SIFF 2023 Dispatch #2: Sam Pollard and Ben Shapiro Profile an American Master in Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes

In this dispatch, I’ll be looking at Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes. Click here for dispatch #1: Other People's Children. 

MAX ROACH: THE DRUM ALSO WALTZES 

(Sam Pollard and Ben Shapiro, USA, 2023, 82 minutes) 

Sam Pollard and Ben Shapiro's admiring, if fair-minded profile of drummer Max Roach joins a lineage of jazz musician profiles that have aired as part of PBS's American Masters after enjoying a festival or theatrical run. 

 

In 2019, for instance, SIFF programmed Stanley Nelson's very fine Miles Davis documentary Birth of the Cool, which aired during the 34th season (in the interest of full disclosure, I work at PBS member station KCTS 9, which will be airing The Drum Also Waltzes on Friday, October 6, at 11pm).  

For perspective, here's a full list of American Masters jazz musician profiles that have preceded Pollard and Shapiro's film:

Billie Holiday: The Long Night of Lady Day 

A Duke Named Ellington 

Satchmo: The Life of Louis Armstrong 

Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker 

Sarah Vaughan: The Divine One 

Benny Goodman: Adventures in the Kingdom of Swing 

Ella Fitzgerald: Something to Live For 

Quincy Jones: In the Pocket 

The World of Nat King Cole 

Cab Calloway: Sketches 

Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool 

 

That's a pretty heavy group. For those who don't know much about jazz, Roach's name is likely to be less familiar than most of those other musicians, though it says something about his talent and reputation that he played with both Charlie "Bird" Parker and Miles Davis (pictured above); one-time Seattleite Quincy Jones also appears as a speaker. 

Unlike many previous jazz musician profiles, however, this one was--in a manner of speaking--in the works for nearly 35 years. Pollard first worked with Roach on a project involving poet Langston Hughes in 1983, and decided four years later, during a sit-down interview, that someone really should make a film about Roach, except Pollard was just an editor at the time and not the filmmaker and producer he would become. Around the same time, Ben Shapiro, a filmmaker and drummer, interviewed Roach for an audio project. It took years, but they would eventually join forces. 

Like Sam Pollard, Roach grew up in New York. Exposed to jazz from an early age, he knew he wanted to be part of that world. When he was in his early teens, his father gifted him with a drum kit, and he got to work. In his words, he became "a fanatic." All that practicing led him to become one of the leading lights of Manhattan's bebop scene in the 1940s, alongside Parker, Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, and Thelonious Monk. 

 

"We hated to sleep," he says in an audio interview, and they played non-stop, making music so groundbreaking at the time that saxophone player Sonny Rollins says he couldn't stand it at first, while actor/musician Harry Belafonte remembers attending Parker/Davis/Roach gigs with his friend, Marlon Brando. It was, he recalls, "one great genius after another."

Just as Parker and Davis would become addicted to heroin, Roach followed suit, but his daughter Maxine's birth in 1950--combined with his mother's entreaties--inspired him to get clean. By the 1950s, he had segued from playing with Parker and Davis to leading an ensemble with trumpeter Clifford Brown. They would later welcome Rollins, who appears in the documentary, into the fold. The group was having a tremendous time recording and playing across the country until Brown was killed in a traffic fatality on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He was only 25. 

Rollins recalls that Roach was devastated. The next few years would not be easy. He had a temper, and he drank--never a good combination. His son, Daryl Keith, says that his parents got divorced sometime afterward. He wouldn't see his father much after that. Then Max met singer/actress Abby Lincoln (Nothing But a Man). He helped her to transition from entertainer to artist. "I was lost," she says in archival footage. "He saved my life."

Together, they cut a figure as sharp as Miles Davis in the 1960s with singer Betty Davis and in the 1970s with actress Cicely Tyson. With Lincoln by his side, Roach entered the jazz-vocal realm whereby his music become overtly political, particularly 1960's We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite with its stark cover featuring bold lettering over a photograph of three Black men at a lunch counter being eyed with suspicion by a white soda jerk. 

 

Max and Abby made their mark, musically, politically, and stylistically with their dashikis and beads, but the marriage eventually came to an end. There was pressure on Max from all sides, from possible FBI surveillance to record company appeals to downplay the politics and add more fusion-style electronics to the mix. 

With no intention of changing his stripes, plus the end of his Atlantic contract and a family to feed--including a new wife and children--he took a teaching job at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he continued to play music on his own terms. Instead of a new brass or vocal partner, he formed an all-percussion unit, M'Boom, and then, when hip-hop emerged, he collaborated with emcees, like godson Fab 5 Freddy, the future Yo! MTV Raps host immortalized by Blondie in "Rapture." Throughout the rest of his life, he would continue to find new forms to which to apply his skills, including collaborations with dancers and writers, like Toni Morrison. 

Max Roach died in 2007 at the age of 83. Since Shapiro and Pollard finished shooting their film, several speakers have also passed on, including pianist Randy Weston, saxophone player Jimmy Heath, critic and musician Greg Tate, and most recently, actor and musician Harry Belafonte (Abby Lincoln passed away in 2010). As of this writing, Sonny Rollins is still surviving and thriving at the age of 92, a living link to the adventurous jazz world Max Roach and his associates helped to create over 70 years ago.  

 

Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes plays the Uptown on May 13, Pacific Place on May 15, and streams on the SIFF Channel from May 22 - May 28. For more information, please see the festival page. Images from American Masters (Max Roach), Robert Parent / Alejandro Escovedo (Roach with Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins in 1956), Drummerworld (Roach with Gretsch drum kit), and Jazz Messengers (We Insist! album cover).