Max Roach

Easy Winners is the studio album of the Max Roach Double Quartet, Roach's working quartet joined by the Uptown String Quartet, recorded at The Platinum Factory in Brooklyn on January 4, 7 and 8, 1985 and released by Soul Note the same year. Roach had tried the format before. A version of the double quartet with the Swedenborg String Quartet had been taped live in Munich in November 1983, and two of the pieces here, Bird Says and A Little Booker, were already in that repertoire. In Brooklyn the strings became a family affair: Roach's daughter Maxine Roach played viola and arranged the title piece.

The quartet was Cecil Bridgewater on trumpet, Odean Pope on tenor saxophone, Tyrone Brown on electric bass and Roach on drums and percussion, with John Williams and Cecelia Hobbs on violins and Eileen Folson on cello; Ray Mantilla adds congas on the opening track. Roach produced, Jon Evans recorded and Stanley Crouch wrote the notes. Three members of the band brought one piece each. Bridgewater's Bird Says opens at almost thirteen minutes, which Phil Freeman in Burning Ambulance (2020) called "a high-speed bebop burner", the strings punching in like a big band section. Pope's ballad Sis leaves the string quartet alone for its first half. Roach's A Little Booker is a fourteen-minute sprint for Pope's tenor. The album closes with Scott Joplin's rag Easy Winners for the strings alone, to which Freeman heard "an almost Mozartian quality".

This is the Soul Note CD 121109-2, which Discogs lists as a reissue of the album first released in 1985 as SN 1109.