On his first day in New York, in 1945, bassist Ray Brown jammed with alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and pianist Bud Powell–the high priests of the new music called bebop.
From that moment forth, Mr. Brown, who died in his sleep Tuesday, July 2, in Indianapolis at 75, stood at the pinnacle of his profession, influencing several generations of jazz musicians.
Yet Mr. Brown, a natural on his instrument who brought a muscular sense of swing to everything he played, could not get over his good fortune in going from his native Pittsburgh directly into a rehearsal session with the most formidable jazz radicals of the day.
“I had come to New York for a job, took the subway to 52nd Street, and I happened to walk past this club where Coleman Hawkins, Billy Daniels and Hank Jones were playing,” Mr. Brown told the Tribune in a 1995 interview.
“Hank and I knew each other well, so I walked in there, talked to him, and Dizzy strolls by. Hank introduces me, and Dizzy says to me, `Can you really play?’
“And I said, `Well, uh, well. …'”
Gillespie took that to mean “yes,” wrote his address on a piece of paper and told Brown to show up at 7 p.m.
“When I arrived,” recalled Mr. Brown in the Tribune interview, “three other guys already were there: Charlie Parker, Max Roach and Bud Powell.
“I never had heard guys play like that in my life. I had heard them on records, but it was a whole different ballgame when they started to play live, right in front of you. It made the hair on the back of your neck stand up.”
That Mr. Brown, who was not yet 20, could keep pace with these musical revolutionaries attested to his prodigious gifts, for Gillespie and friends were playing a music more harmonically advanced and rhythmically volatile than anything yet heard in jazz. Mr. Brown soon was recording with Gillespie, playing solos on “One Bass Hit” and helping drive Gillespie’s large ensemble on breakthrough recordings such as “A Night in Tunisia.”
Mr. Brown “played the strongest, most fluid and imaginative bass lines in modern jazz at the time, with the exception of Oscar Pettiford,” wrote Gillespie in his memoirs, “To Be or Not to Bop.”
Gillespie’s endorsement, in tandem with Mr. Brown’s plush tone and technical acuity, launched the bassist’s career. By the late 1940s, he was touring with impresario Norman Granz’s popular Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts and recording with an early incarnation of the Modern Jazz Quartet (which started out as the nucleus of Gillespie’s big band, though Mr. Brown soon ceded the spot to bassist Percy Heath).
After a short-lived marriage to jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald, in 1947, and a stint managing several jazz artists, Mr. Brown maintained his position at the forefront of modern bass playing. Though he did not fashion himself a soloist of the caliber of Pettiford or an iconoclast like Charles Mingus, Mr. Brown earned respect as one of the most rhythmically hard-driving accompanists in jazz.
His most famous work in this context was with pianist Oscar Peterson, first in a duo and then, in the 1950s and ’60s, in the most prominent trio in jazz.
“We were two guys who were out to play the world into bad health while having as much fun as possible,” writes Peterson in his upcoming autobiography, “Jazz Odyssey: The Life of Oscar Peterson,” to be published this month by Continuum.
“During these years we subconsciously learned to think and breathe together musically as second nature–and this continued not only through the years he was in the group but even to this day.”
Beyond the example he set for other musicians with his nimble technique and sonorous tone, Mr. Brown helped launch many careers, including those of pianists Benny Green and Geoff Keezer, with whom he shared tales of his remarkable career.
“Whenever I go to jazz clinics, the kids always say to me, `Tell us about Charlie Parker, tell us about Diz,'” said Mr. Brown in the Tribune interview. “For someone of my age, it’s almost unimaginable not to have had those giants always in the back of your mind, those memories of their great performances.
“I know they’re always with me when I play.”
Mr. Brown, who lived in the Los Angeles area but was on tour when he died, is survived by his wife, Cecilia, and his son, Ray Jr..
