From Hip-Hop to Jazz:
North Carolina Musicians Influence Music Worldwide By Alicia Benjamin
These legendary Black men from North Carolina have greatly influenced music worldwide. Over the last 100 years, these musicians have elevated the artform of music, not only during their lifetimes, but for generations in the future.
Thelonious Monk
• Jazz (1917 – 1982)
Max Roach
Photo by William P. Gottlieb
Credited as one of the innovators of modern jazz, Thelonious Monk played with jazz giants Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins and many others beginning in the 1940s. Monk, born on October 10, 1917, in Rocky Mount, N.C., moved to Manhattan with his family in 1922. He began studying classical piano when he was 11 years old, but he had already learned to play the piano from watching his sister practice during her music lessons. Monk has composed some of the most recorded jazz standards including “Straight, No Chaser,” “Blue Monk,” “Round Midnight,” and “I Mean You.” Monk was known for his eccentric piano playing style which sometimes included forceful banging on the piano keys, long pauses and playing dissonate chords that created strange harmonies. Monk retired in the early 1970’s after battling mental illness. He died from a stroke in New York City in 1982.
• Jazz (1924 – 2007)
Max Roach was born in Pasquotank County, N.C in 1924 and moved to Brooklyn, N.Y. with his family when he was four years old. He studied classical percussion at the Manhattan School of Music and co-founded Debut Records with bassist Charles Mingus in 1952. Roach formed one of the most respected quintets in jazz history in 1954 with the legendary jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown, who died when he was 25 in a car accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Roach and his second wife, singer and actress Abbey Lincoln, often performed together and helped to create the critically acclaimed “We Resist!” which was released in 1960. A protest piece and artistic expression of the vibrant civil rights movement of the time, “We Resist!” consists of experimental songs that incorporate screams, frantic drumming, instrumental improvisations and forceful singing by Lincoln.
January-February 2022 | Pride Magazine
39
