Researching Pete Roca

In 1957, Max Roach became aware of him while jamming at Birdland and recommended him to Sonny Rollins. As drummer of Rollins' trio on the afternoon set at the Village Vanguard on November 3 he became part of the important record A Night at the Village Vanguard (Originally only one of five recorded tracks with La Roca found their way on the album). In 1959 he recorded with Jackie McLean (New Soil) and in a quartet with Tony Scott, Bill Evans and Jimmy Garrison. Besides Garrison he often joined with bassists who played in the Bill Evans Trio, especially Scott LaFaro and Steve Swallow, and also accompanied pianists like Steve Kuhn, Don Friedman and Paul Bley.

Between the end of the 1950s and 1968, he also played with Slide Hampton, the John Coltrane Quartet, Marian McPartland, Art Farmer, Freddie Hubbard, Mose Allison, Charles Lloyd, among others, as well as leading his own group and working as the house drummer at the Jazz Workshop in Boston, Massachusetts. During this period, he recorded two albums under his own name, Basra (Blue Note, 1965) and Turkish Women at the Bath (Douglas, 1967), also issued as Bliss under pianist Chick Corea's name on Muse.

In 1968, with the market for acoustic jazz in decline, Sims decided to enroll in law school. By this time La Roca was already earning most of his income by driving a taxi cab in New York City, a job he held for five years during the 1960s. Sims became a lawyer in the early 1970s, and was still practicing at the time of a 1997 radio interview with WNYC's Steve Sullivan. When his second album as leader, Turkish Women at the Bath, was released under Chick Corea's name without La Roca's consent, Sims filed and argued a lawsuit against Douglas Records, and the erroneously-labeled records were recalled.

He returned to jazz part-time in 1979, and recorded one new album as a leader, Swing Time (Blue Note, 1997).

He died in New York of lung cancer at the age of 74.