the rules, then…into orbit we go! Little’s ‘50’s albums with Roach document something of his quick progress into the stratosphere.

A final word about Max Roach. Roach always sounds fantastic, but there’s perhaps a particular perceptible melodic magic when there’s no piano. Throughout the trilogy, Roach’s four limbs work in perfect harmony. Nobody tuned their kit like Max Roach.

Nobody kept up like Roach, either, his art was perpetually avant-garde, from day one with Charlie Parker through the 1976-1982 duos recently discussed by Vinnie Sperrazza.

The ‘58/’59 trilogy was fresh then, and these albums are still fresh now.

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Bonus track: A few years ago I wrote about Max Roach’s Members Git Weary from 1968.