Max Roach, who died on 15 August , 2007, made important changes to jazz music during his brilliant career as a drummer, composer and band leader.

Nicknamed 'The Duke Ellington of the Drums,' he explored the art of improvisation and unusual time signatures and became one of the first jazz musicians to perform in times other than the standard 4/4 count.

The motives behind his compositions were political as well as experimental, as he produced pieces that passionately supported racial equality.

His talent shone particularly in the 1940s, when he worked with other famed jazz musicians John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie and Charlie Parker . He was one of the first drummers to perform in the bebop style.

Maxwell Lemuel Roach was born in Newland, North Carolina, on 10 January, 1924. He already demonstrated a drive for music at the age of 14, and after high school, went on to study at the Manhattan School of Music, where his formal training first begun with a former Scottish drum major. However, his spirit and talent shone most when he performed in variety shows and after-hours clubs in Harlem.

From 1942 his efforts were mainly put into a quintet set up by Mr Parker, which produced a disc in 1945 called Koko, known as one of the most influential modern jazz recordings.

He also worked with Miles Davis around this time, playing in Birth of the Cool, and recorded his own work as a freelancer. Yet it was his more accessible recordings from his collaboration with Clifford Brown in the 1950s that are regarded as his best work, with Joy Spring being one of their most celebrated discs.

In 1960 he organised a free music festival with Charles Mingus and worked with the writer Oscar Brown Jr on We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite. In the mid 1960s he also established the drum solo and later set up a percussion ensemble called M'Boom Re.

Working on We Insist!... was the catalyst he needed to write a number of compositions, and he spent most of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s working with choreographers and playwrights, including Sam Shepherd, with whom he won an Obie Award.

He also went on to establish his own quartet, which included the trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater, saxaphonist Odean Pope and bassist Tyrone Brown. This group continued until the start of the century and recorded many discs; and Mr Roach particularly enjoyed collaborating the group with his daughter's own, Uptown String Quartet.

In the latter years of his career, he became one of the first jazz musicians to become a full-time professor and he taught at the University of Massachusetts until the 1990s. He stopped touring in 2000 but continued to write and record until a debilitating illness stopped him a couple of years later. He died in Manhattan at the age of 83.

His first wife was Mildred Roach, with whom he had his son Daryl and daughter Maxine. In 1954 he had another son, Raoul Jordu, with singer Barbara Jai (Johnson). After eight years married to singer Abbey Lincoln, he married for a third and final time to Janus Adams Roach, who gave birth to twin daughters, Ayodele and Dara Rasheeda.

Max Roach's career bore many achievements, such as when he was inducted into the Big Band and Jazz hall of Fame in 1991; and he twice received the French Grand Prix du Disque. He was also recipient of eight honorary degrees, two of which were awarded by the Universities of Bologna and Columbia.