Quick Facts
- NAME: Max Roach
- OCCUPATION: Educator, Songwriter, Drummer
- BIRTH DATE: January 10, 1924
- DEATH DATE: August 16, 2007
- EDUCATION: Manhattan School of Music
- PLACE OF BIRTH: New Land, North Carolina
- PLACE OF DEATH: New York, New York
- AKA: Maxwell Roach
Best Known For
Max Roach was a jazz drummer and pioneer of the bebop style.
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Play NowMax Roach. (2013). The Biography Channel website. Retrieved 10:26, May 23, 2013, from http://www.biography.com/people/max-roach-9459691.
Max Roach. [Internet]. 2013. The Biography Channel website. Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/max-roach-9459691 [Accessed 23 May 2013].
"Max Roach." 2013. The Biography Channel website. May 23 2013, 10:26 http://www.biography.com/people/max-roach-9459691.
"Max Roach," The Biography Channel website, 2013, http://www.biography.com/people/max-roach-9459691 [accessed May 23, 2013].
"Max Roach," The Biography Channel website, http://www.biography.com/people/max-roach-9459691 (accessed May 23, 2013).
Max Roach [Internet]. The Biography Channel website; 2013 [cited 2013 May 23] Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/max-roach-9459691.
Max Roach, http://www.biography.com/people/max-roach-9459691 (last visited May 23, 2013).
Max Roach. The Biography Channel website. 2013. Available at: http://www.biography.com/people/max-roach-9459691. Accessed May 23, 2013.
Synopsis
Max Roach was born on January 10, 1924 in New Land, North Carolina. He was raised in Brooklyn and studied at the Manhattan School of Music. One of the great jazz drummers and a pioneer of bebop, he recorded with Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz,
Charlie Parker and Clifford Brown. Roach was also a composer and a professor of music at the University of Massachusetts. He died in 2007.
Profile
Musician. Legendary jazz drummer Max Roach was born January 10, 1924, in New Land, North Carolina. He was raised in Brooklyn and as a child, he played drums in gospel bands. Roach studied at the Manhattan School of Music and recorded with Coleman Hawkins in 1943. Over the next four years, he played with jazz greats -- Benny Carter, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, and Hawkins. He joined Charlie Parker's trailblazing quintet (1947–49), then freelanced as a session player and with Jazz at the Philharmonic and the Lighthouse All-Stars until 1954. In 1954–56, he and Clifford Brown formed one of the most highly regarded groups in modern jazz.
After Brown's death, Roach maintained a succession of groups while pursuing a wide range of activities as a composer and educator, particularly as a professor of music at the University of Massachusetts (1972).
Roach, best known for creating the fast-paced bebop style, died August 16, 2007, in New York City.
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Famous Jazz Musicians
View groupWith its roots in the blues, jazz has been referred to as America's classical music, yet has also become a major global phenomenon, branching off into a variety of forms. Earlier pioneers like Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton paved the way for the swinging big-band sounds of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. In contrast, contemporaries Dizzie Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk developed bebop, with its speedy, dissonant harmonies and improvisations. And Miles Davis heralded the birth of cool jazz, modal jazz and fusion at different points in his career. Famous jazz instrumentalists have tended to be male, yet women have been at the forefront of the genre when it comes to vocalization, from the brassy blues of Bessie Smith to the haunting eclecticism of Nina Simone.
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