Throughout a recording career that spanned 1943–2002 and engaged with diverse styles and instrumentations, jazz drummer Max Roach (1924–2007) transcended canonical compartmentalization. Readings of Roach fall into two camps, each demonstrating methodological issues that have muted his contributions: an "evolutionary" camp has focused too narrowly on drumming, overlooked cultural context, constructed a linear doctrine of progress, and restricted Roach's impact to bop; a "revolutionary" camp has focused too broadly on context and formed conclusions that lack musical substantiation. Ten extant Roach drum transcriptions stem from six albums released from 1954 to 1966, a sample sufficient to cover neither Roach's oeuvre nor a broader civil rights period. While arguments have relied on accepted assumptions linking Roach and civil rights issues, no study has thoroughly unpacked the material.


Roach confronted marginalization on two fronts: as a Black American, he faced discrimination within society and industry economics; as a drummer, he faced marginalization within performance practices and canonical construction. Proceeding from Ingrid Monson's argument that jazz and civil rights issues are linked through economics, symbolism, activism, and aesthetics, this paper substantiates connections between Roach's musical life and a civil rights impetus by tracking representations of self-determination in both his music and career. Applying his philosophy that music education and pedagogy are paths to self-determination, Roach drew upon sonata form in "Drum Conversation" (Contemporary C-7645) and upon rondo in both "The Drum Also Waltzes" and "For Big Sid" (Atlantic LP-1467), reframing drum solos from excursions in primitivist novelty to masterclasses in composition with an instantly recognizable voice. Through explorations in solo order, drum tuning, meter, and free jazz that shake the foundations of canonical narratives, Roach challenged both jazz's functionality as dance accompaniment and the drummer's conventional subservience. Declaring that musics of extensive synthesis, like jazz, are best analyzed though a blend of methodologies, this study employs archival research (including unprecedented incorporation of the Library of Congress's "Max Roach Papers" and Manhattan School of Music's Registrar archive), published interviews, original transcriptions, and comparative analysis to bridge the research gap between Roach's evolutionary impact and revolutionary engagement with civil rights.

On November 17, 2016, A Tribe Called Quest released "The Space Program," a compelling and deeply disturbing critique of a dystopian future that suddenly seemed upon us.  Today, the track is something of a time capsule back to that tipping point moment between Obama-era hope and its Trump-era backlash.  Notably, a central hypertext in the nexus of meaning on "The Space Program" is a repeated line-"Move on to the stars"-from Andrew Hill's 1969 cut for Blue Note Records, "Lift Every Voice," an angularly experimental, yet hopefully funky Afrofuturist jazz piece.  The title of Hill's high-modernist composition about the spiritual inheritance and continuing mission of African Americans is, of course, an unmistakable reference to "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the 1905 Black National Anthem penned by James Weldon and John Rosamond Johnson, which tracks the path of transcendence "Out from the gloomy past / 'Til now we stand at last / Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast."
This paper presents new musical analytical findings based on interviews with Hill's collaborators and the composer's widow, Joanne Robinson Hill, as well as archival research with the Hill collections at the Rutgers Jazz Archive and Library of Congress.  As we detail, "Lift Every Voice" is a careful reworking of the intervallic content-the perfect fourth to major second movement, and later, minor second movement-of the Black National Anthem's chorus.  Indeed, Hill's piece is a motivic exploration of the trichords (025) and (015).  In writing "Lift Every Voice," Hill was exploring the Anthem's doubly-conscious tonal environment.  The whole piece is thus a meditation on this signal moment in the Black National Anthem-a moment we might call the crux of the difference between hope and despair described in those very lines.
It is our contention that this bifurcated and doubly-conscious sonic environment is at the heart of the play of optimisms and pessimisms in all three of the pieces under consideration here (1905, 1969, 2016).  Further, in presenting this analysis, we model how we might extend Philip Ewell's work on music theory's-and musicology's-white racial frame both methodologically and conceptually.