page_title: Roger Dawson
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Roger Dawson / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: The Jazz Monitors 1957 - from left, Roger Dawson, drums, Herbie Lewis, bass, Bobby Hutcherson, vibraphone, Nat Brown, piano
context_page_description: Roger Dawson is a jazz percussionist, conga drummer, bandleader and jazz composer. He was a leading jazz and salsa disc jockey in the US and acknowledged as at the forefront of New York's salsa music explosion of the seventies and early eighties. He was the creator of the long running "Salsa Meets Jazz" concert series at New York's Village Gate club.
context_section_description: At fourteen, he was influenced by the jazz and Latin music radio shows of Gene Norman over KFI and Chico Sesma respectively on radio station KALI. Roger recalls going to Gene Norman's concerts at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium to see Erroll Garner, Miles Davis with John Coltrane and the "West Coast jazz" sounds of Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse All Stars, Shorty Rogers and the Giants and the Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker Quartet.  Gene Norman also owned "The Crescendo" Jazz club on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood where on his fourteenth birthday Roger met vibraphonist Cal Tjader and the great Cuban Conguero Armando Peraza who so impressed Roger that he pleaded for Peraza to begin teaching him Afro-Cuban conga drum technique.
  Dawson transferred to John Muir High School in Pasadena, California where he met fellow students Vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, Bassist Herbie Lewis and pianist Nat Brown; with Roger on drums, together they formed a quartet called "The Jazz Monitors" and performed at venues in the Los Angeles area until they graduated from John Muir in 1958.
caption: The Jazz Monitors 1957
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