Tom Morello (born Thomas Baptist Morello, May 30, 1964) is an American guitarist known for his participation in the groups Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave, his acoustic solo project The Nightwatchman, and his group, Street Sweeper Social Club. Morello is also the co-founder (with Serj Tankian) of a non-profit political organization Axis of Justice, which broadcasts a monthly program on Pacifica Radio station KPFK (90.7 FM) in Los Angeles. He is known to have played in the bands Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave and since 2014, as an additional member of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band with whom he collaborated on the High Hopes album. Since 2016, Morello has been a member of the Prophets of Rage supergroup. Born in Harlem, New York, he grew up in Libertyville, Illinois and was interested in music and politics in high school. He attended Harvard University and obtained a bachelor's degree in social sciences. After the dissolution of his first Lock Up group. Morello met Zack de la Rocha and together they created Rage Against the Machine, which became one of the most popular and influential rock bands of the 1990s. He is best known for his unique and creative guitar style, which integrates feedback noise (larsens), non-conformist picking and tapping as well as extensive use of effect pedals. Morello is also known for his extreme left-wing political views and activism; if the creation of his side-project The Nightwatchman offered him an outlet for his ideas, he played apolitical music with Audioslave. He is ranked 40th out of the "100 best guitarists of all time" by Rolling Stone magazine>. Tom Morello was born on May 30, 1964, in Harlem, New York, to Ngethe Njoroge and Mary Morello. Morello is of Irish and Sicilian origin on her mother's side, and Kenyan on her father's side. Her mother was a schoolteacher in Marseilles, Illinois, holds a Master of Arts degree from Loyola University in Chicago and had travelled to Germany, Spain, Japan and Kenya as an English language professor between 1977 and 1983. His father Omarzin was a Kenyan and participated in the Mau Mau revolt and served as Kenya's first ambassador to the United Nations. His great-great-uncle, Jomo Kenyatta, was the first elected president in Kenya's history. His parents met in August 1963 while attending a pro-democracy demonstration in Nairobi. After discovering her pregnancy, Mary returned to the United States with Njoroge in November, and they married in New York. When Morello was 16 months old, his father returned to Kenya, and denied his fatherhood. Morello was raised solely by his mother in Libertyville, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, where he attended Libertyville High School, where his mother was an American history teacher. She was Adam Jones' senior teacher in Tool, Tom's classmate and also a guitarist. Morello sang in the high school choir and was involved in the speech and theatre clubs; he plays a leading role, Oberon, in Le Songe d'une nuit d'été.
