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# Max Roach season: what they’re spinning
- URL: https://www.rhythmchanges.ca/radio-roundup-max-roach-202401/
- Published: 2024-01-19T14:00:49.000Z
- Updated: 2025-12-10T23:36:52.000Z
- Description: Radio Roundup: the programming, and the big show, celebrating Roach's birth centenary
- Author: Will Chernoff
- Tags: Subscriber Fridays

It's **Max Roach** season, honouring the legendary drummer's birth centenary. This week, The Infidels announced quite a show to ring it in; at the VIFF Centre, a documentary about Roach will screen alongside a set of music by Feven Kidane, Nebyu Yohannes, John Nicholson, Quincy Mayes, Bella Fedrigo, and Edmonton-based drunner Biboye Onanuga:

[Black History Month: Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes + Feven Kidane Sextet Live | Vancouver International Film FestivalEnjoy great movies at the luxurious VIFF Centre, voted one of the best cinemas in Vancouver and home to the prestigious Vancouver International Film Festival.![](https://viff.org/themes/childtheme/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon.png)Vancouver International Film Festival![](https://images.viff.org/uploads/2024/01/MaxRoach.jpg?resize=960%2C600&gravity)](https://viff.org/whats-on/max-roach-feven-kidane-sextet-live/?ref=rhythmchanges.ca)

The jazz radio shows in our community have all been featuring Roach, which makes for the perfect timing to bring you the first edition of my **Radio Roundup** at Rhythm Changes. I've listened to the programs and will highlight memorable things from each of them for you, linking out to the music for your convenience.

Appropriately, Tim Reinert broke the ice on Jan. 8's edition of The Infidels Jazz Show, airing [the first of three](https://www.mixcloud.com/TheInfidelsJazzShow/the-infidels-232-january-08-2024/?ref=rhythmchanges.ca) multi-hour episodes dedicated to Roach. In it, he declared that "Constellation" is his favourite of Roach's recordings with Charlie Parker:

That was the 40s, before the album era. We're bebopping one track at a time. In Tim's second episode in the series, he shifted decades to the onset of the 60s, to Roach's emergence as an activist, and the seminal album *We Insist!* with a spin of the intense song "Freedom Day":

Then, a week ago today on Friday, Nou Dadoun played this hidden gem – a live recording of Roach playing the Cultch in the 80s with a free-spirited chordless quartet, which amazingly we can access on Bandcamp:

[Live in Vancouver, by Max Roach Quartet6 track album![](https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a1531592090_3.jpg)Condition West RecordingsNicholas G Morlet![](https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a1531592090_5.jpg)](https://conditionwestrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/live-in-vancouver-3?ref=rhythmchanges.ca)

Gavin Walker, on CITR's The Jazz Show, feaured the 1962 album *Speak, Brother, Speak!* with Roach, Clifford Jordan, Mal Waldron, and Eddie Khan*.* It's a one-long-track-per-side live record, straight-ahead grease but in a way that feels disrupted by the Coltrane quartet, that kind of thing:

The other radio program I expect to have in my roundup rotation but didn't get this week is Cory Weeds' Condition Blue – darn weather on Wednesday!

Max Roach is special to me personally, because he played the very first notes of recorded jazz that I ever listened to. You see, my first instrument was actually saxophone. I was a pre-teen; my dad gifted me a classic album on CD that served as my introduction to the genre. Track one happened to have Roach's drums off the top. What was the record? Well, you know: