Max Roach

One of the great bebop drummers, he went on to help define modern jazz
It says much for Charlie Parker's ability to spot talent that two young sidemen from his most famous quintet, Miles Davis (obituary September 30, 1991) and Max Roach, left him far behind. Roach, who has died aged 83, was rated among the greatest of pioneering drummers and later shone as an innovative composer and bandleader.

Parker brought an unprecedented rhythmic intensity to jazz, packing his solos with phrases that used the gap between beats as a springboard. The underlying pulse had quickened during the swing decade from two beats to four. Parker and other bebop masters stretched it to eight in a bar. It followed that a swing-style background guitar strumming would impede the soloists. So, strummers were outlawed, which left more flexible, less intrusive bassists to combine metric and harmonic roles.

Roach, barely 20 when he recorded Koko with Parker, reinvented the role of the drums to exploit these changes. He had the imagination and the quickfire hands, not merely to tap eight beats evenly on his top cymbal at speed but to elaborate them or vary the tones. Bebop's doubling the number of beats created space that encouraged the drummer to overlap between bars, and Roach did so with an endless array of fill-ins and paradiddles. Inventiveness and technical dexterity were equally balanced in his solos, which he built with impeccable logic.

Born in New Land, North Carolina, Roach was four when his family moved to New York. His aunt was pianist in the local baptist church, where the young Max sang. When he was eight, he began studying piano, when he was 12, his father bought him a drum kit. He taught himself music and had a succession of gigs while still at the boy's high school in Brooklyn. At 16 he briefly played with Duke Ellington's orchestra. Later he studied theory and composition at the Manhattan School of Music.

Roach's recording debut was with Coleman Hawkins in 1943 and he toured with Benny Carter's big band. By 1945, firmly into bebop mode, he worked with Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, appearing on all the Parker classics, from Koko to Billie's Bounce and Parker's Mood. In 1949-50 he featured on Davis's Birth of the Cool sessions.

In the early 1950s Roach gravitated to Los Angeles, working with west coast musicians and appearing in the film Carmen Jones (1954). In the same year, offered the chance to form a group, he recruited the superlative trumpeter Clifford Brown into what became known as the Roach-Brown quintet. Brown's saxophone partners were successively Teddy Edwards, Harold Land and Sonny Rollins. Kenny Dorham joined after Brown was killed in a car crash. Brown's death sent Roach into a profound, alcohol-fuelled depression, for which he received psychiatric help. He also defeated a heroin habit.

Parker died in 1955, and modern jazz, via groups led by Davis, Art Blakey, Horace Silver and others ironed out bebop's jagged edges. The first Roach quintets fitted this pattern, though even then, the leader's tendency to pick very fast tempos added an abrasiveness that became more marked when, after Rollins and then Dorham left, he brought in younger men. Replacing the piano with tuba or trombone pushed the drums further towards the front line.

After 1955, a radical tide inspired black Americans to focus on African culture. Increasingly writing the material for his groups, Roach's contributions intensified through an association with singer Abbey Lincoln - they later married - and Lincoln introduced him to lyricist Oscar Brown Jr (obituary June 1, 2005). The three collaborated on the Freedom Now Suite (1960). Roach broke entirely fresh ground with the album, It's Time, composing the music for a 16-piece choir and a jazz sextet, followed by the equally gripping Lift Every Voice And Sing, made up of his arrangements of spirituals.

Among musicians who identified with black consciousness, Roach was most frequently involved in direct action. Together with Charles Mingus - with whom he had set up the shortlived Debut label in 1952 - he organised the Newport Rebels concert, featuring musicians allegedly ignored by the main Newport festival. Roach even interrupted a Miles Davis Carnegie Hall charity performance because he disapproved of the beneficiary. The Village Vanguard club's owner once pleaded with him to just play music and stop lecturing the audience.

In the 1980s, he set Martin Luther King Jr's I Have A Dream speech to a drum accompaniment. His British appearances included a 1986 concert during Africa Week. Its organisers, the then Greater London Council, named a Brixton park after him.

Many young musicians he employed carved out their own niches. Among them were trumpeter Booker Little and saxophonists Stanley Turrentine and George Coleman. Little's partnership with the reedsman Eric Dolphy, a double-act that thrived on extremes of emotional contrast, works to perfection on Tender Warriors, from another classic Roach album, Percussion Bitter Suite. Their successors, trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater and saxophonist Odean Pope, appeared in a number of Roach's groups during a period of 20 years.

By then, jazz musicians were in demand for academic posts and in 1972, Roach had begun a long association with the University of Massachusetts where he joined the department of music and dance. His awards included an honorary doctorate in music from the New England Conservatory. In 1988, he became the first jazz musician to be given a MacArthur fellowship, reserved for those making major contributions to American culture and science.

Roach outgrew the conventions of bebop to the extent that younger innovators such as Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor played duets with him. He played his last concert with Taylor at Colombia University in 2000. Never interested in retracing his career, he continued to break fresh ground well into his 70s. He was among the first jazz stars to claim rappers followed a black tradition by making music without expensive instruments. In 1983 he shared the stage with a team of breakdancers, a rapper and two DJs. He won an Obie for his music for three Sam Shepard plays in 1984. He performed with symphony orchestras, classical string quartets - in one of which his daughter Maxine played cello - as well as with Japanese drummers and Chinese free improvisers, and composed music for Alvin Ailey dance pieces. Perhaps the most telling long-term outcome of his interest in Africa was the splendidly named M'Boom, first set up in the early 1970s, an African-related percussion ensemble including marimba and xylophone that incorporated jazz ideas. His last recording was with Clark Terry in 2002.

Roach's three marriages ended in divorce. His survivors include a son and daughter from his first marriage, a son from another relationship and twin daughters from his third marriage.

· Maxwell Lemuel Roach, musician, born January 10 1924; died August 16 2007