Our diminished realm: A few belated thoughts about Max Roach

I was in New York when Max Roach died, and both the local jazz stations -- imagine, a locale with two legitimate jazz outlets -- both stations spent the following week offering tributes that consisted largely of playing samples from the master's remarkable output: Roach was a teacher and civil rights activist, but he was in the end the most remarkable artist ever to choose the drums to express himself.

He was a driving force in the founding of bebop, and it is hard to think of an artist who was more important in the last half of the 20th century. My own favorite records are those he cut in the 50s with the peerless trumpet player Clifford Brown -- I'd guess the music you encounter when you are a sophomore is always the best, but I can't think of a single instance of hearing Roach play in my adult life that didn't grab my attention.

And that's just as he intended. He once told Stanley Crouch that he worked so hard at the lucidity of his solos -- and every artist will recognize the truth of this -- in pursuit of two things: to teach the audience to follow his mind as he played, and to attract the interest of the ladies in the house.

I hope you spent the last week immersed in the music of Max Roach; there will never be a time when he won't entertain and enlighten us. But for an epitaph, I leave you with his own words: "I am an American and the drum set is one of the few instruments native to this country. This is a democratic nation and jazz is a democratic music in which we all express ourselves as individuals and cooperate for the overall good. That's good enough for the bandstand and it is good enough for the world. In music, you can make a dream come to life as a reality of design and feeling. Democracy is a dream of being able to do it better someday. I have never stopped dreaming."

Max Roach and Clifford Brown