Dance: “Max Roach 100” at the Joyce

Drummer Max Roach was a pioneer in the jazz world. He was at the forefront of the hard “bebop” style characterized by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. In the Sixties, he demonstrated that drums can work as a solo instrument, playing themes, variations, and rhythmically cohesive phrases.

But Roach also blazed trails in fields beyond music. In 1960, for instance, he and Charles Mingus organized an alternative to the Newport Jazz Festival, which they saw as too pop and too white.

This intersection of politics and jazz is boldly explored in “Max Roach 100,” the Joyce Theater’s splendid tribute to the late musician/activist on the centenary of his birth.

In the short black-and-white film that kicks off the evening, Roach is seen playing the drums while wearing a beret that reads “Free Mandela” in French. This theme of defiance is carried through in “Jim has Crowed,” the second of the three pieces on last night’s bill. A dozen or so dancers from Rennie Harris’s company, Puremovement, gather like protesters facing an unseen authority. The dancers flash Black Power fists, wave their arms (one fellow actually spins on his head) to Roach’s “The Dream/ It’s Time.” Interwoven are recorded snippets of Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

In “Percussion Bitter Sweet: Tender Warriors,” Ronald K. Brown and Arcell Cabuag combine two companies—Brown’s troupe, Evidence, and Malpaso, from Cuba—to show Roach at his most Afro-Cuban. Halfway through, the dancers switch seamlessly from sleeveless dashikis and full-skirted dresses into spiritually pure white outfits. The piece reflects Roach’s respect for Afro-Caribbean music, which began when he traveled to Haiti in the late 1940s to study with the traditional drummer Ti Roro.

Perhaps the most impressive piece is “Freedom…in Progress,” a 20-minute solo improvisation by indefatigable tap dancer Ayodele Casel. She performs to one of the duets Roach recorded with the free-jazz pianist Cecil Taylor. Casel floats, slides, and spans the stage as effortless as a pianist spans a keyboard. Wowza.

Max Roach, who served on the board of the Joyce before his death in 2007, once remarked, “I make music do that people can dance.” Truer words were never spoken. Unless it’s the observation that after so many years, Joyce remains at the cutting edge of dance in New York City. Thank goodness.

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