By Nichole L. Reber

Ray Brown turned over my jazz engine.

In one night, the world’s foremost bassist took me from hearing jazz all the way to listening to it. Intellect and emotion merged that night. I’d been stupefied before into uttering an infantile wow when I saw trumpet player Nick Payton, but watching Ray made me think You can do that with a bass? The jazz legend, 75-year-old Raymond Matthews Brown, walked bass lines all over the quaint crowd in his life’s penultimate performance, his last show in Chicago at the Jazz Showcase, Sunday, June 30. Filling in the rest of his trio were pianist Larry Fuller and drummer Karriem Riggins. His amicable, peaceful presence lifted the audience when he walked on stage, a sweetly mischievous grin on his face like that in his Live at Scullers liner notes: he knew our thoughts; he knew how to give us a good time. So we sat back and enjoyed the ride. The tall, gentle man gave his instrument a personality, dimension, depth. It didn’t just add to the bottom line of the higher pitched instruments; it took front stage. It became a wooden woman, the color of maple syrup. He lifted her from her resting spot on the floor between Fuller’s piano and Riggins’ drums and went to work. When she spoke, the crowd went speechless. We watched Ray’s hands work the bass’s strings like long hair down her back into moans of baum boom bome. He really worked that thing, high notes like palpations on a neck, separating his hands in the middle as if working her torso, and then deeper down into her waist and hips. The notes plucked from that curvaceous instrument’s throat were a breathy whisper through the noise, raspy on some chords, deep throated on others. When his hands moved frenetically or even like a caress along the neck of that instrument the notes emulated a child’s laugh, up and down, up and down, and around like a kaleidoscope in pitch and length. His solos contained as much verve and passion as any piano, drum, trumpet, or guitar I’d ever heard.

When he introduced the trio’s next song, a pouch seemed suddenly visible at the bottom of his bass, near where, say, a six-foot woman’s kneecap would be. Just waiting for Ray’s touch inside that pouch was a bow.

A bow.

Watching musicians play stringed instruments — not ukuleles or harps or guitars, but mando-strats, violas, violins— stirs images of soft fingers palpating a tired, rigid spine. The bow makes a stringed instrument sing; the pluck makes it speak. Plink plunk plank up and down that bass’s womanly figure elongated to a purrr when, sure enough, Ray extracted that bow from the pouch and pulled it along the strings. The second he put that bow to his bass on “Hello Girls,” listeners were carried among spring to autumnal moods, moderato to adagio rhythms, and lost among solos and harmonies. The purrr resonated inside our collective chest wall, whirring past our eardrum like a gentle summer wind.

With almost 60 years in the jazz industry, Ray Brown’s name is a part of the history books. He was known as a true master of the bass and inspired numerous musicians with his innovative style and voice and his sense of rhythm. One of few bassists to lead his own band, Ray formed several trios over his life. He didn’t write down his music; guys he performed with—Larry and Karriem or Benny Green or Jeff Hamilton—had to learn his vast repertoire from recordings. That’s quite a fait accompli, considering Ray went back to the days of Dizzy Gillespie.

Ray’s musical interest did not originate on the bass. In fact, he has claimed it was one of the biggest mistakes of his life. He began on piano at the age of eight, just after jazz gained ground as a blend of Creole and black music in New Orleans. Jazz at the time was popular in the form of swing. Jazz evolved to bebop (bop) when Ray was in high school in the 1940s. As a teenager he’d wanted to take up the trombone, but unable to afford one, he picked up a bass his school could provide for him. With that same instrument he began playing gigs in local clubs. By the age of 19, he was playing with Dizzy in an experimental big band in New York City. Just a few years later, he entered a short-lived marriage with Ella Fitzgerald, with whom he adopted a son, Ray Brown Jr. Hard bop (funk) and cool jazz took center stage in the jazz scene then. In the 1950s, Ray began playing in a long-term trio with pianist Oscar Peterson and guitarist Herb Ellis, forming one of the most popular jazz groups ever. A few years later he proved himself even more of a pioneer in the industry when he had a special instrument that combined the cello and the bass professionally made. Ray continued with the Peterson trio through the mid-1960s when classic jazz was giving way to modern jazz. He moved to L.A. and started producing a significant amount of work on TV and movie soundtracks and performing frequently on the Merv Griffin Show. In the 1970s jazz pioneers like Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Charles Mingus died. Jazz would mesh with rock to form fusion and produce acts such as George Benson, Spiro Gyra, and Herbie Hancock. In the next decade, as Ray continued a grueling touring and recording schedule, jazz was developing prefixes such as neo and acid.

And just within the past few weeks jazz has said goodbye to some other legends: Rosemary Clooney, Thelonius Monk’s wife, and Ray Brown. Too much stifling heat during a six-hour day of golf took Ray from the world of jazz on July 2. It was two days after he played (what we now know to be) his penultimate performance in Chicago. It was the second night of an Indianapolis gig. It was the day before he was to fly to Germany for more shows.

My mother bought a Billie Holiday box set when I was six, not realizing that I would grow to love it more than she did. My journey into jazz began with that. I hopped in the car. Then we listened to Billie on an eight-track in my mother’s yellow Datsun B-210, driving around the suburbs of Detroit. Today I listen to Billie on compact disc in my living room or office on Southport Avenue, growing sadder and sadder when July 17 rolls around. That’s the anniversary of her death. I play several of the ten Billie CDs in my collection. One can never have enough Billie Holiday, though I’m finding I do also appreciate Cassandra Wilson and Marlena Shaw.

Frank Sinatra massaged my 22-year-old ear drum through Cincinnati’s public radio station. I was driving; I had to pull off the road to listen, mesmerized, through several songs afterward until the DJ announced the song. Then next day I was in Looney T. Bird’s, the college record store where I bought my first five jazz CDs, mostly arbitrarily. “Oh, if you like this,” said a very pierced and very tattooed blond guy, local to my college town. “Do you listen to Mama Jazz, at night, on NPR?”

I shook my head, unaware of what he was referring to.

“Well you should— if you like big band and jazz.”

Hours later, keeping me and my newly adopted cat company on a muggy July evening, Mama Jazz rasped her way through an FM broadcast. Her voice placed her somewhere in her 60s and reminded me of too many hours in a smoky jazz bar in the 1950s. Mama Jazz and National Public Radio added pleasurable amenities onto my jazz car as I slowly came to realize that jazz needn’t have a vocalist to appeal. A few Miles Davis CDs were air conditioning. My sun roof was the Impulse label’s release featuring Duke Ellington and John Coltrane’s rendition of “In a Sentimental Mood.” Next came a chance to see Wynton Marsalis at my university. This was an amenity that came with the car, everybody supposedly was getting it. Yet I failed to connect, appreciating Wynton’s technique but lacking any emotional connection. Jazz had thrown me into another loop just when I was getting into the complicated world. It was a few years before I went to see another jazz act again, feeling intimidated because I didn’t get the music live. Finally I took a friend’s recommendation to see Nick Payton at Snug Harbor in New Orleans.

That late December 2001 evening Nick made my car “power everything.” There it was— that ambience that kept me hooked on Billie like she was on heroine. This was the live experience that thrilled me to want more— more more! Involuntary sounds leaped from my heart, into my esophagus. This blew away any great jam session at a Grateful Dead show, though watching this show made me realize things about the Dead shows I used to attend in college Nick, synonymous with Louie Armstrong in the critics’ and other jazz musicians’ ears, wears an unassuming façade, especially given his high stature in jazz at such an early age; the soft-spoken, rotund man was not yet thirty years old, but, man, can he blow a Texan tornado off its path! With his soft eyes closed, his narrow, high brow furrowed, and his embouchure in check, this man of no more than five foot ten explained through his music the reciprocity shared between listener and musician. If my jazz car had been waiting at a red light between Wynton Marsalis Road and Nick Payton Avenue, Nick revved it back into Go.

When five months later I discovered his upcoming show at the Showcase I was ready. After six years in a city with such vast jazz history, I was ready for my next lesson. A jazz encyclopedia incarnate, and the only jazz fan I know, my friend Marsha accompanied me. Given my sophomoric status in music, I enlisted her knowledge and experience. She’d grown up listening to it. She’d moved all the way to New York from Colorado for a bassist. This woman could set off a machine gun spray of great jazz names, songs, shows, venues. She frequents the Jazz Showcase so often her drinks and admission fee are half price. If jazz were baseball, she would spout lifetime batting averages or RBIs of players back to the Brooklyn Dodgers. If jazz were baseball, Marsha would be tell me quicker who wasn’t on the list of steroid-dependents. She may not actually like baseball like I do, but she and I share adoration for Nick. I made the commitment and dedicated my emotion, intellect, and time to musicians I’d heard and those I should be listening to. I’m a better music listener for it. Once you’ve had jazz, you can’t go back.

It saddens me that no one else I know can get past the simplistic, monotonous um-ch um-ch um-ch busting out of dance clubs and throbbing the windows of virtual pimp mobiles throughout Chicago. There’s so much people miss about jazz. I had, too, for the last seven years of arbitrarily trying. There’s too much I missed over my wheedling gingerly through the jazz world over the last seven years. I only knew that some songs always made me stop to catch each note of the melody, harmony, rhythm. Particular songs send you away to places no other music did.

Take the standard jazz song “In a Sentimental Mood.” You can’t go wrong with that. Prepare your heart before listening, though: the musical synesthesia may turn you into a listener. The melody and their technique simply burst with emotion. Even if you’re less inclined to hear Coltrane’s wails, many of his phrases can stop you flat. And Ellington! His first few twinkling notes firmly impress upon your mind. You can hear them in your sleep. Taken from a classical song, they make this rendition unique, actually one of the most revered by musicians and listeners alike. Ellington’s touch on those keys taps right into the center of emotion. The twinkling, the tinkling, the stairs his fingers climb on that piano, a few notes held out here or there, or fluttered over on this part…. His piano erases stress from the heart and mind. You sink a little deeper in your chair, hum phrases in the grocery store. Maybe you even sway your hips a little as you walk along the bike path with this stuff in your headphones. This is jazz. It draws you in. It rewards your attention.

I’m no Howard Reich or Ken Burns (watch his PBS documentary Jazz): my jazz vocabulary is still in its infancy. The stuff takes patience, and there’s always room for growth.

The day the world learned of Ray’s death, Marsha said to me, “Papa Ray’s gone. They tried to wake him up….” Her voice trailed off. She shook her blond tresses, her presence heavier than I had felt in the year I’d known her. It’s an unusual turn of roles when a novice must comfort her mentor. She had said with such sadness the night we saw Ray’s trio: “He’s looking old,” drawing out the last word for emphasis. “His hair’s gone grey. He’s slouching a little. He’s moving more slowly.”

I go to the Showcase the next day, July Fourth. It’s my way of paying tribute to him where he helped open my ears. Marsha is asking pianist Harold Maburn between sets for suggestions about particular jazz recordings when I catch Larry Fuller at the bar— a perfect opportunity to develop my neophytic talk about jazz.

“Man, he played his ass off Monday.” Larry pauses, and I can see him reflecting back to the performance in Indianapolis the day the trio left Chicago. “I knew this may happen someday, but I never really imagined it as so sudden, so unpredictable.” Without enough time to worry about where his career would be next week, Larry tells me how he had had to remain composed before he told Ray’s wife, Cecilia, about her husband. He had to do it before a reporter covering the would-be show on Tuesday night could broadcast it before the world. The reporter had already started asking questions just minutes after the trio discovered the news themselves. Larry had to tell Cecilia immediately, without the benefit of time to beautifully frame his words or balance his uneasiness. Already everyone at that night’s venue, the Jazz Kitchen, knew.

As he finishes his story, Larry looks deeply into his martini, Stoli, straight up with olives. Neither of us is smoking, though, as the Showcase doesn’t fit the profile of a smoky, dark jazz club. Every once in a while we smoke together by the front doors of the club, watching passersby go to Blue Chicago or Fado’s Pub around the corner. Larry’s got a Winston Light, I have a Dunhill Light. That’s when his hands become noticeable: they’re not big and long as everyone believes pianist’s fingers should be; they’re really rather short, bony, vein ladled. His fingernails and fingertips seem big as eyeballs. He’s full of shapes, actually. He can’t be five foot ten; his Germanic face is round and seems slightly mysterious behind black rectangle frames. With his white shirt, patterned with some small black design, and his slacks, he’s a rather unassuming character.

Here, at the Showcase, the evening is a scene spliced from Casablanca. Instead of North African artifacts lining the walls there are black and white shots of the world’s top jazz musicians. A charming photo of Charlie Parker looks upon the crowd from the back wall of the stage. Posters announce performances by Dexter Gordon, Chet Baker, Max Roach, Ahmad Jamal, and others at the Showcase. The names and addresses told of the venue’s history from locations at 901 N. Rush, the Blackstone, and now Grand Avenue. An article penned in 1947 by Joe Segal, adds to the historical ambience from under the glass top of a table toward the back of the seating area. Marsha likes to sit between the two columns, get the full view, place herself near but not directly in front of the stage. The personality of the place is obvious in the dynamics of those who hang out there: between sets and after the show where saxophonist Eric Alexander, drummer George Fludas, Maburn, and bassist Dennis Carroll, do a groovin’ “Sugar,” Larry is blanketed in condolences over the loss of his recent employer. “Where were you? In the hotel?” the mild-mannered, half-Greek Fludas asks about his close friend’s location at the moment Ray’s death was discovered.

Larry answers that he and Karriem were already at the Jazz Kitchen, waiting for Ray to show up, but they had started wondering about him at eight-fifteen. He felt something more than strange, something omniscient, if only because of Ray’s abnormal tardiness. Everyone in the business knows of his pristine punctuality. Donald Meade, a close friend of Ray’s who frequently traveled with him around the Chicago area, saw Ray before Larry and Karriem did. Donald had had to go with hotel security to break through the door when Larry called from the club, signaling something might be amiss. Then, even though security had had to break through the chain lock, the police had to investigate it as a homicide. “I guess that’s standard procedure….” Larry looks soberly at Fludas, with whom he’s performed many times. “He was already cold. He died all curled up.”

“In a fetal position?”

“Yeah,” he replied, his deep brown eyes, etched with red map lines, looking into his martini and back up to his friend. Eric steps up to the bar and sets down his cabernet sax case, which matches his cabernet oxford shirt. They exchange hellos and the blond All-American offers his condolences. The players of jazz are a family.

Larry thanks him, says something about a song the quartet played. He tells the guys about the Sheraton Hotel’s graciousness during that fateful Tuesday evening. Management had offered free rooms to the remaining members of the trio for as long as they needed; they reserved the vacant room next to Ray’s as a meeting area for everyone involved in the scene. They kept the press at bay. Then, the conversation turns to causes of the legendary bassist’s death. While Larry had thought it might have been a heat stroke since Ray had played golf in sweltering heat for six hours that day, with little to nothing to drink for hydration, the other jazz musicians bring up words like infarction, heart disease, complications. No one is really sure; someone had read something in a newspaper.

Larry is trying to rationalize the woeful loss. No definitive answers seem to work, judging by the distance on his face. He’s angry that the Indianapolis jazz club’s owners took out the old guy for six hours of golf on a steamy July day. I watch him as he wonders if Ray kept some health problems hidden not only from the jazz world but also from his wife. “She was just so surprised when I told her on Tuesday,” he says, his mind reliving the sad song that was his past 48 hours. Yet on Tuesday, July 9, in Los Angeles, he won’t be able to look at Ray. Officially he won’t because it’ll be a closed casket ceremony, he tells me. He confesses that’s a good thing: “I just want to remember him how he was.”

In addition to Larry’s self-inflicted sense of responsibility of breaking the news from a phone in Indianapolis to one in the California house where Ray shared his life with Cecilia, he had had to care for all the gritty details such as packing Ray’s belongings, including that big beautiful bass, and shipping the items to the new widow. He explains that he used the same company that used to ship Sinatra’s gear. This afternoon, he says, he was asked to be a pallbearer. His mind switches to what he would otherwise have been doing this evening: playing in Germany with the man he greatly admired. He would have finished the second night at the Jazz Kitchen then driven back to Chicago to catch the international flight at O’Hare. Instead, he was making his way around Chicago in the Kia he had rented. He tells me about a rental Karriem had made during an L.A. stint. “He wanted an SUV. One of those Ford Excursions. Do you know how big those are?” His smooth long lips stretch into a smile when he laughs, and he offers other insights into the personalities of the two people he had just worked with. Occasionally, whenever Ray would smoke a cigar, Fuller would tease him about the size. “You got the Clinton model there, Ray,” he tells me, laughing at his memory of his even-tempered friend. Once when playing at a hall in Amsterdam, Ray bent over slightly during a song and said to Larry in a volume the audience can’t hear: “Hey, Fuller, I think your hair’s growing back.” Larry laughs again, rubbing his head shaven to diminish the balding pattern. “I laughed so hard I almost forgot which song we were playing.” He rolls through the memories, talking about Ray’s charisma and eternal level-headedness. The language is riddled with fuck and mutha fucka and a host of other choice words the guys used to say to one another. With the panache of a comedian, Larry tells a funny anecdote about a time the trio saw an attractive woman walk by. “He turned and looked at me with that funny expression on his face and said, ‘Fuller, if you had an ass like that I’d follow you around with a seven-foot Steinway.’”

The thirty-six-year-old laughs and tells me more anecdotes, a smile brightening his sleep-deprived demeanor. Once, in an airport, Ray trumped Karriem’s adoration for hip hop. “Karriem was sitting there moving all around with his headphones on when Ray said he wanted to see what all this hip hop business was about. Ray slipped on the headphones and listened to that stuff for a minute. When he told Karriem with a few fucks thrown in what he thought of the music, Karriem was just crushed. He kinda hung his head for a while after that. He wasn’t bopping around anymore.”

Eventually the conversation shifts back to trying to help me pick out some great musicians. Larry particularly emphasizes saxophonist Stanley Turrentine and tells me things about the song that Eric and the guys played earlier that night. He gives me a spiel about the Marsalis family, Wynton especially. He mentions other musicians, telling who’s “soulful,” who’s got a keen “sense of rhythm,” once saying, “ ‘He swings,’ as they say in jazz.”

We talk about Diana Krall and Harry Connick Jr. I recall Harry’s liner notes, which reveal Harry’s reverence for Ray. I can’t dig Krall, so I ask about Billie Holiday.

“Oh, Billie! Everyone in jazz talks about Billie. Billie did some great stuff,” he replies matter of factly. Lyrics spring to my mind from one of her best albums, Solitude, on which Ray plays: “A cigarette that bears lipstick’s traces...

a tinkling piano in the next apartment...

those stumbling words that told you how my heart felt...

these foolish things remind me of you.”

During one song Eric steps off stage after a long solo. There’s always something to learn about a song and a band’s dynamics when musicians do that. Larry seems to find that thought interesting. When some musicians do it they seem disconnected, but watching Nick is to see someone thinking deeply Although he may not be watching the guys play, he seems to be listening very closely, to be off in his own world, to still be enjoying it. When Eric goes off stage I don’t get that “vibe,” to use one of Larry’s words. But I do like when musicians watch each other; there’s something about it that’s so personal. Though Ray never went off stage (what? and carry that big ole’ bass with him? I remember thinking when I watched him do it that Sunday with his trio), I learned so much about the music, the player, the part of the song. Ray would seem pleased by Karriem’s control or Larry’s emotional expression. Larry smiles, perhaps thinking about that Sunday, or maybe Monday, the last time the trio played together, or maybe his thoughts were on some other night in his tenure with the guy for whom Larry had so much adoration. His tone, his diction obviates his adoration for the late great Ray.

I change the subject to the grunts and groans I’ve never heard in live performances but on albums. “Did Oscar Peterson really do it as much as it sounds on Live at the Blue Note?”

“Oh yeah. Guys do it all the time. It sort of helps them… I don’t know, keep time or momentum, or just express.” He scratches his scruffy beard, lightly salted with greys that don’t seem to match his youthful laugh that becomes a snort when he giggles hard enough.

I ponder that and replay how expressive Larry’s own playing was on Sunday I recall an article about Larry entitled, “It’s a Dream to Play with Ray” (read it at www.allaboutjazz.com, where ironically enough, Ray happens to be July’s featured artist). “The only thing I didn’t like about that article was the title,” I say, trying to lighten the somber mood he’s gotten back into.

“Yeah, that is kinda cheesy, isn’t it?” Larry says with a forced grin “But that guy did a good job writing the article.” It must have triggered him back to thoughts of his career. “You know, I just can’t go back to playing only local gigs. I can’t just die out there in Seattle playing in clubs where people aren’t listening.”

In his silence after that, I think back to something a friend of Marsha’s said that wonderful Sunday. “I can’t go to the Green Mill anymore. That place used to swing. But once the Mighty Blue Kings started playing there a few years back, with all their recognition, a different crowd started appearing. A crowd that talks over the musicians.”

Marsha had added to that comment. She once saw a guy who was apparently on a first date with some girl, sitting directly in the front of the stage with her, his voice crackling over the band as he strained to speak loudly enough for the girl to hear him. “If you’re gonna go to the Green Mill,” Marsha said, “Listen.”

They’ve got a point about the Green Mill. In the Chicago music scene rumors have gone around about the Green Mill being the last straw in bassist Jimmy Sutton’s departure from the Mighty Blue Kings. Allegedly Sutton and Ross Bonn, who leads MBK, had a falling out about playing at the joint that gave them their start. A few years later, Sutton’s everywhere from regular gigs at the Mill with his own band, The Four Charms, to national tours in Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire. They swing, baby! Meanwhile, another former MBK musician plays at Andy’s on Hubbard. And Bonn is still trying to subvert the paradigm of today’s contemporary popular music. Mighty Blue King shows stopped being about the music but about the entertainment value years ago. Now it’s all about playing big venues, and slowly the music is turning to sounds of pop.

I think back to a conversation I had with a reviewer from some Chicago publication I’d never heard of. He was leaving Nick Payton’s performance early, the review explained, because he wanted to see what was shakin’ on the South Side. Evidently that’s where some acts really get down into the late, late hours of the night. If this were the 1920s or 30s, though, he would have had his hands full narrowing down his selection of jazz hangouts. There have been 45 jazz venues around Chicago throughout the city’s jazz history, a great deal of which were concentrated on the South Side. Benny Goodman played at the Venetian Room, located at 66th and Stony Island, in the 1920s; the Regal Theatre was home to Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Ellington, and others from the 20s through the 60s; Louis Armstrong’s Sunset Stompers played at the Sunset Café, in business from 1921 through 1937; Ma Rainey played at the Monogram Theatre, which is still operating after 90 years Meanwhile Larry wonders about his own future in jazz. His conversation leads to his wife and teenage son in Seattle, his “blue-collar” background in Toledo, his next week at Yoshi’s in Oakland, where he’ll continue with a show that was supposed to be a tribute to Ray Brown. The tribute will feature some people Ray’s worked with over his long career: vocalist Marlena Shaw, saxophonist Phil Woods, bassists Marcus Shelby and Reuben Rogers.

Larry’s worried about his income now, saying he lives “comfortably” but is “by no means rich.” “I’m without a job, basically,” he says to me. I remind him of his album just released in Japan; it makes him think of the two weeks he played there with Ray, and the conversation returns to the big guy and some of Larry’s favorite songs from the trio leader he worked with for two years.

My jazz car’s moving to Italy next month. But that, thankfully, won’t stop me from going to watch these guys. Find me at jazz festivals throughout Europe. Meanwhile don’t you miss Chicago’s jazz festival. This year Phil Woods and pianist Ahmad Jamal will blow and twinkle their ways into the hearts of new jazz fans at Grant Park. I wish Ray would be. Yet I have to remind myself how fortunate I’ve been to see him. Damn, if he had this effect on me so instantaneously, it’s no wonder he had the jazz world by his bass strings.

B&W Photo Credit: Sue Storey