[Dixielandjazz] Ray Brown Obit

[Stephen Barbone]

List mates:

One of the great bass players, and a model for just about everyone who
plays the double bass today. His music, like Duke Ellington's is "Beyond
Gategory".

Sadly,
Steve Barbone

July 4, 2002  New York Times

Ray Brown, Jazz Bass Player, Dies at 75

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Ray Brown, whose feather-fingered, guitar-like virtuosity on the bass
carried him to the summits of jazz performance for a half century, died
on Tuesday in Indianapolis. He was 75.

He had failed to show up for a 9:15 p.m. show at a club there and was
found dead in his hotel room, apparently having died in his sleep, The
Associated Press reported.

Mr. Brown won numerous critics' and listeners' popularity polls, and was
regularly included among the half-dozen or so greatest of all jazz
bassists, along with Oscar Pettiford, Charles Mingus, Milt Hinton, and
Jimmy Blanton, whose performances with Duke Ellington he counted among
his greatest influences.

Mr. Brown, whose playing was featured on more than 2,000 recordings,
played with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and the others who invented
bebop in the 1940's; was a long-standing member of the renowned Oscar
Peterson Trio: and was part of the original lineup of the Modern Jazz
Quartet. He accompanied singers from Frank Sinatra to Linda Ronstadt.

He also accompanied Ella Fitzgerald, to whom he was married from 1947 to
1952, and he continued as her musical director after their divorce.

Mr. Brown took the bass beyond its traditional "thump-thump-thump" to a
much more sophisticated technique. But his playing remained rooted in a
fundamental soufulness, which he called "the grits and the gravy."

Gillespie suggested that his sound was so deep and true you could hear
the wood.

"Mr. Brown is still one of the best musicians out there," Ben Ratliff
wrote in The New York Times in 2000. "His notes are shapely — fat and
round and well-defined — and his rhythm is so propelling that on
up-tempo pieces his eighth-notes are always blowing wind into the
music."

The same year, Mike Joyce wrote in The Washington Post, "One of the
great and enduring joys of jazz is watching bassist Ray Brown dig his
fingers into a deep, rhythmic groove until he's smiling like a kid who
just got his hands on a new toy."

Raymond Matthews Brown was born in Pittsburgh on Oct. 13, 1926. His
father was an avid music listener, and Ray fell in love with the piano
stylings of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Fats Waller and Art Tatum. He
began studying the piano at 8.

He decided to switch to the bass in high school when an opening became
available in the school orchestra. He quickly became so good that he had
to turn down offers to join traveling bands because he had promised his
parents he would stay to finish high school.

After graduation he played with a couple of groups, and then, in 1945,
decided to go to New York on his own. Within hours of arriving in
Manhattan, he met Hank Jones, the pianist, who in turn introduced him to
Gillespie. Gillespie hired him on the spot on the basis of only Mr.
Jones's recommendation.

The next evening, Mr. Brown found himself onstage with Gillespie,
Parker, Bud Powell and Max Roach, the giants of bebop, the new jazz
style that was characterized by intricate harmonies and lightning fast
speeds.

"Ray Brown, on bass, played the strongest, most fluid and imaginative
bass lines in modern jazz at the time, with the exception of Oscar
Pettiford," Gillespie wrote in his memoir, "To Be or Not to Bop."

After recording his classics "One Bass Hit" and "Two Bass Hit" with
Gillespie's big band in 1946 and 1947, he formed his own trio with Mr.
Jones and Charlie Smith on drums. Ms. Fitzgerald sang.

He, Ms. Fitzgerald and other star musicians participated in Norman
Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic tours during this period. In the early
1950's, Mr. Brown reunited with colleagues from the Gillespie band, Milt
Jackson, John Lewis and Kenny Clarke, to form the original Modern Jazz
Quartet.

>From 1951 to 1966, he played in the Oscar Peterson Trio with Mr.
Peterson and guitarist Herb Ellis. The group, known for Mr. Peterson's
swirling, intricate solos, was consistently ranked as among jazz's most
popular groups during the 1960's. Mr. Brown was almost always voted top
bassist. As an accompanist, Mr. Brown was "the epitome of foresight,
sympathetic foresight," Mr. Peterson said.

In 1966, Mr. Brown settled in Los Angeles, where he became a freelance
and studio musician. In 1973, he recorded an album with Ellington, "This
One's for Blanton," a tribute to his hero.

His activities included playing on all of Sinatra's television specials,
acting as director of the Monterey Jazz Festival for two years and as
music director of the Concord Summer Festival in 1976 and 1977.

He is survived by his wife, Cecilia, and his son with Ms. Fitzgerald,
Ray Brown Jr. of Hawaii.

In an interview this March with The Albuquerque Tribune, he was asked if
he liked any of his albums more than others.

"The day you get satisfied and start liking what you play is the day you
have to quit," he said. "If you ask a musician what is their best album,
they say, `My next one.' "