Randy Weston

A master pianist and composer largely overlooked by the jazz mainstream, Randy Weston combines a blues-soaked Bop sensibility with an interest in African and Caribbean musical forms. His early trio and quartet work reveals the influence of Thelonious Monk, as he alternates between angular melodic phrases and minimalistic stabs and splashes. By 1960, he was releasing some of the first fusions of jazz with West African rhythms. In the late '60s and early '70s, he spent several years in Morocco, adding North African musical forms and tonalities to his already-wide palette. Weston's voracious appetite for musical hybrids places him at the forefront of jazz's cross-cultural developments.