Lands End

Harold Land (tenor sax), Clifford Brown (trumpet), Richie Powell (piano), George Morrow (bass) and Max Roach (drums). From the album Study in Brown (1955).

Max Roach was a jazz drummer and American composer. He was one of the first drummers to play in the bebop style and belonged to the most important bands of the time. He and Kenny Clarke changed the way they played the drums: instead of setting the pulse with the bass drum, they put the emphasis on the ride cymbal.

This gave the drummers more freedom to explore the possibilities of all the drums elements and allowed the bebop virtuosos to play at a higher speed. On this basis, Roach developed his own skills, such as having great drive, playing coherent solos, mixing tones and timbres, using silences and the ability to use brushes as skillfully as sticks. He used the cymbals as gongs, played hypnotic solos on the tom-tom drums and kept the rhythm going forward.

After a brief introduction, the theme begins at medium tempo, it’s one of which the group typically played. Land begins his solo without hurry, but without pause, as if he were having a friendly conversation. Next comes Brown enters in a similar tone, his phrases are slow and pleasant, although he sometimes plays faster passages. After that, Powell starts playing the piano with relax, as if nothing mattered in this world, and finally the group reexposes the theme.