WASHINGTON – Music and recordings from Max Roach, one of the creators of modern jazz drumming, will be preserved at the Library of Congress, curators and his family announced Monday.
Roach worked with other such jazz greats as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk to develop the jazz style known as bebop. And beyond the confines of music, Roach was engaged with the civil-rights movement.
“He’s a major figure, not just in jazz but in American music,” said Larry Appelbaum, a music specialist and jazz curator at the library.
Roach studied music on many levels. He wrote about his disdain for the label of “jazz.” To him, it represented “the worst of working conditions for an artist.” He didn’t want to be reduced to a stereotype or cliche, curators said.
Max Roach, a one-time university professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, had said he just wanted his children to keep his materials together after he was gone.
At one point on a hotel stationery notepad, he wrote about his education in music.
“I attended the university of the streets in the ‘Harlems’ of the USA,” he wrote. “My professors were Duke Ellington, Sonny Greer, Baby Dodds, Louis Armstrong. ... My classmates were Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Charlie Mingus, Theolonius Monk, Miles Davis.”
