Switch Blade

Duke Ellington (piano), Charles Mingus (doble bass) and Max Roach (drums). From the album Money Jungle (1963).

Max Roach was one of the first drummers to play bebop. His first recording was in 1943 accompanying Coleman Hawkins and then he played in the bands of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. He also participated in the different recording sessions that later would give place to the album Birth of the Cool by Miles Davis. In 1952 he founded Debut Records with Charles Mingus and they recorded the famous concert at Massey Hall in Toronto.

In 1953 he moved to California, where he invited trumpeter Clifford Brown to be the co-leader of a quintet that would not only mark the professional future of the drummer, but would become one of the most influential jazz groups of the early 1950s. Throughout his career he had the will to grow as a musician and as a man, surpassing bebop and embracing new compositional structures, strange instruments mixes, unusual time signatures, atonality, music for Broadway musicals, television, cinema and concert halls, and even working with a rapper. He also became a fervent advocate of racial equality and this damaged his musical career several times.

Mingus makes an introduction with a lot of feeling and Ellington and Roach join to expose the theme, a blues composed of few notes, but very well distributed. However, Ellington begins his solo with faster phrases, but soon returns to his melodic simplicity while Mingus does all kinds of mischief below. Ellington keeps playing slowly, placing each note in its place. Next, Ellington and Roach leave Mingus alone with an expressive and dynamic discourse that ends the theme fading out.