Roger Dawson

Did You Know?

• After high school, Dawson served in the U.S. Army and was an announcer for the Armed Forces radio network in Europe.
• In 1963, Dawson became General Manager of San Diego radio station KJLM, changed it to a 24-hour jazz format with call letters KDIG, and won the Billboard Jazz Station award in June 1965.

Early life

As a teenager, Dawson was hooked on the jazz and Latin music programs hosted by Gene Norman on KFI and Chico Sesma on KALI. He caught live performances at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, where Norman presented artists like Erroll Garner, Miles Davis with John Coltrane, and West Coast groups such as Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse All Stars. On his fourteenth birthday at Norman’s Sunset Strip club, The Crescendo, Dawson met vibraphonist Cal Tjader and Cuban conga player Armando Peraza, and he begged Peraza to teach him Afro-Cuban drumming. After transferring to John Muir High School in Pasadena, he connected with classmates Bobby Hutcherson, Herbie Lewis, and Nat Brown. With Dawson on drums, they formed the Jazz Monitors and played around Los Angeles until their 1958 graduation.

Jazz and salsa musician

In late 1966, Roger Dawson left his job as a radio General Manager after a 1965 talk with John Coltrane at Los Angeles's It Club. He moved to New York to pursue jazz, reuniting with high school friends Herbie Lewis and Bobby Hutcherson. Settling on Harlem's Sugar Hill, he studied conga and Afro-Cuban percussion under Jose Valiente, Carlos Valdes (Patato), Jose Mangual, Frankie Malabe, and Milton Cardona. He played congas for Frankie Dante's Orquesta Flamboyan Salsa and performed with many top salsa acts, including Tito Puente, Machito, Típica 73, Fajardo, Orquesta Broadway, Angel Canales, Dave Valentin, Joe Cuba, and Cortijo. With Rubén Blades, he co-wrote the salsa tune "Iguales," which Orquesta Guarere recorded. Dawson stayed connected to his jazz roots, performing with Ahmad Jamal, Ray Nance, the Gil Evans Orchestra, McCoy Tyner, Roy Haynes, Hannibal Marvin Peterson, Kenny Barron, Billy Harper, Cedar Walton, Herbie Lewis, Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Hutcherson, Sam Rivers, Rashied Ali, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Hilton Ruiz with George Coleman, and touring with Archie Shepp. He also recorded with Carla Bley and the Jazz Composers' Orchestra on the epic Escalator over the Hill, alongside Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Gato Barbieri, Paul Motian, and others.

Development of an original conga style

Having started as a post-bop trap player upon arriving in New York in 1965, Dawson combined authentic Afro-Cuban technique learned from Patato Valdes, Armando Peraza, Frankie Malabe, Milton Cardona, Tommy Lopez, and others into the jazz idioms of the 1960s and 1970s, including the Free Jazz Avant Garde movement. At Slug's on East 3rd Street, his long association with Archie Shepp's band and drummer Beaver Harris's aggressive high-energy percussive forays led to exploration of improvised non-traditional "rolling" or "rubato" tempos. This led Dawson to further experimental free playing with Sam Rivers, the Jazz Composers Orchestra, and the Ted Danial Energy Big Band at Ali's Alley. He adapted non-traditional tempos such as 7/4 and 9/4, creating patterns incorporating authentic Afro-Cuban conga technique, and utilized mixtures of 4/4, 6/8, 12/8, 7/4, and 9/4 in his own compositions and with Hilton Ruiz.

New York radio years

In 1975, while continuing to perform on congas, Dawson returned to jazz broadcasting as a jazz deejay and account executive on New York's WRVR, where he hosted the highest rated New York jazz radio show on the station on Saturday according to the Fall '75 Arbitron ratings. Because of his knowledge of Latin music, he created Roger Dawson's Sunday Salsa Show, which began on May 18, 1975. According to the Arbitron Radio Ratings Service, it became the highest rated Sunday radio show in the New York market with over one quarter of a million listeners every Sunday from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm. The show could be heard from one end of Central Park to the other, Brooklyn's Coney Island and Prospect Park, Orchard Beach in the Bronx, the New Jersey Shore, and north to Bridgeport and Stamford, Connecticut. Due to his multiethnic audience, salsa album sales began to soar. In addition to playing historical cuts of vintage Cuban and Puerto Rican music and explaining the evolution of modern salsa, he also broke new albums of New York's emerging salsa performers, including the Palmieri brothers, Willie Colón, Tito Puente, Ray Barretto, Joe Cuba, the Fania All-Stars, Celia Cruz, Machito, Héctor Lavoe, Ismael Rivera, Rubén Blades, and many others.