Billboard : 10/14/1957
Spotlight on… selection

New idea in jazz sets has all the selections in waltz tempos. This in no way limits Roach from displaying his great technique and simultaneous poly rhythms. The fleet, concise artist is nicely supported and manages intriguing interplay with his combo. Standouts are Blues Waltz, which has several fugal passages between drums and piano, and a stirring run of Lover.

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Indianapolis Star
Polly Cochran : 10/27/1957

Estimable drummer Max Roach leads the way to an unworn path in jazz with his EmArcy album, Jazz in Three-Quarter Time.

As the title tells, it’s two sides, or 40 plus minutes, of unique waltz interpretations.

Taking three standards that were composed in waltz-time and since been turned over to 4/4 swinging, Roach has returned them to the original beat intended, but this time retaining a solid jazz context.

The oldies given both new and old form are I’ll Take Romance, Lover and The Most Beautiful Girl in the World. Completing the side one is a Roach original, Little Folks, which he intended as simple and humorous, basing it on the spirit of child’s play.

A work of Sonny Rollins, Valse Hot, and another by Roach, Blues Waltz, take up the entire second side.

It’s a smooth-working quintet you hear on the LP (tenor, trumpet, bass, piano and drums). but no credits are listed, indicating the group other than Roach doesn’t belong to the EmArcy label.

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Playboy Magazine : December, 1957

Of course, there will be all the obvious cracks from the obvious critics about Johann Strauss turning over in his grave, but to our ears Jazz in 3/4 Time by the Max Roach Quintet is as thought-provoking and swinging an LP as we’ve heard in months. Years ago, to ask for a jazz tune in waltz time seemed like asking for a can of plaid paint. But in Lover, I’ll Take Romance and Max’s own Blue Waltz and Little Folks, the ease with which a waltz can be swung, in ensemble or ad lib solos, is proved beyond a doubt by Max and his uncredited sidemen (for your inside info, they’re Sonny Rollins, tenor, Kenny Dorham, trumpet, Billy Wallace, piano and George Morrow, bass). We can only find fault with the nailbitingly overlong treatment of Rollins’ Valse Hot. In general, this LP is an educational gas, one that should settle (or start) many arguments.

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Providence Journal
Philip C. Gunion : 10/27/1957

The talented and tasteful Max Roach Quintet also has been experimenting, but this time in a more conventional vein. His new EmArcy album is Jazz in 3/4 Time, a pleasant session confined to jazz waltzes – if you didn’t get a distinct clue form the title.

Although Roach’s drumming has been outstanding for a long time, he continues to grow both in ability and feeling and Sonny Rollins‘ tenor helps out immeasurably in this departure into 3/4 time.

The fare: I’ll Take Romance, Lover, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, and some well-developed originals.

Max’s drumming always helps out in any company and in the framework of his own group he is great. He never attempts to push himself out in front simply because he is the leader. Greater love for jazz hath no drummer.[/spoiler]

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 01/19/1958

An ill-advised attempt to make modern hard jazz sound waltzy – saved only by the superb musicianship of Roach and his men who cannot do anything without swinging. The result is that you get good bop, hard but quiet, in which the tempo gimps along like Long John Silver. Listen particularly to Sonny Rollins‘ Valse Hot. The notes do not listen the personnel but it should, at a guess, include Roach, Rollins and Dorham.

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San Bernardino County Sun
Jim Angelo : 11/23/1957

No gimmick is this agreeable union of waltz and jazz music. Blues, ballads, and originals are swung in waltz time without losing the three quarter beat and still keeping the drive and feeling of jazz. Blues Waltz, for example, has the earthy blues wail yet is undeniably waltz music.

The waltz-jazz styling is ably delineated on such balladic standards as I’ll Take Romance and Lover, with jazz originals Valse Hot and Little Folks also lending themselves admirably to this treatment. Solo standouts are Rollins and Dorham whose rapport with Roach leaves little to be desired. Individual and ensemble work jell beautifully and nowhere does the music sound labored or contrived. Doubters should spin it because in this case hearing is believing.

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Down Beat : 11/14/1957
Leonard Feather : 4.5 stars

Elsewhere in these pages you will be reading of the special interest the writer has felt for triple-pulse jazz, and of the particular contributions to its development made by Sonny Rollins.

With this, the first jazz album ever devoted to the idea, the waltz becomes ineradically established in direct association with jazz. Not as a gimmick. Not as a twisted three-against-four metric device. The music played by Rollins, Roach & Co. makes no apologies or qualifications; it is waltz music, and it is jazz, and it makes it.

What the album proves as a whole is that improvisation, and the particular subtleties of syncopation that cause it to swing, cannot be destroyed by the triple pulse. The first track, six-and-a-half minutes of blues, proves this conclusively. The choruses are long-metered into 24 measures apiece; ironically, measures 17 through 20 of the theme are taken note for note from Kay Starr‘s Rock and Roll Waltz. Though it tapers off into a sloppy ending, Sonny Rollins’ solo is generally excellent. So is his composition, Valse Hot, heard previously on one of his Prestige LPs.

It is not during the solos, but in a couple of the ensembles, that the group occasionally fails to swing: Kenny Dorham‘s exposition of the theme in I’ll Take Romance grazes perilously close to the boundaries of the corn belt, while Max tends toward the un-ching-ching feeling, but a minute later, on the same track, Kenny blows some typically persuasively ad lib Dorham, and Max is cooking with 3/4 gas. Something similar happens on Max’s composition, Little Folks, four measures of which have an inescapable Ach Du Lieber Augustin flavor.

Lover, which in its many previous 4/4 versions always sounded to us like Cinderella at the ball, in the wrong clothes, clearly is more at home in a jazz waltz setting. The last track, a seven-minute stretch on the Rodgers and Hart standard, makes an intriguing contrast with the 4/4 version cut earlier by Rollins for Prestige.

A full five stars must be credited to Max and the quintet for the idea of this LP. The slight reduction from the maximum rating is due only to a few slight goofs in execution. But by all means, get this one. It’s unique. How many jazz LPs nowadays can even pretend to have earned this adjective?

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Liner Notes by Unknown

This is the first jazz album to be composed entirely of waltzes, or at least waltz-time. While the concept of jazz waltz is not new, it remains a relatively odd phenomenon; and when Bob Shad, jazz head of Mercury-EmArcy, first suggested the idea of the album to Max Roach, Max quite candidly didn’t dig it.

“As we began to work it out,” Max recalls, “I began to enjoy it more. Even now, there are many nights in a club when we never play a waltz, but we do have them in the book, and occasionally feel like playing them. A waltz does change the pace of everything, and so frequently makes a lot of sense in programming.”

In terms of learning to swing in 3/4 time, Max added: “It’s awkward at first, but after a while, everything fits right into place. And I don’t feel restrained, or feel like I’m about to fall into 4/4 if I don’t watch myself. After a while, it feels natural.”

Max chose the three standards because each originally had been in waltz time. “The jazz musician always turns tunes into 4/4 and that’s what happened to these after a while in jazz. I’ll take Romance is a head arrangement with Billy Wallace having contributed the ending. Lover and The Most Beautiful Girl in the World are also heads, and Sonny Rollins wrote the ending for Lover.

The first of the originals, Valse Hot, is Sonny’s, and was the first waltz in the Roach book, some time before the idea of this album was suggested. “We used to talk about the idea of a jazz waltz quite a bit, and then Sonny brought this in.” The work, performed by Sonny on his own album and beginning to be worked into other units’ repertoires, has become the most renowned modern jazz waltz. Sonny arranged this track.

The other two originals are by Max, who also did the arrangements. Blues Waltz is self-explanatory while the inspiration for Little Folks came to Max from watching his boy and girl, eight-year-old Daryl and seven-year-old Maxine. “I was thinking of the little things I see them do. The song has a simple and kind of humorous melody, and it sounds to me like children.”

Keeping the new kind of time on a set like this isn’t, of course, all a drummer has to do. As usual, Max is conscious of dynamics, of what each player is saying. “A drummer,” he points out, “has to listen to what’s happening. I change according to who’s playing and what he’s playing. You have to play behind a soloist according to how you interpret what they’re doing at the time. He may be playing something delicate or fiery of something else. There are a lot of different things you can do to complement a man’s solo and also to keep the rhythm more interesting and still keep that sound of the rhythm section going. It’s a matter of not being overbearing and overpowering and yet remaining stimulating.”

“Because jazz is so spontaneous,” Max added, “and because it’s hard to anticipate what will happen, it’s easy to lose control and not listen to what’s happening around you. That goes for anyone in the rhythm section. When that happens, you’re liable to smother the soloist and kill the whole sound of the section. All of us are guilty of it at times.”

A tribute to Max’s own growth into his position as the dean of modern jazz drummers was contained in Ralph Gleason’s column recently in Down Beat. Speaking of two other albums on which Max was the drummer, Gleason noted that Max’s playing is an example in terms of dynamics that it is not necessary “to fill that tympanic glass of water to the brim for each and every bar.” In talking of Max’s solos, Gleason said that what Max, “is now putting down on records (and has been for some time, actually) is a very thorough delineation of melodic, linear drum solos played with the taste of a Joe Morello or a Shelly Manne, and all the fire and guts of the glass fillers. To my way of hearing, what Roach is doing is showing the way the drums have got to go.”