[TR24][OF] Max Roach - Drums Unlimited (Remastered) - 1965/2009 (Jazz)

Max Roach, drums
Freddie Hubbard, trumpet (tracks 2, 4, 6)
Roland Alexander, soprano saxophone (track 4)
James Spaulding, alto saxophone (tracks 2, 4 6)
Ronnie Mathews, piano (tracks 2, 4 6)
Jymie Merritt, bass (tracks 2, 4 6)

Max Roach is a renowned American percussionist and composer. He was born in the year of 1925 in New Land, North Carolina, but he began his extensive career at the age of ten when he began playing drums in Brooklyn, New York for gospel music groups. These gospel groups proved to contribute the most significant influence to his musical style. He also studied at the Manhattan School of Music.
At Monroe's Uptown House, a nightclub in Harlem, New York, Max Roach began working with a group of American jazz musicians (including pianist Thelonius Monk and alto saxophonist Charlie Parker) in 1942. These talented musicians were experimenting with a musical style that was to become known as bebop jazz, or bop. At the time, drummer Kenny Clarke was introducing stylistic innovations and was performing with many of the top bebop musicians. These innovations included utilizing the cymbals rather than the bass drum for the primary rhythmic pulse of the music. Roach was the first to fully realize the potential of these innovations and quickly developed his own style to become the leading drummer of the bop movement (early 1940s to mid-1950s). He played and recorded with most of the major jazz musicians of the period, including American tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and American trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. From 1947 to 1949 he was a member of Charlie Parker's historic bebop quintet. From 1954 to 1956 Roach led a jazz quintet with American trumpeter Clifford Brown. Through such albums as Study in Brown (1955) and At Basin Street (1956), the Brown/Roach Quintet came to exemplify the aggressive style of jazz known as hard bop.
Throughout the 1960s, the struggle for black racial equality rose to the forefront of societal awareness and Roach recorded a number of albums centering on these issues, including the album We Insist! Freedom Now Suite (1960). He also focused on the black-American cultural arts movement. In 1970 he formed M' Boom Re: Percussion, a ten-member ensemble representing diverse percussion traditions from around the world. In addition to ensemble work, Roach has been a frequent solo percussion performer and has composed music for Broadway musicals, motion pictures, television, and symphony orchestras. He then went on to join the music faculty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1972.

Recorded on October 14 & 20, 1965 and April 25, 1966, New York City
Released in 1966, Drums Unlimited remains a unique listening experience even now, but it’s a tremendous opportunity to hear just how amazing Roach could be when he was sitting behind his kit. The six-track album alternates between a trio of solo performances by Roach – “The Drum Also Waltzes,” the title track, and “For Big Sid” – and a trio of songs which find him playing alongside trumpeter Freddie Bubbard, alto saxophonist Roland Alexander, pianist Ronnie Matthews, and bassist Jymie Merritt. The tracks in the latter category, by the way, are “Nommo,” “St. Louis Blues,” and “In the Red (A Christmas Carol),” and it should also be noted that “St. Louis Blues” also features some sweet soprano sax from Roland Alexander.
If you’ve ever found yourself thinking of the words “drum solo” as nothing more than a punchline, then Drums Unlimited may change your tune. As fellow drummer Nasheet Waits said in a piece on Jazz.com, “I think it’s one of the great albums in the history of jazz music, not only for interspersing the solos between the other songs, but also the quality of those tunes: it’s what he played (and) how he played it.”