| [review]
I Remember Ray: Ray Brown’s 79th Birthday Bash at Yoshi’s featuring Christian McBride, John Clayton, Benny Green, Russell Malone and Gregory Hutchinson, October 14th, 2005 by Steven Mayers
Ray Brown. From Duke to Dizzy to Ella to Peterson to Pass to Vaughan to Bennett to Clayton, McBride, Green, Hutcheson and Malone, Grammy-winning master-bassist touched more musicians in a single life, including many young musicians who he brought into his paternal warmth and his selflessly sharing guidance. Virtually every jazz musician has learned his or her standards by listening to Ray, particularly albums like We Get Requests, and all of those wonderful recordings with the Oscar Peterson trio. With over fifty studio recordings under his belt as a bandleader as well as hundreds of recordings the most legendary jazz musicians in the history of jazz, Ray Brown will be remembered as a pioneer, innovator, and all around figurehead of jazz for over fifty years, and an all around great person who will be forever missed. Ray’s wife, Cecilia Brown, was in the audience, dressed meticulously and looking beautiful on Ray’s extended birthday party at which final band gathered and told stories and dipped into Brown’s magic bag. Ray Brown passed away in 2002 after playing a full round of golf, one of his favorite pastimes, and catching a nap before his performance that night. Raymond Mathews Brown was born on October 13th, 1926, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he started studying piano as a child and then noticed how many piano players there were in his high school and wanted to switch to trombone but couldn’t afford a horn. The school needed a bass player and had an instrument. While he was a student, Brown would play along with the jukeboxes in bars and lock in with Duke Ellington’s bassist, Jimmy Blanton. After reading Downbeat and listening to all the music coming out of New York, he moved there and an old friend, pianist Hank Jones, introduced him to Dizzy Gillespie, who hired him on the spot. Ray played on some of the foundational be-bop albums and was showcased as a young bassist on the tune, “One Bass Hit,” with the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra. Ray Brown went on to meet Ella Fitzgerald for whom he was bassist, musical director, and in 1948, husband, for a short four years. He went on to work with orchestras in Los Angeles where he was in high demand with Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan, and Nancy Wilson, and started The Big Four with vibraphonist Milt Jackson, guitarist Joe Pass and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. He also played with Milt Jackson’s quintet which was the predecessor of The Modern Jazz Quartet. On whatever he was playing, Ray’s time was impeccable, and his tone solid like hardwood, never giving in an anchor, and his voice, what he was saying, has become a bedrock for modern jazz bass. He was bluesy, soulful, and hilarious at times with his choice of quotes that he would play straight faced. Ray Brown was a grand musician and a true showman. Christian McBride fires the night up with a story about Ray; everyone who met Ray has a story to tell about him. He tells of a night not far in the past at Carnegie Hall, when a great number of musicians had gathered for a jam session including Abbey Lincoln, Ellis and Wynton Marsalis, and McBride looks at Ray Brown and Ray is standing there frowning before the session. So he says to him, “Why you frownin’?” And Ray says, “cause they ain’t gonna give me a bass solo.” Everyone in the room laughs. ȁSo I say, what are you talkin’ ‘bout? You’re Ray Brown! Of course they gonna give you a solo!” And Ray just shakes his head and walks away. The set opens with a bass duo featuring John Clayton and Christian McBride, playing Dizzy Gillespie’s classic “Birks' Works,” keeping it slow and bluesy and gritty, and I was transported back to the number of times I had the honor of hearing Ray Brown play at Yoshi’s, just digging his attitude and trying to soak up some of his totemic grace. Immediately Ray was in the room with us, with his wife, Cecilia, and all the musicians and fans he touched. Clayton and McBride trade solos back and forth that are pulsating with Ray’s blues, leaving me grunting out some implied downbeats in the silence of the suspended room. John Clayton, a legendary Jazz and Classical bassist who I’ve heard with Milt Jackson, and who had played with Carmen McRae, Nancy Wilson, Joe Williams and Ernstein Anderson, and bass phenomenon Christian McBride who has played with Dianna Krall, Charlie Hunter and Bill Frisell, and who are both descendants of Ray Brown school. Brown, Clayton, and McBride all collaborated on the extraordinary bass trio album, Super Bass. Later in the evening, the tune, “Bass Face” composed by guitarist Kenny Burrell, featured Clayton and McBride in a call and response duo.
The whole band enters for the second tune, “F.S.R.,” which Benny Green announces as a take on Sonny Rollin’s “Doxy,” which Ray jokingly entitled "*** Sonny Rollins." Benny Green takes the head, playing as he does with a lean to the left as he runs down the keyboard like Fats Waller. Benny Green is on fire tonight. The band members are shaking their heads. Green grew up in Berkley and started studying classical music at an early age. Influenced by his father, who played tenor saxophone, he started playing jazz shortly after, and got his first real shot at it when he began to play with vocalist Fay Caroll. What I love about Green’s playing is his rhythm – he really swings and has an incredible control at just about any tempo – and his soulful touch of the blues. Green has recorded extensively with Ray Brown, as well as Oscar Peterson, Art Blakey, and Gary Bartz, just to name a few. I highly recommend all of Benny Green’s work. These Are Soulful Days
Russell Malone is one of my favorite living jazz guitarists, and just walking into the theater and seeing his custom D’Angelico propped in its stand gave me goose bumps. I first heard Malone’s work by randomly picking up his first recording, Black Butterfly
Just check out this solo: An up-and-coming drummer from Brooklyn, Hutchinson is the youngest member of the band and has gained critical esteem throughout the ‘90’s playing with jazz greats such as Joshua Redman, Joe Henderson, Betty Carter and Harry Connick, Jr. "When you get to work with people who were actually around when jazz was created, you get a whole different sense of what the music is about," he pays homage. "Those musicians took their craft very seriously. It was their lives. The things you learn from them apply to everything: How to conduct business. How to play on the road. Understanding what it takes to be successful and attain longevity in the business." A humble and thankful person by nature, Hutchinson is grateful to have played with such inspirational figures, and often downplays the singular talent he brings with him. Perfectly at home playing funk, R&B and jazz, Hutchinson nevertheless most loves playing jazz. "I just like good music," he looks down bashfully. "I gravitated toward jazz because my mom used to play all those great Sonny Rollins and Art Blakey albums around the house. But my dad came from Trinidad, so I also grew up with all kinds of groove music from the islands. Groove is the essence of music. If you can hit a groove in any style, you'll always have work." Ray Brown played a few lifetimes worth of music and I’m sure he is keeping time for Duke and Satchmo right now, “blow[ing] St. Gabriel out of the sky,” as Armstrong once said he would do when he got to heaven. To behold Ray Brown at the bass was to behold one of the great innovators of jazz music, but to meet Ray Brown, from what I have heard, was to meet a sensitive and caring human. He took on mentors, like my friends, Dave McKinney and Mandy Flowers, into his last days, and was always open to a joke, a talk, or a bass lesson. Dave McKinney, met Ray while picking him up at the airport, working as I have as a Yoshi’s volunteer driver. Taken him in as a student, mentor, and friend, Dave started taking lessons with the master and was traveling to hear him play and selling CD’s for him. I am thrilled and honored to have been able to hear Ray Brown play on numerous occasions, and to have taken part in this joyous celebration on his 79th birthday, and with Cecelia Brown there, and John Clayton, Christian McBride, Benny Green, Russell Malone and Gregory Hutchinson all in the house keeping the legacy alive, it really felt like Ray was there with us, cracking his tongue-in-cheek jokes and touching our hearts with his everlasting music. Listen to audio interviews with Ray Brown: Also check out video and audio recordings of Ray Brown and list of condolences to his family and friends: |
, released in 1999 and featuring Russell Malone, and 
(2003) are two of my later favorites featuring Green and Malone. 
, recorded in 1992 and was blown away by his warm tone, his sense of lyricism, and his arrangements on tunes like “Say a Little Prayer for Me,” and “Black Butterfly.” I think I’ll go dig that record up right now. I first heard Malone play in concert with pianist and vocalist Diana Krall at Yoshi’s in 1998, and, having the chance to see him comp chords behind piano and vocals as part of the rhythm section, which I hadn’t heard on Black Butterfly, I truly fell in love with his playing. Like Brown, McBride, Clayton and Green, Malone is a master of the small band setting and a perfectly rounded jazz guitarist, with the gift, like that of Pass or of Montgomery, to seamlessly change between bass line, harmony and melody, a one-man-band, a piece of work that one doesn’t come across often. Later in the evening, Green and Malone played their rendition of Cole Porter’s “It’s Alright With Me,” as a duo, featuring all sides of both players, their rhythms, harmonies, melodies, and tone interlocking like one instrument, later joined by the bassists, sans drums in an epic exchange of solos on a nameless E blues. Along with everything he’s ever recorded, I recommend his 2001 release on Verve, 
, featuring Malone with strings. 