♪♪
-[ Drumming ]
♪♪
-Do you consider this music as a weapon?
♪♪
-You mean as a weapon in the fight
against discrimination and things like that?
-Yes. -Sometimes the music is used,
say, to make people feel happy and joy,
but on some occasions, we do use the music as a weapon
against man's inhumanity toward man.
-It is with great pleasure that I present to you
Mr. Max Roach.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-[ Drumming ]
♪♪
Well, jazz is, to me, a nickname.
To me, it's synonymous to "nigger" and things like that.
That's not the proper name
for African-American instrumental music.
[ Drumming continues ]
♪♪
It never was a name that we, as musicians, gave to it.
It was a name that just was given to it.
-So you're not a jazz musician?
-No, I'm an African-American musician,
and that's the kind of music that I play...
or I attempt to play.
-The Max Roach archive at the Library of Congress
is extensive -- stills, audio recordings.
Oh, I've seen this one already.
He knew that to document his legacy would be very important.
These are the '80s. -Mm-hmm.
-Check this out.
I began this film in 1987, so it's 35 years.
That's a long journey.
In 1983, I was editing a documentary
about the poet Langston Hughes, and one of the sequences
was Max performing to one of Langston Hughes' poems.
-[ Drumming ]
-Seeing Max Roach sit behind a drum set,
he had a regal quality about him.
It was like no wasted motion.
Just wonderful, man.
And I remember saying, "Somebody should do a film on Max Roach."
[ Beep ]
I had never directed anything. I was just an editor.
But in 1987, I was able to do my first sit-down
on-camera interview with Max at his house
up on Central Park West.
-I got the cameras on me, and Sam is shooting,
telling us where to go,
and Juan has got his camera on me now.
-And we shot Max and his wonderful band M'Boom
in the rehearsal session performing Monk's tunes.
[ Mid-tempo tune plays ]
♪♪
And unbeknownst to me, Ben Shapiro, a fellow filmmaker,
was doing audio recordings with Max Roach.
Ben was a drummer,
and he had been studying Max's music and this book
that had many exercises that had Max's approach to the drums.
-[ Drumming ]
-The drum set itself, that is a uniquely American innovation.
-So I learned that as I was shooting Max Roach,
Ben was doing a long audio interview
where Max documented his whole life story.
-I'm into the whole political thing.
To me, everything has that kind of meaning to it, you know?
[ Drumming ]
-Now after three decades, we're finishing this film
to tell the story of Max Roach.
Ready? -Mm-hmm.
-Thank you, Maxine,
sitting down finally to do an interview.
How come, you think, in your opinion,
that your dad's not as recognized today,
even in the 21st century, as Miles Davis is?
-I think it's the path he took...
[ Doorbell rings ] ...his life and politics.
-Hi, there. How are you doing? -How are you?
And then maybe it's just the way we are trained to hear music.
You know, the drummer is not really supposed to be the lead,
and he fought against that, and he created.
You know, his drum inventions are just beautiful.
-[ Drumming ]
♪♪
-Max has this way of playing
that seems so effortless.
♪♪
-[ Laughs ] But when you understand what it is,
it's quite unique and it's...
Yeah. It's deep.
[ Camera shutter clicks ]
♪♪
-I guess from the very beginning,
my aspirations were to be involved in music,
and especially this music that we call jazz.
-The music was the salvation. It was like sports is today.
It's like basketball. That was it.
We'd go to sit in the theaters on Saturdays all day
with our lunch and watch these wonderful musicians.
-My father bought me my first set of drums
for graduating elementary school.
That was the only gift I wanted.
And I would set the drum up right
so that when I got out of my bed in the mornings to go to school,
my bed was the drum seat.
So I would get up in the morning before I'd go to school
and actually just sit at them drums and imagine
that I was Papa Jo or Big Sidney Catlett.
I couldn't play that early and couldn't wait to get home.
Now this is 13, 14. -Right.
-So after I finished whatever chores my family
had for me to do and finished my homework,
just sit down and play them drums
until it was -- until the neighbors would come to the door
and say, "Well, Mrs. Roach, that boy is just making
too much noise."
[ Drumming ]
♪♪
But that kind of discipline,
you become almost a fanatic to it
after you get involved in it.
♪♪
[ Applause ]
-And so once again, ladies and gentlemen,
we take our WMCA microphones right down to the Royal Roost,
bringing you the new sound,
Charlie Parker and the All-Stars --
Miles Davis on trumpet, the great Max Roach on drums.
-We started the so-called bebop movement.
We had a little coalition of folks, if you will --
Dizzy and Charlie Parker,
Bud Powell, Monk, and Miles.
We all kind of clung together.
For whatever reasons, we related to each other,
and we hated to sleep.
We would work from 9:00 till 9:00 the next morning
in two different clubs.
[ Up-tempo tune plays ]
We would then go up to Dizzy's house on 7th Avenue
and sit down and exchange ideas
and talk about different musicians and analyze styles.
-We were just young musicians.
Wherever the music was, we would go.
So I'd always go to Max's house and sit in the corner
and watch and listen, 'cause he always had
all the heavyweights there with this new music.
So one day, Max said, "Hey, Randy,
play one of your songs for Charlie Parker."
Man, Sam, I was like this,
'cause Charlie Parker was not only a great musician,
he was a powerful, spiritual human being.
Something about him was very sp-- I can't explain it.
♪♪
-When Miles and I were working with Charlie Parker,
his first piece would be his warm-up piece.
It'd be the fastest thing we'd perform for that night.
And it would just destroy Miles and myself.
You know, I'd be puffing and blowing.
Miles would be, you know, just --
it would just reduce us to nothing.
He'd just breeze through it.
And we would practice all day to get ready for this gentleman.
I had a lot of freedom working with Charlie Parker.
He would just write one sheet of music for Miles.
He'd write a trumpet part.
And he'd look over at me and just tell me
that I had freedom to do what I wanted to do.
I would find my own way.
[ Drumming ]
-Early bebop just had that shock of the new.
It was just something challenging, intimidating.
You know, people just really couldn't figure out
where you're supposed to pat your foot.
[ Up-tempo tune plays ]
And all of that is by design, you know?
Rhythmically, melodically, harmonically,
they wanted to just get up in the music
and then just start toying with every aspect of it.
♪♪
There was a confrontational quality
forcing the audience to receive them on their own terms.
And, of course, it changed the content,
the form, the virtuosity level of jazz forever.
-It just blew my mind to hear music played
as well as they did with this new flavor
and new harmonic, and the speed.
♪♪
-The first time I heard Bird's group,
you know, it was interesting.
I didn't dislike it,
but eventually...
I got what they were doing, you know?
Then I realized that this was the music for our generation,
what Charlie Parker was doing and Max.
-There was no other kind of music for me but that.
And night after night, Marlon Brando and myself
and a couple of others just sit there
and listen to one great genius after the other.
♪♪
Bebop wasn't just being sweet and joyous
like Louis Armstrong.
It came by as an outraged expression
of the time in which we lived,
and it found great synergy with young Black people.
♪♪
-It was a new political feeling among the guys.
You know, this is right after the war,
and Bird and Max and Miles
exemplified that.
♪♪
-I'm just so glad I came up with that kind of influence,
because they were so progressive,
and the goal was to get jazz musicians
so they did not just have to entertain.
They wanted to be an artist just like Stravinsky.
[ Down-tempo tune plays ]
♪♪
-In the late '40s, most artists used something
before they'd perform to give them that lift,
and marijuana -- that was the big thing,
and also cocaine, but cocaine might be, like, New Year's Eve.
That was a rich man's drug.
Then all of a sudden, the powers that be
put out this drug that nobody ever heard of before.
What's the difference?
It doesn't smell,
very cheap, gets you high, and nobody knows.
Nobody knew what it was.
And they came with this heroin, and this thing spread.
-And so you got in that stupid trend of everybody else,
and that's what Trane and Miles and all of us did.
But we weren't the only ones.
Max had delved, too.
-I was in a bad way as far as drugs
and other things were concerned.
I got in trouble, and I got locked up.
And my mother came to get me out of jail.
She did day work, and she scrubbed people's floors.
And she came, she said, "You know, son,
I got calluses on my knees."
And I thought she meant from scrubbing floors.
So I said, "Mom, when I get out of this nonsense
I'm in now, I'm gonna see to it
that you don't have to do that anymore."
She said, "No, son, I'm not talking about working.
I'm talking about praying.
I'm praying so hard for you to get your act together
till my knees have calluses on them."
And so I decided then I had to change my way of living.
I went to the hospital.
The hospital that took me in was a Catholic hospital.
And the next morning when I woke up,
the sister came into my bed and said that I had a daughter.
My wife was in the hospital, and Maxine was born.
From that day on, my life began to straighten itself out
as far as drugs and all the other things
that were concerned.
-Max, you were very well known
because of the many great records you've made
with both Charlie and Dizzy.
When did you form your own quintet?
-This is about 1953 on the West Coast,
and the great Clifford Brown, Harold Land,
and Richie Powell and George Morrow.
It was the first quintet
that we made some records with that caught on,
I would say, among the jazz public.
♪♪
-The first time I saw Max Roach perform was in Chicago
at a new nightclub called the Beehive.
♪♪
It was Max and Clifford Brown,
and one of my friends leaned over and said something.
"Max is playing so loud I can't hear the rest of the guys."
You know, and Clifford read his lips
and turned around and said something to Max,
and then Max immediately softened down.
And I regarded Max as God, you know,
and the fact that he could accept criticism
from someone that was younger than he showed me
what a sensitive musician he was in the first place, you know?
♪♪
-When I formed the group with Clifford Brown, of course,
then I began to do things that I would do as a leader.
I was responsible for the direction
that the group was going musically, et cetera.
And I had a chance then to develop the things
I felt were important to what I wanted to do with the music.
♪♪
-Beautiful.
Max and Clifford Brown together? Incredible, man.
♪♪
-Man, when we were kids in Philadelphia
and they used to come,
and we would be there for every note,
'cause it was Max leading
one of the most exciting groups of our time,
and Clifford was like a star out of nowhere.
♪♪
-Brownie was one of the most complete musicians
I had worked with.
He could play drums, he played piano,
and he was a good composer.
We shared an apartment together.
And I had a piano in it, so every morning
we'd wake up to see who would get to the piano first.
♪♪
The beginning of this story,
I had heard Clifford Brown originally on a record.
I was in California at a place called the Lighthouse.
I was there -- to go out there on a six-month contract.
It was about 1951.
I'll never forget Howard Rumsey riding me up and down
this beautiful enclave on the Pacific Ocean
out there in California, trying to find an apartment.
John Levine owned the Lighthouse,
so finally Mr. Levine said, "Listen, you know I'm Jewish,
and I had to buy up half of the [bleep]damn town
before I could get a place to live here."
But I'd heard Clifford on the record with J.J. Johnson.
I'll never forget that record.
I called him up, and he said, "Fine," you know.
He was about 22 at that time.
And he had a great sense of humor.
He never engaged in any kind of narcotics
or anything like that.
Never even drank, in fact.
I think one thing that he did do that I found out about
after we had been together about a year
was he loved to play the horses.
[ Laughter ]
Now, that was a contradiction to such a clean living.
-At the Rouge Lounge all this week
is one of the great jazz groups in the country today,
and that's the Max Roach Cliff Brown Ensemble,
and with us tonight is one of the outstanding
jazz trumpeters in the country today,
EmArcy recording star Clifford Brown.
[ Up-tempo tune plays ]
♪♪
-Soft power.
Beautiful, exquisite tone,
but yet it was this controlled power.
Unsurpassed ability to handle that trumpet.
♪♪
-So Max got that group,
and that group really took a hold of the public.
Then it went up another notch when Harold Land left the group
and Sonny Rollins took his place.
-On the tenor saxophone, the guy who brings us all up here
the most pleasure -- Sonny Rollins.
[ Applause ]
The man behind the drum,
undoubtedly the world's greatest -- Max Roach.
[ Applause ]
I play the trumpet. My name is Clifford Brown.
[ Applause ]
[ Up-tempo tune plays ]
♪♪
-If you have a Clifford Brown and a Sonny Rollins,
that's a heck of a group.
So you write accordingly, and you give them so much
and they take it to another level.
♪♪
-Okay. Wow. Boy, I haven't heard that in 5 million years.
That band was really going strong.
Max Roach Clifford Brown Band,
or Clifford Brown Max Roach Band.
It didn't matter, because they were that cool
about ego and all this stuff.
With them, it didn't matter.
-The relationship we had was something like
nothing I'd ever experienced before.
We respected and loved each other,
and it was really like a family.
We protected each other.
And they all listened to me because I was the oldest.
-Everybody had their own music,
but, you know, the concept of the band,
as far as I can see, was Max Roach.
Max Roach was really the figure.
His drum style and everything
was what the band was about, really.
Plus, he was a god before I played with him.
Yeah, he was a great drummer, but then everybody knew Max
as sort of a big celebrity in the Black community.
I mean, it wasn't just the music community we knew him,
but he then became like a movie star.
-Go, Max!
-[ Drumming ]
-The guys that were top drummers were Art Blakey and Max Roach.
So Art Blakey was more the elemental guy.
I mean, when you go back to Africa,
did those guys study how to read music, anything?
No. They had it.
They have that -- that thing.
Max had that,
but he was also a more finessed, polished drummer.
To me, his drum style was like heaven.
Playing with Max was like heaven.
When you play, somebody's got to answer you.
And when they play, you've got to answer them.
Bam, you answer me.
Oh, right, then I can do something else.
That's why I say Max is heavenly,
because he's feeding me.
He's making me think of something to play.
He's playing something that makes me want to play.
You see what I mean?
♪♪
-Max Roach Clifford Brown Group,
recording-wise and performance-wise,
they were all over the country.
-And we were off. That was it.
We worked like -- we could work 52 weeks a year.
It was amazing.
Just a moment that presented itself.
We stayed eight weeks in St. Louis,
eight weeks in Chicago, come out to the West Coast
and open a club for four weeks.
We were doing very, very well
traveling up and down this country.
And Brownie drove a car, and I drove a car.
♪♪
-We had to stay in some funky hotels.
And I don't like funky hotels.
Broken-down hotels which were in the neighborhood,
Black neighborhood.
-When African-Americans came back from the Second World War,
a lot of us expected a change in how African people were treated.
But in the '50s, nothing had changed.
Jim Crow, racism -- it was all there.
-Restaurants -- you could go in restaurants
and you couldn't sit down and eat.
You know, you could take some out, take it out.
They'd stand there and take the food and go out
and take it in your car or in the bus
or whatever we had to travel in.
I went through that era.
And that's -- You know, it's horrible, man.
You know, you can't sit down in a restaurant?
Come on. What am I gonna do?
-So it was tough being a Black musician back then?
-Oh, definitely.
-He did tell me once that he was stopped by the police
in New Jersey, and the police said,
"If you're a musician, play something for us."
[ Chuckles ] And my father threw his drumsticks
at the police officer, and said, "Mother[bleep] you play."
You know, and that didn't turn out well.
But he said something which moved me so much
about that period.
He said that if he didn't have the drums,
he would have picked up guns.
♪♪
-We were playing in front of people that,
whatever else they had to go through in life,
they needed their music,
and they needed the guys that gave it to them,
and we were those people.
It was great. It was like an honor.
-Yeah. -You know?
-Now it's our pleasure to present Clifford Brown,
playing for you "Tenderly."
[ Down-tempo tune plays ]
♪♪
-The Max Roach Clifford Brown Group was performing
at the Showboat in Philadelphia.
That night they were gonna get in the car
and go to Pittsburgh, I think it was.
Max didn't go that night.
He was gonna go the next night
and meet them there or something.
But Clifford and Richard Powell, the piano player,
Nancy -- I didn't know her last name,
but she and Richard had just gotten married --
they got in the car together,
those three got on the turnpike,
and that's when they had the accident
on the Pennsylvania Turnpike,
and all of them died.
♪♪
-I was at a session.
We got a call that Clifford was in a car
with Bud Powell's brother and his girlfriend,
and it was raining.
Clifford was laying down in the back seat,
and the truck hit them, cut his body in half at 25.
Got killed.
Imagine what would happen if he'd lived to 50.
Boy, he was something else.
-Gee, this is -- this is hard for me to try to recount, man,
because it was such a...
a bad day.
It's just a lesson in life.
You learn a little bit about life,
because Brownie was like a -- was like a little angel.
You know, that was like an angel.
How could something happen to Brownie?
And when that happened, of course, everybody was...
You know, we was crying like babies, all of us.
♪♪
-Clifford -- he was a joy to work with.
That particular ingredient that we find in people
that we all say, "Well, he's a genius,"
and at such a young age to have done so much musically
and to have contributed so much,
it was one of the high points of my life.
♪♪
[ Applause ]
-Max suffered.
Max suffered, man.
Max really suffered.
Max was getting -- Max had gotten to the point --
and I don't know if this has even
ever been spoken about, but...
I wonder, shouldIspeak about it now,
as a matter of fact, because it's so personal.
But Max suffered. I can say that.
He really took it hard, man.
It really took Max a while to...
to bounce back from that.
You know, it was rough.
[ Down-tempo piano tune plays ]
♪♪
-♪ When that ship began to sail ♪
♪ It was like a bird without a tail ♪
♪ And when that bird began to fly ♪
♪ It was like an eagle in the sky ♪
♪ And when the sky began to roar ♪
♪ It was like a lion at the door ♪
♪ And when the door began to crack ♪
♪ 'Twas like a stick across my back ♪
♪ And when my back began to smart ♪
♪ It was like a penknife in my heart ♪
♪ And when my heart ♪
♪ Began to bleed ♪
♪ 'Twas death ♪
♪ And death indeed ♪
♪♪
-When Clifford Brown died, everything altered.
And my mother said that after the accident,
my father was just screaming against God.
It was a pivotal breakdown, you know,
of all the dreams and hopes for himself and his family.
And then soon after that, they were divorced.
You know, there were five years after that
that we saw our father not often.
-After Clifford died, that shattered him.
He would talk about how he went into an alcohol binge,
and that life was hard.
But that anger he felt from his head to his toes,
when it came out.
-He had a temper.
And he was able to...
funnel that temper into his music, ultimately.
But if he wasn't doing that, you could be -- it could be --
When you're downwind of it, it can be devastating.
-We were scheduled to perform
at the Pep's Showbar in Philadelphia.
[ Up-tempo tune plays ]
Max's drums were behind me,
and in the middle of my solo, the drums stop.
So I kind of look behind me,
and Max was climbing over the drums,
coming toward me with a look on his face
that made me put my trombone down
and get ready for this onslaught that was on its way.
And then we wrestle.
And Max has been in this psychological turmoil
that he was in.
It was something that I couldn't fault him.
-He made missteps.
With his family, he made missteps.
With his music, he made missteps.
But when I look at my father's life,
there were pivotal people who he allowed in
to rescue him, in a way.
[ Mid-tempo tune plays ]
-♪ There's a land of milk and honey ♪
-This beautiful young lady is very special to me --
Abbey Lincoln, the voice of our group.
-♪ Every day ♪
♪ It's bright and sunny ♪
-She was a star when I met her.
She was very young.
Everything seemed to come natural for Abbey.
She was always herself.
-I didn't know who he was.
I didn't know anything about bebop.
But, anyway, they told him that he should come and see me,
and he did.
And he was very attentive and wonderful.
We had a lot of fun.
And then when it came time for him to sign the check,
I was impressed because his concentration was something
I had never really witnessed before.
He was suddenly gone from where we were,
and he was concentrating on the check.
And I noticed his hands,
and I thought, "What a beautiful man."
♪ Spread the word, spread the gospel ♪
♪ Let the congregation know that a cornet ♪
♪ Was the downfall of the walls of Jericho ♪
I was working supper clubs
and wearing this dress [chuckles]
and bouncing on the stage
so my breasts would jiggle a little.
It wasn't funny to me, though.
I've always taken myself seriously,
so it wasn't easy to make light of my life like that.
And I saw Max Roach again, and he said to me,
"You don't have to do that.
Come here. You don't have to do that."
And he started to teach me,
and he started to take care of me.
All I had to do was what he said.
[ Laughs ]
I was pretty good at that.
After a while, though, my independent spirit
wouldn't allow it.
But he helped me.
He saved my life,
because I was lost.
I really was.
♪♪
I brought to the relationship my experiences
as somebody who worked in show business.
And he brought to me the approach of the artist.
But the collaboration was wonderful,
because for the first time, it was a Black man and woman.
[ Mid-tempo tune plays ]
-Well, Abbey, besides being one of the world's
most beautiful women,
is an exceptionally talented human being.
Of course, she's not only a fine singer,
but she's a poet and a playwright,
and we all know she's an actress, you see.
She has helped me a great deal
to -- to write more
and to engage myself in the theater
on a musical level, you see.
-♪ Ain't you got no sweet love in you ♪
♪ My, how you carry on ♪
♪ Ohhhh ♪
Strange, but having met Max
seemed to point up things for me.
I had a chance to find out what made me tick.
♪♪
♪ Ain't you got no sweet love in you? ♪
♪ My, how you carry on ♪
♪ My, how you do ♪
♪ You do carry on ♪
♪♪
-Ethnically speaking, you know, it was like
we looked up to them as the shining example, you know?
-They both were so talented,
so aware of who they were, where they were,
the conditions that were impacting their goals.
-Max and Abbey had a chance to make their statement,
and it was needed.
It was needed.
I'm glad it turned out
pretty successful as a record, you know?
[ Tambourine rattling ]
-♪ Ain't but two things on my mind ♪
♪ Driva' man and quittin' time ♪
♪ Driva' man the kind of boss ♪
♪ Ride a man and lead a horse ♪
♪ When his cat o' nine tail fly ♪
♪ You be happy just to die ♪
♪ Run away and you'll be found ♪
♪ By his big old red bone hound ♪
♪ Pateroller bring you back ♪
♪ Make you sorry you is Black ♪
♪ Driva' man, he made a life ♪
♪ But a Mamie ain't his wife ♪
♪ Ain't but two things on my mind ♪
♪ Driva' man and quittin' time ♪
-I became an advocate, I guess, politically speaking.
We thought the country was gonna change
and things were gonna be better in education
and labor and equality and all this.
It was like that dream
that everybody was hoping would happen.
So I got caught up in it intellectually, emotionally,
and musically.
Since I had the stage and I was recording,
if I could say something, I said it,
whether it was through my music or whatever,
because I have a stake in this country as well as anybody else.
-As a young kid, I would play with my parents' records.
I would just pull the records out
and look at all the amazing images,
black-and-white images
in particular, and also sometimes abstract art,
'cause in certain record stores
where people might have been racist,
it'd be better to put just a piece of art on the cover
as opposed to these Black men that are just making music.
And there was one record in particular
that really fascinated me
and kind of disturbed me,
and this record was "We Insist!"
the Max Roach "Freedom Now Suite."
You see these brothers looking serious, turned,
looking at the camera, at the viewer,
and behind them is a white guy.
Clearly, he wasn't trying to serve them.
And what my parents would explain to me
was that's a protest going on at a lunch counter.
Like, we are demanding the right
to be able to come into this establishment.
We insist on these rights.
And later when I would grow up,
I would learn that this was what many people consider
one of America's first official protest records.
-Idea of the whole piece was to trace from Africa,
across the Atlantic, in chains to the plantations,
and then the fight for freedom.
-Even today, a lot of people, even African-Americans,
they don't want to hear about slavery or whatever.
It's like, that's a long time ago.
Let's just be cool and whatever.
But to celebrate our people having gone through that
and surviving that and still having a lot of spirit,
to create, like, a whole musical theme and statement about that
is just brave, I think.
-I was very proud to have been a part of that.
It was a learning experience for me,
because up to that point,
I was more interested in performing.
I was interested in playing some bebop.
[ Laughs ] And it was wonderful, you know.
It gave me purpose.
-Max was very conscious about his Blackness
and was very much into uniting Black Americans
with the African nation.
He felt socially responsible to educate people
about the things that he knew.
And that's the Max that I knew.
-Yeah, the "Freedom Now Suite"...
Yeah. I don't think --
Has anything been done like that since?
[ Mid-tempo tune plays ]
-♪ Eeeee ♪
♪ Oooooooh ♪
♪ I-eeeeeeeeee ♪
-This particular piece, "Tears for Johannesburg,"
was to commemorate the memory
of all those young people who were killed in Johannesburg
during the military insurrection on the students.
-♪ I-eeeee ♪
-And so that piece was dedicated to them.
-Even before the Civil Rights and Black Power movements
and Panthers and all those folks made this connection
between movement for justice here,
movement for justice in Africa,
you know, he just kind of made a line in the sand,
said, "This is how my music is gonna address
this worldwide movement for justice."
-It resonated with us.
"Freedom Now Suite" was our quest
for liberation in South Africa and in Africa...
♪♪
...because there was somebody, you know,
who really cared.
♪♪
He made us all understand that there are no boundaries.
There are no boundaries in the human experience
and no boundaries in music, because Max's work is really
about how you relate to another human being.
♪♪
So there was this interlinking interconnection
with experience and quests.
It was our story.
♪♪
The regime saw it as a threat.
The music was subversive,
and that's why they banned it.
-The album was barred
from being further imported into South Africa,
and it reached the national press and became a light hit.
It almost reached the kind of popularity
that went into pop records, because the times warranted it.
-The apartheid government said in the future they were gonna
keep an eye out for work by Negro artists from America
that had the word "freedom" in the title.
♪♪
-I just looked at a picture the other day of the premiere
of "For Love of Ivy," and they're wearing dashikis.
[ Laughs ] You know? And I was just --
Nobody was doing that.
Everybody was wearing sharkskin suits
and, you know, slicked-back hair.
And it was really like, "We're Black,
we're claiming the pride of being
who we are as natural people,
and we don't have to be anybody else but ourselves."
-I remember one day they came to the house,
and I was a little boy, and I was like,
"Why does her hair look like that?"
'Cause then all Black women were ironing and pressing
and straightening and perming their hair.
And later I realized that Abbey Lincoln
had one of the first natural hairdos,
one of the first Afros, which would become ubiquitous.
So I always remembered, like,
man, I saw that before the world saw that.
And then as I would grow older and understand more,
I just realized how courageous they were to do those things.
-I didn't see myself as an imitation of anybody,
but an original.
And that spooked a lot of people.
It's amazing what'll spook people.
They said I was a rebel, but I felt beautiful.
I felt beautiful and whole.
-When I first saw Abbey Lincoln,
Abbey came there one Sunday afternoon.
Never forget that.
We were in this, like, room
that was like a smallish auditorium, right,
and light was coming in that Sunday afternoon,
and Abbey came with that amazing natural
that she had on her head,
and she did a lecture on who will revere the Black woman.
-I believe that the role of the Black woman
is the same role she's always played,
that you can only play if you're a woman,
and that is this.
You do whatever is necessary, you know?
That's what we've always done -- whatever came naturally.
If the situation calls for this, you do this.
If it calls for that, you do that.
We all know what we're doing.
[ Laughter ]
-Very well put. [ Laughter ]
I've heard people say we're not together.
That's a state of mind.
All I have to do is say we're together,
he says we were together, he says we were together,
you say when we're together, any time,
when people say you're not together,
it's another one of those little phrases
that if you grasp at it, you're going to be hung with it.
A lot of this stuff here we're gonna have to start
weeding out, like little phrases that tend to make us look down
on ourselves at any point, in any way possible.
-They were originators,
and it made us originate also, to be originators.
And you could not go back.
You could not turn around.
You had to go forward.
And you went forward with a fast tongue, right, you know,
and the music on that tongue, you know,
and the curses on that tongue, you know,
and the defiance on that tongue,
but also at the same time, the beauty.
-Very few artists were activists at the time,
and coming to the table with his prestige,
he brought a lot of juice.
I think he influenced a lot of other musicians to come in
and to see how he'd protest through Max's eyes.
-I still have a dream.
It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream
that one day this nation will rise up
to live out the true meaning of its creed.
We hold these truths to be self-evident
that all men are created equal.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-But he ran up against a fierce enemy.
[ Dogs barking, people shouting ]
And certainly those of us who spoke out
against injustice became the target.
[ Woman gasps, men shouting ]
[ Siren wailing ]
-Max is really in the forefront of this critique of America.
People like Fanon and Richard Wright and Malcolm X
and Martin Luther King all paid, you know, a huge price for it.
-You know, these men came along at a time
when it was real rough, you know,
andreallyrough for the Black man.
And, um...
they fought.
They fought.
-I took it to a degree where everything I wrote
and recorded had to do with the movement.
[ Mid-tempo tune plays ]
-♪ Members, don't get weary ♪
♪ Members, don't get weary ♪
Even in my public performances,
I chose to deal with that kind of music
and that kind of attitude, and whenever I did an interview,
the same thing prevailed.
My public performances were curtailed because people said,
"Well, if you hire Max Roach, he's gonna make a speech."
This wasn't entirely true, but I would announce
that this piece is dedicated to Marcus Garvey,
and if you didn't know who Marcus Garvey was,
since we were working downtown,
I would give a short history of Garvey.
Well, that's too much.
So they'd say, "Well, Max, just come in and play music.
You don't have to talk."
-♪ There's a land of milk and honey ♪
♪ Up the river they call the Nile ♪
-So how I really did subsist was to work with the groups
that were doing things like that, like the NAACP.
They premiered the "Freedom Now Suite."
I would perform at rallies from town hall
all the way up to the armory uptown.
Malcolm X, the Muslims would use the entertainment
to bring people in so that they could talk
about the sociopolitical situation
that existed in the United States of America.
-Making political statements in jazz music
was definitely on the radar of the government.
The FBI was banning, blackballing.
J. Edgar Hoover was known to send the feds
to gigs to revoke your musician's license away
so that you couldn't make a living.
-One time I went to meet him,
and I was looking for him and looking for him,
and I couldn't find him.
And I saw a man, and he had a newspaper up,
but it was, like, covered, you know,
like you see in the movies, and I said,
"Well, that's the only person I haven't looked at."
I saw the hands were brown, so I go around,
and he's down like this, and I said, "Max."
He said, "Sit down! Sit down. Sit down.
They're watching me. They're watching me.
Just sit. Sit. I just wanted to see you.
I wanted to see how you're doing."
And I was like, "I'm okay," but you know --
and he kept the paper up, and so finally I was like,
"Max, you got to put the paper down."
I said, "I don't think anybody's here," you know.
-It was painful, frightening, threatening.
It was taxing on him...
economically, certainly,
emotionally.
I remember one time Abbey saying to me, quietly,
"I don't want to scream anymore."
You know?
-[ Drumming ]
-♪ Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah, ahhhhhhh! ♪
♪ Ahhhh ♪
♪ Ahhhhhhh ♪
-I don't know the true dynamics
of the end of Abbey and Dad's relationship,
and he would never talk about it.
But from hindsight, I see that
his sometimes rages wore her down.
You know, and in terms of the rage coming out of him,
I don't see how he could have
navigated through his life without it
in a society that was against you
politically, economically, and socially.
And his expression of it being hard out there --
it's hard out there --
it was something that drove him
to the end of his life.
-The record companies and the industry in general
were putting a lot of pressure on him
to do what Miles did with "Bitches Brew,"
to go electronic, and he refused.
-There were some musicians at that time
who would say to me, "Forget about all of that."
Why not just opt for making a lot of money
and I could buy my freedom?
Of course, I didn't believe that.
But I remember, when I did my last album for Atlantic Records,
I was approached by the brass there,
and they said, "You know, Max, you know,
you're the number-one this and you're number-one that.
You know, you should be rich."
And I said, "Yeah," you know.
"Why not, you know? I could go for that."
And they said, "Well, all you have to do is do material
that's familiar or coattail on hit tunes."
They said, you know, "When people are familiar with things,
they accept them much more readily
than they would with a lot of original material.
New material, that is."
So I thought about it, and I said,
"Ah, the Negro spiritual."
-He says, "Okay, I'll do something popular.
I'll do a gospel album." [ Laughs ]
So he did "Lift Every Voice and Sing."
[ Mid-tempo tune plays ]
[ Choir vocalizing ]
It was a unique combination of jazz quartet
and gospel choir.
[ Choir vocalizing ]
♪♪
I love that album.
-You know, with the church, jazz was forbidden.
It was my desire to bring these two forces together.
It's the kind of material I use with something
like "Singing with a Sword in my Hand,"
"Were You There When They Crucified My Lord,"
which, to me, was a spiritual
that was a testament to a lynching.
And we used the gospel choir and jazz musicians
who improvised all through the arrangements.
-♪ Let the people go ♪
♪ Let the people go ♪
-I dedicated each song to people
like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers.
After the record came out, I called up the brass
and asked them what they thought of it,
and there was a loud silence on the other end of the phone.
But that was the last one I recorded
for a major label at that time.
-Here he was -- he had a new wife, Janus,
and twin infant daughters,
and I think for a while it was hard.
He had become depressed, you know,
felt like a part of his life had ended.
-He asked me to replace Abbey,
and we had a show in Detroit.
All of a sudden, he started cursing me out
on stage in front of the public,
calling me the B-word, and he said, "Get off the stage,"
you know, "Just get off the stage."
I mean, just, it was crazy.
So I went back to the hotel. I was in tears.
And he came into the room and he said, "I'm sorry.
I thought you were Abbey. You look like Abbey."
-I remember one time he went through the house
and broke every drumstick in the house,
even on the little doll -- little African statues.
He would pull out the little ivory drumsticks and snap them.
So when the offer came in for him
to take a professorship up at UMass, he took it.
-I went up there because the students demanded it,
during the period when Black students
were asking for more faculty
and they were seizing the campuses and things like this.
It grew out of this whole '60s movement.
When the students demanded it, the university reached out.
Of all the schools that showed an interest,
UMass was the closest to New York City,
and I felt that I could still do the things I wanted to do,
so I had to move my family there,
and that was good for me, I thought.
-Yeah, this is the house in Amherst.
Wow. Um...
Wow. Look at us.
I have never seen this.
That's me. -That's you?
-I think that's me.
Oh, my goodness.
-He was a responsible father,
and he understood that he had to provide
for himself and for his family.
And it was a way to also connect with students.
We'd have young, you know, aspiring musicians
come over to the house.
He was always mentoring somebody.
-I began to experiment with the students.
You had a 60-voice choir.
♪♪
You had musicians in the music department,
and we would begin to collaborate on doing
large orchestral works that spotlighted percussion
and improvised instrumentalists, so that was a good period for me
because it was good for experimenting.
-I was teaching,
and I got arrested with my students, right?
I came to find out that I wasn't being rehired,
so that's why I went to Amherst.
And we got up to Amherst College.
Man, it is 9:00 a.m. in the morning,
and Max looked like he was
just gotten out of "Gentlemen's Quarterly," right?
He had this hat sitting acey-deucey,
this leather coat -- jacket on,
this turtleneck sweater on.
But Max came over and said,
"We heard you were coming up here.
Welcome. Now you'll be okay."
-There was a community of Black artists, intellectuals,
scholars that he was very closely connected to.
But, you know, he was still Max Roach at that time.
He still wanted to create. He still wanted to perform.
That's who he was.
[ Applause ]
-[ Drumming ]
♪♪
I began to do these drum solos, concerts with drum solos.
You know, the composers and all, they'd say,
"Well, you're just doing a solo with drums."
And I'd say, "Yes, that's what it is."
"You mean to tell me you're gonna play an hour
and a half with drums?"
"Yes."
♪♪
One guy says, "Man, I heard this piece, Max,
but it didn't sound like music to me."
And I say, "Well, in the sense of this area of music,
when you talk about didn't sound like Charlie Parker
or Duke Ellington or Mozart or Bach
or somebody like that, you're right.
But I'm organizing sounds now,
and sound is not restricted
to any particular group of instruments.
This world of sound is infinite."
♪♪
[ Applause ]
♪♪
I wanted to put it all together logically
and create a structure
and a piece of sound architecture that makes sense,
and phrases that are rhythmic
and that come out of the drum set itself.
And M'Boom, of course, uses all those properties.
[ Tapping ]
♪♪
[ Cymbals playing ]
-M'Boom came about because I had this group
of percussion instruments in my studio.
So people like Max Roach and Joe Chambers
would come up there to practice.
We were all there, and it was Max's idea.
After he finished rehearsing, we sat down.
He said, "I'm thinking about starting a percussion ensemble."
-I wanted to hear and create something different
but would still be in the continuum
of what Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker
and Count Basie visualized,
but only with percussion instruments.
-At that time, percussion ensembles
were all strictly, like, snare drums and military.
And Max heard something that was more African.
[ Mid-tempo tune plays ]
♪♪
-The music of Africa is very powerful.
We were taken away from Mother Africa,
but whether we were taken to Brazil or Cuba or Haiti
or Mississippi or Georgia,
we approached life with what Duke says,
"the African pulse," in our music.
♪♪
-We decided we could just do anything we wanted.
It doesn't sound like the African percussion ensembles.
It doesn't sound like the European percussion ensembles.
It doesn't sound like Kodo,
the Japanese percussion ensembles.
We could come up with our own musical personality.
♪♪
[ Laughter ]
-It's a group made of drummers.
That's my worst nightmare.
[ Laughs ]
You know, it's just weird.
You know how many drummers call me up
to like, "Yo, man, let's come over,
let's shed together"?
And I was like, "Ugh. This is soup for one. No."
Like, for guitarists to play together,
for horn sections to play together, for pianists,
I always feel that there's a natural give and take,
but with drumming, it's such --
it's such a responsibility, because someone's gonna
have to be the alpha in the situation.
Someone's gonna have to determine the meter.
Someone's gonna have to determine the volume,
the level, the dynamics.
It's just, whew!
How?
-The fact that we had Max Roach,
whom we all idolized,
so we accepted him and his domination.
And, of course, our egos weren't as big,
but we would have arguments.
There was one time we were rehearsing at my studio,
and Max and Joe Chambers squared off.
Joe was the only one who had the height, the stature,
and the ego to challenge Max.
And Max said, "Well, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah,"
and Joe said, "Oh, yeah? Well, come on.
We're gonna walk outside and settle this."
And they got together and they both marched out,
and everybody sat there and waited for five minutes,
and then they both came in smiling and laughing together.
[ Up-tempo tune plays ]
-Max was great with me. He loved me.
And everybody was scared of him.
And whatever I did, it made him laugh,
and we had fun, and da, da, da.
I did my job, and he used to call me Ramon,
and he would teach me, right?
He would teach me the mallets, teach me the chimes.
"I want you to do this, Ray."
And I would learn it, and that's it.
-We realized that we were going to have to create this music,
so every one of us sat down
and composed a percussion ensemble piece
that involved what we could do.
[ All whistling ]
We did a whole piece which described
the elements of a storm, from drizzling rain...
[ Saw warbling ]
...through a thunderstorm and lightning.
[ All whistling ]
[ Saw warbling ]
[ Whistling continues ]
This was one of the first abstract pieces that we did
that, you know, everybody just bought into.
[ Whistling ] [ Bells chiming ]
-He would give us an idea, and we would hit on that,
and then we would build on it.
Everybody would build on it.
And that was real. That's jazz. That's music.
♪♪
-After a year and a half of rehearsing one day a week,
Max got an endorsement
from the Ludwig Drum Company... [ Applause ]
...and at that point, arranged our first European tour.
[ All slapping ]
That kind of established us as an entity,
and we just kept growing and kept performing.
[ Slapping continues ]
-[ Drumming ]
♪♪
-I would say that of all of the Max Roach projects --
this includes the quintet, the Clifford Brown project,
all of the stuff with Abbey Lincoln,
his solo stuff -- the M'Boom project
is probably his most adventurous.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-Max was one of the people redefining what the music
is gonna be in every decade that he was active.
He was never resting on his laurels, and he could have.
-A lot of bebop purists want Max
and people that made that great music over 50 years ago,
they want those guys to continue to play the same thing.
And Max and those guys were always about that new
and that next thing.
[ Record scratching ]
-[ Drumming ]
-Right about now, my man with the fresh approach,
none other than the maestro Max Roach.
Check, check, check, check it out.
Rock, rock. Yeah.
-The musical director at The Kitchen,
a performance art space in New York,
had a meeting with Max Roach,
and the idea came, what about a performance?
-Max. -This is still early '80s.
-Yeah, Max.
-[ Drumming ]
♪♪
-I was at that performance with Fab 5 Freddy
and the DJs at The Kitchen, yeah.
Max was there with his suit, you know, debonair,
looking like Max Roach, you know?
It's like, oh, new drum music is being made in the culture?
Well, of course Max Roach is here.
The most natural thing in the world.
In some ways he was kind of this living, totemic
art piece, art object.
-[ Rapping ] ♪ I pump the mic ♪
-When the rap craze came,
it was another thing that excited me,
because I said, "Now, this is the same thing
I had been working on all these years."
Because what they did was just use rhythm
without using the rules of music theory.
So when my peers say, "Well, Max, you know
you're dealing with these rap-- what, that's not music,"
you know, and I say, "Well, it may not be music,
but it's part of the world of sound that music is part of."
And it created something that was very valid for me.
-♪ Dyno-mite, dyno-mite, dyno-mite ♪
-He got the anarchic, disruptive aspects of their music.
And it just gives you a sense of, really,
his connection to Blackness.
-Of course my dad's like, "Look, Max Roach is on television."
Like, he didn't care what else was going on.
But I was kind of looking at my dad like, "Wait a minute.
You realize, like,
this is a fusion collaboration between the music I like
that you detest and the music..."
Like, this can work.
-We thank you very much. [ Applause ]
Max, Fab 5 Freddy. See you later.
-The fact that he saw that vision
before it became cool in the early '90s
for you to mix your hip-hop and your jazz together
shows, like, how ahead of the curve he was.
-Now, I've seen you do "The Drum Also Waltzes."
Can you give a little bit of that?
-Oh, sure, sure, sure. Absolutely.
So it's...
[ Drumming ]
♪♪
-[ Drumming ]
♪♪
-I remember he'd look at the drum kit and he'd say,
"I'm just beginning to master this."
And he was in his 70s then.
♪♪
-Do you have the time... -The unrest that he had
always propelled him, particularly in the later years,
as long as he could focus on what was ahead
and not duplicate anything.
The foray into ballet
and playing drums with a reading of Toni Morrison --
those are some of the things that he took his instrument
and his art to
and his desire to exceed his own boundaries.
[ Down-tempo tune plays ]
♪♪
-Max Roach, y'all!
-[ Drumming ]
-After a while, you expected to see Max Roach
pop up in all these places
and just really showcase his musicianship
in so many different contexts.
♪♪
[ Up-tempo tune plays ]
♪♪
-You know, I heard -- and I don't know if this is true,
but I heard that, you know, the older you get,
the more you are like yourself when you were younger.
-Go ahead. Whatever you do is good.
-[ Drumming ]
All right. Now you go over here, Joe.
-So, you know, there's so many stories
out there about his temper,
but later in life, he was so gentle.
-That's all right. Go ahead.
Oh, she's bashful.
[ Laughter ]
I'm gonna do a piece called "Mop Mop."
-"Mop Mop."
-Yeah. I'm gonna play on the drums...
♪ Delia-da-da, delia-da-da, delia-da-da-da ♪
Clap, clap.
♪ Delia-da-da, delia-da-da, delia-da-da-da ♪
[ Children clapping ]
Very, very good. Let me try it on the drums here.
[ Drumming ]
[ Children clapping ]
[ Drumming ]
[ Children clapping ]
[ Drumming ]
♪♪
[ Children clapping ]
My artistic efforts is to show
that we can be the strongest and most creative people
instrumentally that there is.
And, in fact, if I had never played music,
I'd take pride in knowing that
Black folks are the greatest musicians in the world
by way of Charlie Parker and Elvin Jones
and Kenny Clarke and Lester Young, et cetera.
[ Down-tempo tune plays ]
♪♪
-At Lincoln Center, they had inductee night
for the Jazz Hall of Fame.
He was in a wheelchair at that time,
but he was talking, everything.
He was, you know, joking around about stuff,
you know, as Max was wont to do.
They put Max and I in the same dressing room.
All his children were there, so we talked, and he was cool.
But that's the last time I saw him, you know.
And...
it was great, you know?
♪♪
-Thousands of people gathered
at Riverside Church in New York on Friday
for the funeral of the legendary drummer,
educator, and activist Max Roach.
Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez,
and others credited Roach
with helping to revolutionize the sound of jazz
and for playing a prominent role in the struggle
for Black liberation at home and in Africa.
-I have come to sing a song of praise
to the courage of Black men in general
and Max Roach in particular.
It is such a wonderful thing to look
at these friends and family,
to see great names here,
great artists who loved Max Roach
because he had the courage to love us.
And so I'm glad to say we had him.
We are bigger and better and stronger
because Max Roach was my brother.
[ Applause ]
-[ Drumming ]
♪♪
-You know, it's that kind of love that those giants gave us.
They actually said, "We love you," you know?
"We're gonna make sure you survive.
We're gonna give you music that will make you survive.
You know, it will make you get out
into the streets of America
and challenge everything and call people mother[bleep]
you know, who need to be called mother[bleep] right?"
That was Max.
You know, Max did that for all of us.
♪♪
-Max Roach didn't set out to become an icon of history.
He did what he did 'cause he felt it was his responsibility.
He wasn't trying to be anything. He was already it.
♪♪