Hearing the American Civil Rights Movement in the Music of Max Roach

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, ignored nuance, and formed conclusions that lack 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 upon 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 hierarchical performance practices and canonical construction. Proceeding from Ingrid Monson's argument that jazz and the civil rights movement are linked through economics, symbolism, activism, and aesthetics, this dissertation substantiates connections between the civil rights movement and Roach's musical life by tracking representations of self-determination throughout both his music and career. Chapter 2 unpacks representations outside Roach's drumming, including pedagogy and music education, composition and business incorporations, ensemble leadership, and explorations in meter, tempo, instrumentation, and solo order that challenged both jazz's functionality as dance accompaniment and the drummer's conventionally subservient role. Chapter 3 explores representations within Roach's drumming, including drumset tuning, unconventional stickings, linear incorporation of both feet, comping concepts, and both motivic development and "conversational structures" that reframed drum solos from excursions in primitivist novelty to masterclasses in composition. Declaring that musics of great 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, twenty-four original transcriptions, and comparative analysis to bridge the research gap between Roach's evolutionary impact and revolutionary engagement with civil rights