Max Roach, 83; created rhythmic foundation of bebop, expanded role of drums

Max Roach, one of the most innovative and influential drummers in jazz history, as well as a professor of music for many years at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, died yesterday at a Manhattan hospital. He was 83.

His death was announced by a spokesman for Blue Note Records, where Mr. Roach had expanded the possibilities of jazz and of percussion. No cause of death was given. Mr. Roach had been ill for the past several years.

One of the first jazz musicians to win a MacArthur Fellowship, in 1988, Mr. Roach was one of those rare figures on a first-name basis with an art form. Just as the name Miles (Davis) or Lester (Young) can mean only one person to a jazz fan, so does Max automatically indicate Mr. Roach. He was that important and ubiquitous a figure.

"One of the grand masters of our music," Dizzy Gillespie once called him.

Along with Kenny Clarke, Mr. Roach was the seminal bebop drummer, all but inventing the rhythmic foundation for a jazz revolution. Bebop, with its furious tempos and shifting accents, was an ideal vehicle for Mr. Roach's virtuosity, placing as it did vastly greater demands on a percussionist than swing music had. A highly melodic drummer, Mr. Roach in effect moved the instrument's center of gravity upward, putting the main rhythmic responsibility on the ride cymbal rather than bass drum, opening the way to a far wider range of accents and patterns.

"Roach's influence was pervasive and absolute," the critic Gary Giddins wrote in 2003. "He was the most ingenious, resourceful, venturesome drummer of his generation. Even drummers who didn't want to play bop envied his reflexes, panache, freedom, and adamant musicality."

Mr. Roach's impact extended well beyond his formative role in bebop. He was coleader of one of the most important jazz groups of the '50s, the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet, which helped define the hard bop school of jazz. His recordings "We Insist! Freedom Now Suite" (1960) and "It's Time!" (1962) were landmarks of the civil rights era, integrating music and protest. During the '70s and '80s, his percussion ensemble, M'Boom, and Double Quartet, which combined a classical string quartet with a more traditional jazz quartet, further expanded musical horizons.

"It's only a slight exaggeration to say," The (London) Independent newspaper wrote in 1998, "that every time we hear the drums in jazz or rock music, we hear an echo of the great Max Roach."

Among the classic recordings Mr. Roach played on as sideman were those produced at the 1944 session led by Coleman Hawkins and Gillespie, such as "Disorder at the Border" and "Woody 'n' You," which are considered the first bebop discs; Charlie Parker's "Ko-Ko," "Billie's Bounce," and "Now's the Time;" Davis's "Birth of the Cool;" Bud Powell's "Tempus Fugit" and "Un Poco Loco"; Sonny Rollins's "Saxophone Colossus"; and Duke Ellington's "Money Jungle."

Mr. Roach was the drummer at the "Greatest Jazz Concert Ever," the title of the resulting album at Toronto's Massey Hall, with Parker, Powell, Gillespie, and Charles Mingus in 1953.

A two-time recipient of the French Grand Prix du Disque, Mr. Roach also played at various times with Benny Carter, Oscar Pettiford, J.J. Johnson, Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Stan Getz, Herbie Nichols, and Abbey Lincoln, his first wife.

It was a mark of Mr. Roach's range that he also performed with R&B singer Louis Jordan, Dixieland trumpeter Henry (Red) Allen, avant-garde players such as Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor, and the rapper Fab 5 Freddy.

"You have to pursue, pursue, pursue," Mr. Roach said in a 1998 interview with The (London) Observer newspaper. "Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but if you've been around as long as I have, you can afford to take chances."

Maxwell Lemuel Roach was born Jan. 10, 1924, in Newland, N.C. When still young, he moved with his parents and brother to Brooklyn, N.Y. An aunt was a church pianist. She gave Mr. Roach his first music lessons.

He got his first drum kit when he was 12 and played in a church drum-and-bugle corps and his school marching band. Drummers he would later cite as models included Baby Dodds, Big Sid Catlett, Jo Jones, and Clarke.

Mr. Roach started playing professionally before he had graduated from high school. As house drummer at a Harlem club, Monroe's Uptown House, he participated in the jam sessions that helped give birth to bebop.

He earned a bachelor's degree in composition at the Manhattan School of Music. A more important education came via the "conservatory of the street," as Mr. Roach liked to call the clubs in Harlem and along 52d Street, in midtown Manhattan.

Mr. Roach began performing with Parker in 1945 and would be with him off and on for the next decade. He made the first recordings under his own name in 1949. Three years later, he and Mingus founded Debut Records. He formed the quintet with Brown in 1954. The trumpeter's death in a 1956 auto accident devastated Mr. Roach.

Mr. Roach had long been interested in vocal and choral music, and he wrote for voices in his protest music of the early '60s, as well as a large-scale piece, "Lift Every Voice and Sing" (1971). Among later works by Mr. Roach are the score to three one-act plays by Sam Shepard, which won the composer a 1985 Obie Award, and an opera, "The Life and Life of Bumpy Johnson" (1992), with the poet Amiri Baraka.

Mr. Roach was a natural teacher. "I learned so much about drums from Max Roach when we were playing together," Miles Davis wrote in his autobiography.

His educational career extended beyond the bandstand and recording studio. He joined the faculty at UMass in 1972 and taught there for a quarter century. He was instrumental in setting up the school's program in Afro-American music and jazz studies."It was a godsend for the university to have him here," said Fred Tillis, a composer, saxophone player, and retired director of UMASS jazz program. "One of his legacies is a scholarship fund for students interested in jazz.Mr. Roach's generosity led to the Fletcher Henderson/Max Roach Memorial Scholarship Fund. "I had to convince him to add his own name," Tillis said last night.

"He was untraditional, but a very effective teacher," he said, adding that Mr. Roach would teach percussion on a variety of materials, including instruments he collected from Africa.

A member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Mr. Roach was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1995. France named him a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, its highest cultural honor, in 1989.

Mr. Roach leaves three children from his first marriage, sons, Raoul and Darryl, and a daughter, Maxine, a violist, who often performed with her father; and two other daughters, Ayo and Dara.

Funeral arrangements were incomplete.