Musician and educator Jay Sweet’s biography of jazz bassist Ray Brown (1926-2002) is the culmination of more than a quarter-century of dedicated study, with the author having won the Benny Carter Jazz Research Award in 2001 for his research on Brown. Brown was born in the same year as two other jazz legends, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, whose works are probably the best known among popular music fans with a casual interest in jazz.
Ray Brown: His Life and Music puts great emphasis on the music and the musicality of Brown’s life overall. The book’s first chapter opens by detailing Brown’s familial background, born to working-class parents in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the “Steel City”. Matters move on to Brown’s formative musical education, in school and the concert halls. The first chapter closes with Brown’s high school graduation.
Unlike Miles Davis, whose middle-class upbringing afforded him access to study at the Juilliard School, or John Coltrane, whose army service unlocked further musical educational opportunities, Ray Brown was a largely self-taught musician. The regional impact of jazz outside the coastal meccas of the American entertainment industry, particularly in cities across the Midwest, is often fascinating. Brown witnessed Pittsburgh heroes like pianists Earl Hines and Mary Lou Williams, and bandleader Billy Eckstine.
From chapter two onwards, aspects of Ray Brown’s life beyond performance become details. Having moved to New York City at the age of 18, his first marriage in 1947 was to the singer Ella Fitzgerald. They raised a son, Ray Brown Jr., who would become a professional musician. Ray Brown Jr.’s first interest was rock ‘n’ roll. “I used to drive my parents crazy with this. I told my father a few years before he died, you know a lot of times I played that music ’cause I just wanted to see the look on your face.”
Jay Sweet’s narrative puts Ray Brown in a lineage of pioneering performers, starting with Jimmy Blanton in the Duke Ellington Orchestra, who pushed the bass role from a steady timekeeper to hold its own as a melodic, solo instrument. Oscar Pettiford, who also played in the Duke Ellington Orchestra, “replicated the vocabulary and technicality of the top saxophone and trumpet soloists“. Scott LaFaro, who played in Bill Evans’ Trio, “developed a conversational style of improvisation, and expanded the higher range of the bass“.
Sweet further defines Ray Brown as an elder statesman of jazz music, building upon Brown’s association with some of the most elegant and virtuosic performers in jazz history. Soon after relocating to New York City, Brown would score a place in an all-star band of bebop pioneers including saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, pianist Bud Powell, and drummer Max Roach.
Two years after first parting company with Dizzy Gillespie in 1947, Ray Brown accompanied the Canadian pianist Oscar Peterson’s debut American performance at Carnegie Hall, as part of a Jazz at the Philharmonic show arranged by jazz promoter Norman Granz. Granz had a reputation for paying musicians fairly in the cutthroat business of independent jazz labels, while exerting a great degree of control over the music they made.
According to pianist Hank Jones, “Jazz at the Philharmonic got its name from the fact that he brought jazz into the concert hall. People could come dressed in their tuxedos if they wanted to. It elevated the status of jazz. Not that jazz needed that elevation.”
Ray Brown’s involvement with the Oscar Peterson Trio defined his most fertile period between 1954 and 1958, which is covered throughout six of the book’s chapters, in which the bassist also worked as a session player and as a co-leader with the West Coast jazz supergroup the Poll Winners. The second classic lineup of the Oscar Peterson Trio commenced in 1959, a year of several landmark jazz releases, including bassist Charles Mingus’ Mingus Ah Um, pianist Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, and saxophonist Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, and the turn of the decade that would portend a tumultuous period for jazz.
When rock music eclipsed jazz in the mid-1960s, Ray Brown relocated to Los Angeles and worked as a studio musician. Curiously, Jay Sweet refers to the Wrecking Crew, the group of jazz-trained session musicians who played on records by the likes of the Beach Boys and the Byrds, but only to say that Brown was not really a part of that scene. He worked most closely with Pittsburgh contemporary Henry Mancini, and with Quincy Jones, for whom he also worked as manager, developing scores for film and television.
In the 1970s era of jazz fusion, Ray Brown collaborated with Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida and later formed the L.A. Four with Almeida, saxophonist Bud Shank, and drummer Shelly Manne. The tensions that arose from combining jazz improvisation, folk, and precise classical arrangements are recalled vividly by Shank. “We lasted until 1983 with a totally impossible group. There was no way this should work: three jazz guys and one classical guitarist. No way.”
A feature of Sweet’s writing that may be familiar to other writers is the uncertain extent to describe musicians who featured in Ray Brown’s career. For example, although Miles Davis and Ray Brown did not record together, the overall impact of Davis’ music is such that he is introduced into Brown’s story without the need for clarification. John Coltrane, who featured alongside Brown in an early 1949 session, before either was well-established, is described straightforwardly as a “jazz legend“. Pianist Bill Evans, who first recorded with Brown in 1976, is given greater explanation as “a style innovator who came to fame in the late 1950s as a member of Miles Davis’s sextet”.
Ray Brown: His Life and Music consolidates Brown’s accomplishments. He successfully navigated the various trends in jazz music during the 20th century, becoming a fellow, mentor, and teacher to successive generations of jazz musicians since the 1990s, all while upholding high standards to create some of the finest music in the jazz repertoire. Jay Sweet’s work is rigorously exhaustive in its detail of Brown’s discography, studiously reverent in its assessment of Brown’s talent, and matter-of-fact about Brown’s purist views regarding jazz-rock and the avant-garde.