‘Max Roach 100’ at the ICA does the great jazz drummer proud
“Richard, I make music so that people will dance.” That was Max Roach speaking to Summer Stages Dance cofounder Richard Colton, and in “Max Roach 100,” the performers dance up a storm. Curated by Colton, and offering choreography by Ayodele Casel, Rennie Harris, and Ronald K. Brown and Arcell Cabuag, this centenary tribute to the great jazz drummer, composer, and activist premiered last week at the
Joyce Theater in New York. This past weekend, “Max Roach 100” was at the Institute of Contemporary Art, and it’s an exuberant celebration of an icon who ranged from bebop to hip-hop and played with everyone from Duke Ellington to Fab 5 Freddy.
The program begins with video artist Kit Fitzgerald’s eight-minute documentary “Max Roach Live,” which she filmed in the 1980s and ‘90s. We see Roach wearing a “Libérez Mandela” headband and sitting at his drum set, what he called “an American innovation” and “the only percussion instrument that I know of anywhere in the world where you have to play it with all four limbs.” It’s hard to believe he has only four, such is the machine-gun velocity of his performance; at one point he creates a percussion symphony playing nothing but hi-hat. Fitzgerald’s artsy effects, like turning Roach’s drums into paint brushes that produce rainbows of color, just gild the lily.
The dancing itself brings familiar faces: Casel, Rennie Harris PuremoveRoach ment, Ronald K. Brown/Evidence, and Malpaso Dance Company have all performed here in the past couple of years. Casel is first up, with “Freedom . . . In Progress,” which is set to a 1979 duet improvisation from Roach and pianist Cecil Taylor. She comes on, chooses a jacket from the half dozen on a rack behind the tapping platform, puts on her shoes, tests the platform. Her rapid-fire close-to-the-floor work, even in silence, suggests she’ll be more than a match for Roach and Taylor when the music kicks in.
That proves to be the case. Over the next 20 minutes, Casel stutters, sputters, hopscotches, crabwalks, moonwalks, ice-skates, train-chugs, skips rope. She’s so fluid, at times she appears to be tapping on a moving sidewalk. If you didn’t know the music was a 45-year-old recording, you’d think this was a trio improvisation, Roach, Taylor, and Casel in polyrhythmic conversation. Toward the end, her jacket is thrown off, the clothes rack exits (dimly lit, it seems to be leaving on its own), the lights that line the platform perimeter tumble away, and Casel’s shadow is cast in duplicate on the rear wall, as if and Taylor were dancing with her. They would surely have found her a worthy collaborator.
Rennie Harris’s “Jim Has Crowed” tells a more sober story. A dozen members of Rennie Harris Puremovement walk on like protesters, amid shouts of “F–– the police” and “Stop killing Black people.” The music, when it arrives, is Roach’s 1981 mash-up “The Dream/It’s Time,” the first part of which finds Roach drumming furiously against Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech. The street dance that ensues, complete with eye-popping backflips and headspins, does kinetic justice to the wailings of Cecil Bridgewater’s trumpet and Odean Pope’s tenor sax; if the music dances, the dancers are musicians. There’s irony in the way fists are raised in a Black Power salute even as King is asking for a “symphony of brotherhood.” More often, though, hands are raised as if at the point of a pistol. When the music cuts out, three men are left standing, and one by one, they’re gunned down, Harris reminding us that it was already “Time” back in 1963 and now still is in 2024.
“Jim Has Crowed” is a tight nine minutes; the program closer, “Percussion Bitter Sweet: Tender Warriors,” is a more relaxed half hour. Brown and Cabuag chose four tracks from Roach’s 1961 album “Percussion Bitter Sweet,” and though the titles — “Tender Warriors,” “Praise for a Martyr,” “Garvey’s Ghost,” “Man from South Africa” — are unmistakably political, the music itself is upbeat. Clad initially in red and green sleeveless dashikis or full-skirted dresses, the 16 dancers from Evidence and Malpaso move with languid gravity, and the recurring threesome of Joyce Edwards, Demetrius Burns, and Osnel Delgado give the piece some structure, but it all looks a little unspecific after what we’ve seen from Casel and Harris. Brown and Cabuag often have the men and women dancing separately; it’s the women, swishing skirts, who channel the Afro-Cuban flavor of the congas and cowbells, the energy of Booker Little’s frenetic trumpet solos, the anguish of Abbey Lincoln’s wordless vocals.
For “Man from South Africa,” everyone reappears in flowing white outfits for what might be a Yoruba ceremony of ritual imprecation and communal celebration danced to a propulsive 7/4 rhythm. The curtain call brings everyone back on stage, and even though there’s no audible music, Casel can’t stop tapping. Roach would be pleased.