Each month, Our State senior editor — and resident soundtrack maker — Mark Kemp, a former music editor of Rolling Stone, curates a one-of-a-kind Spotify playlist featuring North Carolina songs and musicians.

How is it that four fairly unassuming towns in North Carolina — three so small that most people couldn’t locate them on a map —wound up producing four of the most spectacular, legendary, and trailblazing musicians in the history of America’s only true homegrown art form?

Take Hamlet, in Richmond County. Blink and you’ll miss it, right? That’s the birthplace of saxophonist John Coltrane, world-renowned as one of the most innovative jazz musicians in history. About three hours west of Hamlet, in Polk County, there’s the tiny town of Tryon. Eunice Kathleen Waymon — better known to the world as Nina Simone — was born there in a little shack, the daughter of the Rev. Mary Kate Waymon, a Methodist preacher. Young Nina began her remarkable career playing piano in her mother’s church.

And then there’s Newland Township, in Pasquotank County, way out on the southern edge of the Great Dismal Swamp. The inventive jazz drummer Max Roach was born there. His subtle use of brushes and cymbals in his earliest sessions with be-bop legends Charlie Parker and Bud Powell opened up a whole new musical language, creating space for improvised piano and horn solos. And speaking of piano: Thelonious Monk, one of the most creative jazz pianists of all time, was born in Rocky Mount.

Imagine if those four titans of American music had formed a band together — Simone’s husky contralto dancing over Monk’s angular, single-note piano runs, with Roach’s gentle brushes hissing in the background making space for Coltrane’s dark and probing sax solos. A session featuring those four North Carolina musicians alone would have amounted to probably the single most important moment in the annals of jazz.

Alas, that never happened. But it could have.

The thing is, Coltrane, Simone, Roach, and Monk are hardly the only jazz greats that our state has produced. In the 20 tracks on this month’s playlist, you’ll hear the cream of North Carolina’s jazz crop: pianist Billy Strayhorn (composer of the Duke Ellington standard “Take the ‘A’ Train” who spent much of his childhood in Hillsborough); saxophonists Lou Donaldson (Badin), Harold Vick (Rocky Mount), and Tab Smith (Kinston); swing legend Johnny Long (Newell) and ’90s swing revivalists the Squirrel Nut Zippers (Chapel Hill); vocalist June Tyson (Albemarle), who sang with Afrofuturist legend Sun Ra’s Arkestra; and guitar virtuoso Tal Farlow (Greensboro), who played with the great Charles Mingus and Artie Shaw. And then there are the more contemporary experimental jazz musicians like pianists Claire Ritter (Weddington) and the late Frank Kimbrough (Roxboro), as well as the free-jazz group Ghost Trees, who continue to take jazz in new directions in the hipster clubs of Charlotte.

Those are just a few of the extraordinary names you’ll find in this mixtape of magnificent North Carolina jazz. We can be proud of our state’s jazz legacy. It’s worth celebrating!