Max Roach by Jean-Michel Basquiat “What makes a piece an art piece is design. Design. If you play any instrument, if you don’t create design…. If the artist doesn’t know how to utilize space and […]
Category: Max Roach
How to play Jordu
About time I did another one of these: here’s Jordu, by Clifford Brown, as played on the definitive recording, Clifford Brown & Max Roach, on EmArcy. It gets played a lot at the high school […]
How to play Pent Up House
Or, how to play it the way it was played originally. What we’ll do in this series is look at the definitive recorded versions of some commonly played jazz tunes, and nail down all the […]
VOQOTD: Max Roach on what it’s about
“It’s not about comparative things: who’s the fastest, or… it’s not about that. It’s about someone who, when you hear them, you say, Oh, that’s Tony! Oh, that’s Miles! Ah, that’s John Coltrane! That’s what […]
Transcription: Blue Seven
UPDATE: PDF link working now! I can’t believe I’ve never transcribed this one before. This is a very famous drum solo by Max Roach, on the tune Blue Seven from the album Saxophone Colossus by […]
Cracking 5/4: listening
Here’s the first in a series on playing in 5/4. Since everything in music follows from listening (and this is the easiest type of post for me to write), we’ll start with some recorded examples: […]
Go watch now
The Max Roach story, at Four on the Floor. Here’s part 1/7:
VOQOTD: Elvin
“Don’t ask me to show you anything, because if I could show you, we would all be Max Roach.” – Elvin Jones, from part 2 of Ethan Iverson’s Billy Hart interview
Very occasional quote of the day: Jack on Max
“…and he could play the fastest tempos!” – Jack Dejohnette on Max Roach I thought this one deserved its own post.
Know your tempos: what’s meant by up
In case you were wondering how fast you need to be able to play, here are a bunch of your favorite tracks spanning the break between “medium up”- where it’s still possible to swing- and […]