Ray Brown: His Life and Music

Ray Brown: His Life and Music
Jay Sweet
310 Pages
ISBN: # 9781800505353
Equinox Publishing
2025

It is such a common occurrence in life that bad things happen to good people, and conversely that good things happen to bad people, that there is a branch of theology given to the question of how and why God allows such injustice to occur. It is called theodicy.

Given the frequency with which people don't get what they deserve, how refreshing it is to read about a good person to whom good things happen. Ray Brown worked hard to establish himself as a jobbing bassist in Pittsburgh, and was just eighteen years old when Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis told him "You play good kid. You should go to New York." He secured a few offers of potential work and set off to make his fortune.

On his first night in New York, after dropping his bags with his aunt, he headed impatiently to 52nd Street to see what was what. He bumped into Hank Jones in a club, who introduced him to Dizzy Gillespie. There and then, Gillespie offered Brown a job. When Brown arrived at the rehearsal the next day, we walked into a room containing Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and Max Roach. The next day, his nineteenth birthday, he started work with the bebop band that Gillespie was assembling for a six-week stint in LA. What a twenty four hours that was.

As it turned out, the introduction of bebop to audiences used to a diet of easily digested swing wasn't a straightforward process. In fact, Billy Berg, who was promoting the series, became so uneasy with the Gillespie/Parker band's effect on audiences that he insisted they include a few vocal numbers in their set. Parker quickly put together some vocal arrangements which required all the band to sing, which must have been quite a thing to see. Difficulties aside, to walk straight into one of the most transformational bands in one of their most transformational moments and fit straight in is a testament to both Brown's talent and to his easy-going nature.

Brown's sheer presence over the next few years is phenomenal. He is there when Gillespie and Parker play live together for the last time. He is part of the second iteration of Gillespie's bebop big band after the failure of the short-lived Hepstations. He is there in the Milt Jackson Quartet before it morphs into the Modern Jazz Quartet. He is present on the pivotal recording of Parker with Strings (Mercury Records, 1950). He is on Sonny Rollins's seminal Way Out West (Contemporary, 1957). And he is there throughout the titanic career of Oscar Peterson.

But though we hear that Brown was subsumed deeply into the jazz scene, we are not invited to watch him at work, which is a huge shame. We don't hear what it was like to meet those people, to sit in those studios, to make that wonderful music. There are moments when we get an insight into Brown's character and his life, but they are few and far between. There is a lovely anecdote about his first meeting with Hank Jones, which came about when Brown overheard Jones playing Art Tatum's "Begin the Beguine" on a YMCA cafeteria piano so perfectly that Brown mistook the live performance for the record. They bonded over their love of Tatum, and jammed together in the YMCA cafeteria every night for the duration of their stay. As an anecdote, it stands out at least in part due to the scarcity in this book of that kind of personal story.

As the book progresses, the anecdotes and insight become fewer and fewer, making way instead for exhaustive lists of recording dates, personnel and track listings. There are opportunities to dig deeper which are missed again and again. Gillespie sits Brown down at the piano to show him ways to comp without using roots, but frustratingly, we don't know exactly what wisdom he shared. The challenges and torments of life on the road as a black musician are touched on extremely briefly, then set aside. Most bewilderingly, Brown's marriage to Ella Fitzgerald comes and goes without much comment or commentary. We learn virtually nothing about their relationship apart from that Brown was steadfastly devoted to his wife's career and that their marriage was probably ruined by the time they spent apart on the road.

Brown recorded a lot, so the list of recording dates is almost interminable. On the one hand, it will certainly introduce the reader to some music they have not heard before. On the other hand, because there is no discography included, you might discover a recording you want to go back to and then not be able to find it again in the forest of detail. Readers could of course take careful notes, but not everyone will want to.

A highlight is the breakdown and analysis of Brown's famous solo on "How High The Moon" from the album The Oscar Peterson Trio Live at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival (Verve, 1956), which really goes to demonstrate just how grateful the reader is by that point in the book for some discussion of the actual music rather than the arrangements for recording it.

This book is certainly not without its merits. There is a real sense of what musicians who fell under the aegis of Norman Granz gained from the experience (a lot, in Brown and Peterson's cases) and at what cost (exhaustion and over-exposure). The mind-boggling list of people that Brown played with might challenge some preconceptions about a career lived mostly in the comfortable lane—for a time, he was everywhere. However, there could have been so much more to hold the reader's attention.

Brown's comments on a Bob James track when he was invited to join a review panel for Downbeat magazine ("No stars!") suggest an irascible character with a surprisingly conservative view of jazz, especially considering his bop beginnings. It would be interesting to speculate how Brown's career, which started off at the bleeding edge of the avant guard, might have developed differently if he had worked more with Blue Note, say, and less with Clef and Verve. It would be interesting to know more about him as a person (he was a practical joker, apparently, as was Peterson, which nearly put Herb Ellis off from joining the Oscar Peterson Trio as a replacement for Barney Kessel). The slender shafts of light which illuminate Brown's character are as interesting as they are rare. The title of the book offers an account of Brown's life and music. There is a lot of music here, and sadly too little life.

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