Max Roach Played For Keeps

A drummer who changed the game, and the culture.

Max Roach at the drums, in a studio portrait from 1956. (Gilles Petard / Redferns)

“I like to do everything seriously,” Max Roach, the indomitable artist and activist, said once in passing. “Even when I relax, I do it seriously.”

This avowal, as emblematic as any that Roach made in a lifetime full of quotables, comes from a 1970 interview with his fellow drummer Art Taylor. It can be found in the justly celebrated oral history collection Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews, and on this day — precisely a century after Roach’s birth, on Jan. 10, 1924 — I’m inclined to apprehend it in earnest, as scripture and verse.

The quote constitutes the beginning of an answer to the most basic prompt in the interviewer’s handbook: Do you have any hobbies? It’s possible Taylor was hoping Roach might reveal a taste for cigars, or a side hustle in coin collecting. But I think he knew what he was in for. After the line about relaxing seriously, Roach elaborates:

Hobby is a strange word to me. It’s a word like you do something to fool around. I don’t like to fool around with anything. If I’m playing chess or if I’m swimming or in conversation, I like to be as honest with it as possible. What I am, I am. God made it, and I’m grateful. That’s the way it is.

Consider the question, and now the answer. I believe the man made his point. And as we mark his centenary, it’s worth considering Roach’s utter seriousness of purpose, as a key to deciphering his artistry and identity. It informed the way he moved through the world, and bolstered the seismic impact that he made. What’s more, you can hear it — you can feel it — in practically every measure of music he played.