Max Roach

Live At Vielharmonie is a concert by the Max Roach Double Quartet, recorded at the Vielharmonie in Munich on November 7, 1983 and released by Soul Note in 1985. Max Roach had begun that year to set his working quartet beside a string quartet, in concert and in the studio, and this is the earliest of the recordings he made in that format, two long pieces that each fill a side of the original LP.

The quartet is Cecil Bridgewater on trumpet and flugelhorn, Dayne Armstrong on tenor saxophone, Phil Bowler on electric bass and Roach on drums and percussion; the strings are the Swedenborg String Quartet, with Lars Holm and Ulrika Jansson on violins, Anders Lindgren on viola and Kerstin Elmquist on cello. Werner Filipitsch engineered the concert, which was mixed at Barigozzi Studio in Milan in June 1984; Roach produced it himself, and Joachim Ernst Berendt wrote the liner notes. Roach's A Little Booker, more than twenty minutes, and Bridgewater's Bird Says, eighteen, honour Booker Little and Charlie Parker, two of the drummer's closest partners, as CAM Jazz notes on its page for the album. Both came back in January 1985 on the studio album Easy Winners, with Odean Pope and the Uptown String Quartet. Comparing the two in Burning Ambulance (2020), Phil Freeman found that "Bridgewater is the star of the show", his solos burning bright for long stretches while the strings mostly add accents behind the horns. His verdict was that the album is "more of a footnote to Easy Winners than a vital stand-alone work", though proof that the concept held up on stage.

This is the Soul Note CD 121073-2, in the edition now sold by CAM Jazz, which owns the label, of the album first released on LP in 1985 as SN 1073.