[Dixielandjazz] Ray Smith of Ray's Records RIP

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Ray Smith obituary
Owner of Ray's Jazz Shop, a mecca for record collectors
     * Richard Williams 
    * guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 19 April 2011 18.47 BST 
    
Ray Smith played cricket with the Ravers, a team of jazz lovers and musicians At 
a time when the jazz avant garde of the 1960s was further dividing the eternally 
factional and quarrelsome world of British jazz, Ray Smith became the source 
from whom London's more adventurous enthusiasts acquired recordings 
whose limited availability only enhanced their appeal. It was in the basement of 
Collet's Record Shop at 70 New Oxford Street that Ray, who has died of cancer 
aged 76, began to dispense the imported albums of Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, 
Cecil Taylor and other prophets of a movement then known as the "new thing", on 
such covetable independent US labels as ESP-Disk and Candid.Ray was a natural 
hipster and, like all great record-shop managers, was sometimes intimidating and 
seldom allowed his time to be wasted, but successive generations benefited from 
his love and broad knowledge of the entire history of jazz. One of his slogans, 
in a magazine advertisement, trumpeted that inclusivity by claiming that the 
shop's stock ranged "from George Lewis to 

George Lewis" – in other words, from a New Orleans clarinettist of the most 
traditional kind to a highly experimental New York trombonist and composer of 
the same name.
In 1975, Collet's moved to Shaftesbury Avenue, where Smith eventually took over 
the lease and the stock, rechristening the premises Ray's Jazz Shop. In 2002 he 
retired after selling the business to Foyles, who closed the shop but 
transferred the stock, and the name, to a department of their bookshop in 
Charing Cross Road.
Ray was born in the west London suburb of Ealing and had a difficult childhood. 
His father served in the army during the second world war and thereafter played 
no part in the family's life, leaving his wife to bring up their son. Ray was 
sent to board at Allhallows school near Lyme Regis in Dorset, where he developed 
a love of jazz and cricket. His asthma made it difficult to participate in 
sport, and he was bullied as a result, but he turned out to have a gift for 
spinning a cricket ball. Returning from his holidays at home, he would carry 
with him recordings by Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie.In 1956, aged 21, he 
went to work for Collet's, the well-known leftwing bookseller. Their record shop 
on New Oxford Street contained a folk and blues department on the ground floor, 
run by Gill Cook and Hans Fried, with Ray selling jazz records from a basement 
which also contained his own drum kit and occasionally became the venue for 
impromptu sessions.
As an increasingly familiar face on the Soho jazz and art scene, he played with 
Wally Fawkes's Troglodytes and other bands, shared a flat on Monmouth Street 
with the saxophonist Bobby Wellins, and became friendly with the artist Peter 
Blake. Ray can be seen dancing the Twist in Ken Russell's 1962 TV pop-art 
documentary, Pop Goes the Easel, which examined the work and the world of Blake, 
Pauline Boty and Derek Boshier.
The drummer Charlie Watts, a future member of the Rolling Stones and a fellow 
jazz fan, was another friend. When the embryonic Stones supported the Dave Hunt 
Blues Band, which featured Ray on drums, Watts borrowed Smith's kit and made a 
hole in the snare drum head.
Many years later, when Watts was invited to present an hour of music on the Jazz 
FM radio station, he took Ray along to share the microphone. Although Ray gave 
up playing in the 60s, the drums remained in the basement and made the move to 
Shaftesbury Avenue.
After the relocation, the business was given an unexpected boost when Ray 
arranged to sell a large cache of valuable unplayed bebop 78s on the Savoy and 
Dee Gee labels (the latter named after and owned by Gillespie) discovered in a 
New Jersey warehouse by the bandleader Chris Barber. Ray's assistants, Bob Glass 
and Matthew Wright, helped sort and sell them, with the aid of newspaper and 
television publicity. Mint copies of Charlie Parker's classic Parker's Mood were 
among the treasures which found their way into the hands of grateful collectors.
Cricket and football were frequent topics of conversation in the shop. Ray 
played for many years in the colours of the Ravers, a superficially louche but 
deadly serious cricket team consisting of jazz musicians, including Fawkes, Mick 
Mulligan, Bruce Turner and Frank Parr, and other figures from their world, such 
as the agent Jim Godbolt and the Melody Maker journalist Bob Dawbarn. A member 
of Middlesex cricket club, Ray was a frequent visitor to Lord's and was once 
asked to provide specialist advice to the county's young spinners. After 

supporting Brentford, his local football team, during childhood, he switched his 
allegiance to Chelsea in later years.
When Collet's announced a plan to move the shop into their main branch, Ray 
decided to buy the jazz half and become its proprietor. Once Cook and the folk 
department had made their exit, Ray and his assistants spent a weekend knocking 
down the interior wall dividing the genres, repositioned the counter and were 
open for business under the new name on the Monday morning.Wright took on the 
manager's role, succeeded by Glyn Callingham and Paul Pace, while Mike Gavin 
came in to run a blues and roots section in the basement. Among the browser bins 
was a category of LPs under the title, invented by Ray, of "Hen's Teeth": the 
rarest of the rare, from Dick Twardzik on the Pacific Jazz label to Joe Harriott 
on Jazzland.
For all their inestimable cultural value, however, specialist record shops of 
all kinds are the most marginal of businesses, and by 2002 Ray had no desire to 
accept yet another rent increase. The business changed owners, and he retired to 
watch Test cricket from around the world on a large TV screen in his Camden Town 

flat.
In 1969 he married the artist Wendy Jones, who – as Wendy Smith – illustrated a 
successful series of children's books by Margaret Mahy. They separated in later 
years, but remained friends, and Wendy was among those in attendance during his 
final weeks in hospital.
• Ray Smith, record-shop owner, born 9 September 1934; died 17 April 2011