Jazz In 3/4 Time

Max Roach was Charlie Parker’s drummer on the classic Savoy and Dial sides. He was Clifford Brown’s partner until Brown died in a car crash in 1956 — the year before this record. Jazz in 3/4 Time is exactly what it says: an entire jazz album in waltz time, a constraint that was genuinely unusual for late-’50s jazz, which was almost universally in 4/4. Sonny Rollins plays on it.

Charnas singles this out as a precursor experiment in the same territory as Dilla Time — not microrhythmic displacement at the level of the individual phrase, but a compositional decision to work within a metric structure that the genre’s conventions don’t normally permit. What Roach was doing in 1957 — deliberately asking what jazz sounds like when you remove the assumption of 4/4 — is structurally similar to what Dilla was doing in the ’90s when he asked what hip-hop sounds like when you remove the assumption of quantised drums. The questions are different; the method is the same.