Wayne Escoffery, Music Director. Celebrating American drummer and composer Max Roach (1924-2007) and his commitment to championing equality and social justice through music.
The program will feature two movements of his avant-garde jazz album and vocal-instrumental suite “We Insist!” (subtitled Max Roach’s “Freedom Now Suite”) on themes related to the Civil Rights Movement. Both movements were orchestrated and arranged specifically for the YJE Big Band by Michael Philip Mossman.
Roach was a pioneer of bepop, but worked in many other styles of music and with various musicians including Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Abbey Lincoln, Dinah Washington, Charles Mingus, Billy Eckstine, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, Eric Dolphy, Booker Little, and more. He was inducted into the “DownBeat” Hall of Fame in 1980 and the “Modern Drummer” Hall of Fame in 1992.