Asa G. Hilliard III, 73; scholar was leading proponent of Afrocentrism

By Adam Bernstein, Washington Post  |  August 17, 2007

WASHINGTON -- Asa G. Hilliard III, 73, an educational psychologist and a
leading proponent of Afrocentric studies in public schools, died Aug. 13 in
Egypt, where he was on an annual study tour with students. He had
complications of malaria and died in Cairo.

Since 1980, Dr. Hilliard had been the Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Urban
Education at Georgia State University. He previously had spent 18 years on
the faculty of San Francisco State University, where he became dean of
education.

For more than two decades, Dr. Hilliard was a leader of Afrocentrism, an
ethnic history movement that highlights historical achievement among blacks,
in part to boost minority students' self-esteem.

Dr. Hilliard became a consultant to Atlanta schools during the
implementation of training guides known as the "African-American Baseline
Essays." The essays, developed by educators in Portland, Ore., view ancient
black Egypt as the birthplace of the philosophical, mathematical, and
scientific theories that formed civilization.

Afrocentrism attracted much debate and a range of scholars, including
polarizing figures such as Leonard Jeffries. Among its detractors were
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Frank M.
Snowden Jr., a Howard University classicist, both of whom wrote that the
effort to highlight the roots of black culture often came at the expense of
white European civilization. Both Schlesinger and Snowden died in February.

Dr. Hilliard told the Washington Post in 1989 that he hoped for a better
balance in all historical instruction. "We misteach European history, as we
misteach American history," he said. "Basically, what we should be teaching
is the whole story, the truth. That's the bottom line."

Asa Grant Hilliard III was born Aug. 22, 1933, in Galveston, Texas. His
father was a high school principal and his mother was a Pentecostal
minister. After they divorced, he grew up in Denver with his mother.

He graduated in 1955 from the University of Denver, where he also received a
master's degree in counseling in 1961 and a doctorate in educational
psychology in 1963. While attending college, he worked as a math teacher in
the Denver public schools and as a railroad maintenance worker, bartender,
waiter, and cook. He also served in the Army.

In academia, he made African studies and minority achievement his chief
concerns during a long career as a writer, consultant, and lecturer. He
consulted on perceived cultural biases in history textbooks and wrote
hundreds of scholarly articles.
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Max Roach
Jazz drummer Max Roach, in a 1999 file photo from Madrid, Spain, died
Thursday at
Max Roach, 83; created rhythmic foundation of bebop, expanded role of drums

By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff  |  August 17, 2007

Max Roach, one of the most innovative and influential drummers in jazz
history, as well as a professor of music for many years at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst, died yesterday at a Manhattan hospital. He was 83.

His death was announced by a spokesman for Blue Note Records, where Mr.
Roach had expanded the possibilities of jazz and of percussion. No cause of
death was given. Mr. Roach had been ill for the past several years.

One of the first jazz musicians to win a MacArthur Fellowship, in 1988, Mr.
Roach was one of those rare figures on a first-name basis with an art form.
Just as the name Miles (Davis) or Lester (Young) can mean only one person to
a jazz fan, so does Max automatically indicate Mr. Roach. He was that
important and ubiquitous a figure.

"One of the grand masters of our music," Dizzy Gillespie once called him.

Along with Kenny Clarke, Mr. Roach was the seminal bebop drummer, all but
inventing the rhythmic foundation for a jazz revolution. Bebop, with its
furious tempos and shifting accents, was an ideal vehicle for Mr. Roach's
virtuosity, placing as it did vastly greater demands on a percussionist than
swing music had. A highly melodic drummer, Mr. Roach in effect moved the
instrument's center of gravity upward, putting the main rhythmic
responsibility on the ride cymbal rather than bass drum, opening the way to
a far wider range of accents and patterns.

"Roach's influence was pervasive and absolute," the critic Gary Giddins
wrote in 2003. "He was the most ingenious, resourceful, venturesome drummer
of his generation. Even drummers who didn't want to play bop envied his
reflexes, panache, freedom, and adamant musicality."

Mr. Roach's impact extended well beyond his formative role in bebop. He was
coleader of one of the most important jazz groups of the '50s, the Clifford
Brown-Max Roach Quintet, which helped define the hard bop school of jazz.
His recordings "We Insist! Freedom Now Suite" (1960) and "It's Time!" (1962)
were landmarks of the civil rights era, integrating music and protest.
During the '70s and '80s, his percussion ensemble, M'Boom, and Double
Quartet, which combined a classical string quartet with a more traditional
jazz quartet, further expanded musical horizons.

"It's only a slight exaggeration to say," The (London) Independent newspaper
wrote in 1998, "that every time we hear the drums in jazz or rock music, we
hear an echo of the great Max Roach."

Among the classic recordings Mr. Roach played on as sideman were those
produced at the 1944 session led by Coleman Hawkins and Gillespie, such as
"Disorder at the Border" and "Woody 'n' You," which are considered the first
bebop discs; Charlie Parker's "Ko-Ko," "Billie's Bounce," and "Now's the
Time;" Davis's "Birth of the Cool;" Bud Powell's "Tempus Fugit" and "Un Poco
Loco"; Sonny Rollins's "Saxophone Colossus"; and Duke Ellington's "Money
Jungle."

Mr. Roach was the drummer at the "Greatest Jazz Concert Ever," the title of
the resulting album at Toronto's Massey Hall, with Parker, Powell,
Gillespie, and Charles Mingus in 1953.

A two-time recipient of the French Grand Prix du Disque, Mr. Roach also
played at various times with Benny Carter, Oscar Pettiford, J.J. Johnson,
Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Stan Getz, Herbie Nichols, and Abbey Lincoln,
his first wife.

It was a mark of Mr. Roach's range that he also performed with R&B singer
Louis Jordan, Dixieland trumpeter Henry (Red) Allen, avant-garde players
such as Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor, and the rapper Fab 5 Freddy.

"You have to pursue, pursue, pursue," Mr. Roach said in a 1998 interview
with The (London) Observer newspaper. "Sometimes it works, sometimes it
doesn't, but if you've been around as long as I have, you can afford to take
chances."

Maxwell Lemuel Roach was born Jan. 10, 1924, in Newland, N.C. When still
young, he moved with his parents and brother to Brooklyn, N.Y. An aunt was a
church pianist. She gave Mr. Roach his first music lessons.

He got his first drum kit when he was 12 and played in a church
drum-and-bugle corps and his school marching band. Drummers he would later
cite as models included Baby Dodds, Big Sid Catlett, Jo Jones, and Clarke.

Mr. Roach started playing professionally before he had graduated from high
school. As house drummer at a Harlem club, Monroe's Uptown House, he
participated in the jam sessions that helped give birth to bebop.

He earned a bachelor's degree in composition at the Manhattan School of
Music. A more important education came via the "conservatory of the street,"
as Mr. Roach liked to call the clubs in Harlem and along 52d Street, in
midtown Manhattan.

Mr. Roach began performing with Parker in 1945 and would be with him off and
on for the next decade. He made the first recordings under his own name in
1949. Three years later, he and Mingus founded Debut Records. He formed the
quintet with Brown in 1954. The trumpeter's death in a 1956 auto accident
devastated Mr. Roach.

Mr. Roach had long been interested in vocal and choral music, and he wrote
for voices in his protest music of the early '60s, as well as a large-scale
piece, "Lift Every Voice and Sing" (1971). Among later works by Mr. Roach
are the score to three one-act plays by Sam Shepard, which won the composer
a 1985 Obie Award, and an opera, "The Life and Life of Bumpy Johnson"
(1992), with the poet Amiri Baraka.

Mr. Roach was a natural teacher. "I learned so much about drums from Max
Roach when we were playing together," Miles Davis wrote in his
autobiography.

His educational career extended beyond the bandstand and recording studio.
He joined the faculty at UMass in 1972 and taught there for a quarter
century. He was instrumental in setting up the school's program in
Afro-American music and jazz studies."It was a godsend for the university to
have him here," said Fred Tillis, a composer, saxophone player, and retired
director of UMASS jazz program. "One of his legacies is a scholarship fund
for students interested in jazz.Mr. Roach's generosity led to the Fletcher
Henderson/Max Roach Memorial Scholarship Fund. "I had to convince him to add
his own name," Tillis said last night.

"He was untraditional, but a very effective teacher," he said, adding that
Mr. Roach would teach percussion on a variety of materials, including
instruments he collected from Africa.

A member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Mr. Roach was
inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1995. France named him a Commander
of the Order of Arts and Letters, its highest cultural honor, in 1989.

Mr. Roach leaves three children from his first marriage, sons, Raoul and
Darryl, and a daughter, Maxine, a violist, who often performed with her
father; and two other daughters, Ayo and Dara.

Funeral arrangements were incomplete.
© Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company



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