Max Roach

Jazz is a democratic musical form. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty.

In classical music, only two people are important, the composer and the conductor. Everybody else is a serf. In jazz, a thing of beauty is created collectively with everybody getting to express an idea. And that reflects what democratic society is – or should be.

Monk encouraged me to emancipate the drums from their subservient role as timekeepers.

The people who really got me off were dealing with the musical potential of their instrument.

Jazz music grabs you to the point where it never lets you go until the very last breath.

Jazz is not to be sliced into bites by mass marketing geniuses who assume we are mindless cattle.

The only thing better than singing is more singing.

I feel I have only scratched the surface of what I know I am capable of doing.

Music can’t save the world, but can make one a little calmer.

Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe I’m honest.

I used to play – when I first started trying to be professional, I disk jockey from 1949 to 1955 in Memphis, Tennessee, and I was quite popular there as a disk jockey.

I’ve worked with jazz artists, country artists, classical artists, pop artists. I never wanted there to be categories, because when I was a kid there weren’t.

Even when you write it, someone’s got to play it. So if you can play it and bypass all the rest of the things, you’re still doing as great as someone that has spent forty years trying to find out how to do that. I’m really pro-human beings, pro-expression of everything.

It’s like a language. You learn the alphabet, which are the scales. You learn sentences, which are the chords. And then you talk extemporaneously with the horn. It’s a wonderful thing to speak extemporaneously, which is something I’ve never gotten the hang of. But musically I love to talk just off the top of my head. And that’s what jazz music is all about.

The Blues and Jazz will live forever. So will the Delta and the Big Easy.

You could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be playing.

I don’t worry too much about the fundamentalist principles that are in almost any discussion about Jazz.

I felt like I was making a record under the radar, and that is my favorite way to do anything.

Get out there and improvise and take chances and don’t be a perfectionist.

Les is an old friend of mine. He gave me this special white Les Paul – he wound the pickups himself – for my birthday, first time I met him. I play everything from heavy metal to blues to jazz on it. He just hit it right on the head when he designed the Les Paul. I like it better than most girlfriends I’ve had. The godfather of rock ‘n’ roll, I call him. Without him, none of us would have a job.