Meisenhower

A native Detroiter, Cooke was originally a classically trained pianist (as a student of Mischa Kotler), who’s musical world forever changed after hearing Miles Davis's Kind of Blue for the first time. He then at age 10, discovered John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Bud Powell, Art Tatum, Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans, and developed a deep love for the Jazz idiom. Later influences include Chick Corea and Return to Forever, John Scofield, John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra and others.

After migrating to Cambridge, Mass for college, Ray continued to write and perform music of many styles. After spending nearly as much time "hanging out" at the Berklee College of Music, as he did at his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institue of Technology (which was just up the street), where he earned an array of degrees in physics & mathematics (terminating with the Ph.D.), Cooke had the good fortune to fall in with a very talented group of jazz players.

Continuing his jazz education with some advanced theory and composition studies with Charlie Banacos (Berklee, New England Conservatory of Music, and MIT) Cooke has learned to incorporate texture from tensions, passing tones, approaches, tonal paralypsis, bitonal pendulums (double mambos), hemiola substratum elisions, modal sequences, 23rd chords, intervallics, pivots, facets, agogics, number permutation systems, voicings in clusters, fourths, fifths, reverse tensions, interconnecting scales, pentatonics, tetratonics, hexatonics, chord-on-chord, upper structure triads, pandiatonics, superimpositions into his music.

Over the years, Cooke has played disco, funk, rock, R&B, fusion, straight ahead and hard bop jazz, the blues and has played in North & South America, Europe and Asia. Most notably, he has performed and shared a stage with Mike Stern, Stan Getz, Woody Herman, Baron Browne, Meisenhower, Destiny, Id.i.om & others.

On a more personal note, Ray is an avid world traveler and has visited over 40 countries and has lived in London, Zurich and Geneva. Ray also shares his home with his various musical instruments, A collection of 7,000 vinyl records and two Great Danes named Pi & Enzo.

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