Michael Roach | |
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Background information | |
Born | Washington, D.C., U.S. | March 18, 1955
Genres | Piedmont blues |
Occupation(s) | Musician |
Instrument(s) | Guitar |
Website | michaelroach |
Michael Roach [1] (born March 18, 1955, Washington, D.C., United States) is an American blues performer and educator based in England, who has released six albums on the independent Stella Records label. He conducts workshops on African American musical/cultural heritage internationally, [2] and is a founder of the European Blues Association. [3]
In 1941, Roach's parents moved from South Carolina to Washington, D.C., where the twenty-seven-year-old Roach later heard regional musicians John Jackson, John Cephas and Archie Edwards, who became his mentors in traditional Piedmont blues guitar. [4]
Upon relocating to the UK, Roach became active on the European blues scene, [5] and founded the European Blues Association (EBA) [3] with writer/historian Dr. Paul Oliver, MBE in 1997. The European Blues Association became a registered charity in 2002, and Roach currently serves as its director.
In 2000, Michael Roach founded "Blues Week", [5] an annual residential program of lectures and instruction in country blues guitar, harmonica, blues piano and vocals at Northampton University (UK). [6] In 2003, Roach presented Deep Blue, a three-part series on blues music featured on BBC Radio 4. [7] [8] In 2006 he released an instructional DVD, Introduction to Country Blues Guitar.
Roach's tours as an educator and performer have taken him to the Augusta Heritage Center (US), Centrum Piedmont Blues Intensive [9] (US), The Ironworks [10] (UK) and the Smithsonian Institution (US). [11] He has performed and lectured at blues, jazz, folk and roots music festivals in Croatia, [12] Czech Republic, [13] England, [14] [15] the United States, the United Arab Emirates, and Wales. [16]
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Maxwell Lemuel Roach was an American jazz drummer and composer. A pioneer of bebop, he worked in many other styles of music, and is generally considered one of the most important drummers in history. He worked with many famous jazz musicians, including Clifford Brown, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Abbey Lincoln, Dinah Washington, Charles Mingus, Billy Eckstine, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, Eric Dolphy, and Booker Little. He also played with his daughter Maxine Roach, a Grammy nominated violist. He was inducted into the DownBeat Hall of Fame in 1980 and the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1992.
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Piedmont blues refers primarily to a guitar style, which is characterized by a fingerpicking approach in which a regular, alternating thumb bass string rhythmic pattern supports a syncopated melody using the treble strings generally picked with the fore-finger, occasionally others. The result is comparable in sound to ragtime or stride piano styles. Blues researcher Peter B. Lowry coined the term, giving co-credit to fellow folklorist Bruce Bastin. The Piedmont style is differentiated from other styles, particularly the Mississippi Delta blues, by its ragtime-based rhythms.
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