Max Roach was born January 10, 1924, in Newland, North Carolina, and grew up in New York City, where he played drums in gospel bands as a child. In the early 1940s he began performing with the innovators gathering at Monroe's Uptown House and Minton's Playhouse, including Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, jam sessions that gave rise to bebop. Roach's playing moved the music's fixed pulse from the bass drum to the ride cymbal, creating a polyrhythmic, percussive texture that elevated the drummer to an equal partner with melodic improvisers rather than simply a timekeeper.

In 1954 he became co-leader of a quintet with trumpeter Clifford Brown, a group that produced a run of influential recordings before a 1956 car accident killed Brown and another band member. In 1960, Roach composed We Insist! Freedom Now Suite with lyricist Oscar Brown Jr., written for his future wife, vocalist Abbey Lincoln, a chorus, instrumental soloists, and ensemble, its theme of racial equality a direct expression of Roach's own political activism.

Roach died August 16, 2007, in New York City, following a long illness, at age 83.

Roach's rhythmic innovations, developed alongside Parker and Gillespie in bebop's founding jam sessions, permanently changed how the drum set functioned in jazz, and his later explicitly political work, especially We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, established a template for jazz as a vehicle for direct social commentary.