Raising a Glass for Max Roach

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When you’re a true fan of jazz music, you don’t take the music lightly. When you listen to recordings by jazz greats, you study each song; you learn each note of every solo.

The jazz drummer Max Roach was one of those greats that you study.

His passing this week prompted a lot of conversation between my friends and me about how awesome Roach was on the drum kit and how much we’ve been influenced by his style and ideas. One of my musician friends sent out this email today:

It seems like whenever one of the greats passes away these days, it never gets the press and back story it deserves. Max Roach’s composition “Drum Conversation” was on a random old record that my folks had in their collection and it was the main reason I picked up the drums in the first place. After Max, drummers were considered musicians. Please raise a glass for Max, we owe him a huge debt.

Well, here I am, raising my glass. To Max Roach.

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We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

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If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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