He wasn’t born in Brooklyn; New Land, North Carolina is the town that claims his birth. But the great bebop jazz drummer and innovator, Max Roach, grew up in Bed Stuy, studied piano in a Brooklyn Baptist Church, went to Boys High and by the time he was a teenager was playing with Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker.

Music critic, Peter Keepnews, writes in the New York Times’:

Layering rhythms on top of rhythms, he paid as much attention to a
song’s melody as to its beat. He developed, as the jazz critic Burt
Korall put it, “a highly responsive, contrapuntal style,” engaging his
fellow musicians in an open-ended conversation while maintaining a
rock-solid pulse. His approach “initially mystified and thoroughly
challenged other drummers,” Mr. Korall wrote, but it quickly earned the
respect of his peers and established a new standard for the instrument.

…For all his accomplishments, Mr. Roach often said that he was proudest
of the role he played in raising the profile of his instrument. “I
always resented the role of a drummer as nothing more than a
subservient figure,” he said in a 1988 interview with the writer Mike
Zwerin. “The people who really got me off were dealing with the musical
potential of the instrument.