Max Roach: Percussion Bittersweet (Verve Vault series) [VERVE]

Why you'll love it

This Verve Vault pressing was cut from the original analog tapes by Ryan K. Smith at Sterling Sound and pressed on 180g vinyl in Germany. It features Eric Dolphy, Booker Little, Clifford Jordan, Mal Waldron and Abbey Lincoln with Roach at his most purposeful.

This edition

• Verve Vault series
• 180g vinyl
• Cut from the original analog tapes
• Mastered by Ryan K. Smith at Sterling Sound
• Pressed in Germany
• Stereo mix

About the album

Max Roach had already helped invent bebop drumming. By 1961 he wanted his music to say something about the world, and on Percussion Bitter Sweet he wrote or co-wrote every tune, many of them tributes to the heroes and the history of the African diaspora. Producing the session himself for Impulse!, he gathered a band to match the ambition.

The band is extraordinary. Eric Dolphy switches between alto sax, flute and bass clarinet, Booker Little's trumpet is bright and lyrical, Clifford Jordan and Julian Priester fill out the front line, and Mal Waldron and Art Davis hold down piano and bass, with Carlos "Patato" Valdés and Eugenio "Totico" Arango adding Afro-Cuban percussion. Abbey Lincoln sings on "Garvey's Ghost" and "Mendacity." "Tender Warriors," "Praise for a Martyr" and "Man from South Africa" give the whole band room to stretch over Roach's endlessly inventive rhythms.

It was one of Booker Little's last sessions before his death that October, and it stands among the great statements of early-'60s jazz. Roach takes the odd solo, of course, and for a drummer that counts as tremendous restraint.

Also at Kops: more Max Roach on vinyl · browse Classic Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On Impulse! / Verve (cat# AS-8), a reissue of the 1961 album.