A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH RAY BRYANT


Solo piano recordings are a tough thing to pull off. Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Horace Tapscott, Cecil Taylor, Phineas Newborn, and Art Tatum perfected the art form. With Monk, Powell, Newborn, Tatum, and more recently, Tapscott, all deceased, only Taylor is left to give me my solo piano fix. Of late, I have been rediscovering the solo piano music of Ray Bryant. The Philly native's blues playing is as good as it gets these days. He sat down with the Roadshow from his home to speak about his life and times and his new release on Joel Dorn's new label, Label M, Somewhere in France, as always, unedited and in his own words.


FJ: Let's start from the beginning.

RAY BRYANT: My parents sent me off to the neighborhood piano teacher and of course, the first music that I heard was gospel music from the church because I was taken there almost every week when I was a child. Anyway, it is probably because of my mom.


FJ: Those gospel roots are quite transparent in your music.

RAY BRYANT: Oh, yeah, Fred. That is for sure. That's for sure. As a matter of fact, my mother said that one of the things which prompted her to see that I got some more further training was that she would play something on the piano and then I would go to the piano and almost play it exactly as she had done it.


FJ: You had perfect pitch.

RAY BRYANT: (Laughing) Well, at least I could pick up on a melody.


FJ: Growing up in Philly and that kind of supportive environment seems conducive to a young musician's development.

RAY BRYANT: Oh, very much so. I am from Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As I was growing up, it was shortly after the second World War and things were booming there in Philadelphia. People were moving there, which included musicians. A lot of the jazz musicians who had been on the road decided that they might want to settle down and what better place than Philadelphia? So I had all these experienced and great musicians to listen to and to draw from. There were lots of places to play, lots of clubs in Philadelphia that featured live jazz music every night. There was just a real boom thing happening there for a little while. Of course, it is not like that anymore. After the war, things sort of calmed down there. Anyway, like I said, there were lots of good musicians who were living there and I got a chance to hang out with them and be with them and play with them and learn from them.


FJ: You were the house piano player at the Blue Note in Philly.

RAY BRYANT: Right.


FJ: Who were some of the players that you were able to share the bandstand with?

RAY BRYANT: OK, that would be like the encyclopedia of jazz almost (laughing). Like you said, Fred, I was the house pianist there, which was that I had a trio of piano, bass, and drums and anytime anybody came to town and needed accompaniment or backup, I would generally get the call. I had a chance to work with guys like Roy Eldridge, Charlie Shavers, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Sonny Stitt, and just on and on and on, Ben Webster, Lester Young.


FJ: Sounds like you were enrolled in jazz's highest institution of higher learning.

RAY BRYANT: That is right. That is exactly what it was.


FJ: How much did your playing progress having been in the presence of the legends of this music?

RAY BRYANT: It added to my experience immeasurably. Just to be there and let everything soak in like that and listen and learn. What it added to my playing is incalculable. I know this. I feel it and I know that it is exactly what happened.


FJ: You accompanied Carmen McRae for a couple of years.

RAY BRYANT: That is where I met Carmen, at the Blue Note. She came to the Blue Note. This was in 1956 and she had no piano player. She just had her husband, Ike Issacs, who was a bass player.


FJ: Issacs was a member of your trio.

RAY BRYANT: Right, I knew Ike from a couple of years before and Ike called me and said that they were in town and they were going to be at the Blue Note and they needed somebody to play and to come down and play with them. So I went down and I did the week with Carmen and when she left, to make a long story short, I left with her. I left town with her and I stayed as her accompanist for two years. The trio came about because she only had Ike as the bass player and then I joined them at the piano and that is the way it was for maybe a year. After that, Carmen said, "Let's add a drummer." Ike and I both knew Specs Wright from Philadelphia and he was the man that we called. So we got a chance to get the trio together and play for her. When I got calls to come and make a record on my own, I just took the trio that was backing Carmen McRae and that is how that happened.


FJ: How long did you keep that trio together?

RAY BRYANT: Well, actually only until my time with Carmen was up. Like I said, I only stayed for two years and then I felt like I wanted to go out on my own. Ike was there with Carmen and if I am not mistaken, Specs passed away very young and I think that happened shortly after that and so I never got a chance to include Specs in my own trio. As a matter of fact, the only records that I made with that trio were while we were still with Carmen.


FJ: Is the trio format comforting for you?

RAY BRYANT: I enjoy it. I also enjoy the solo format.


FJ: Do you approach them differently? Because although the trio and solo performances are both intimate, there is tremendous pressure placed upon a solo performance.

RAY BRYANT: That is exactly right. With a trio, you have more variety of sounds. You've got the bass and the drums in addition to the piano. The piano is a complete instrument and you should be able to play it alone. Of course, when you do that you have to fill in all the cracks. You have to use both hands and both feet sometimes. You have to keep it full. It is a very demanding, it's a challenge and not many piano players want to accept the challenge and even try it. It is easier to sit back on the cushion of the bass and drums and just relax and play. But I really do enjoy playing solo piano as well as trio.


FJ: Was you approach in accompanying a vocalist augmented in any way?

RAY BRYANT: Well, it never made any difference. I always took the same approach, which was easiest to do. You just back up what the horn player is doing and so you back up what the singer is doing. Of course, with a singer, you have the added thing of the lyric too. I find that if you know somewhat the lyric of a song, it adds to your interpretations of the song and I learned the lyrics to lots of songs, just sitting behind Carmen and accompanying her and playing for her. Otherwise, I never saw any difference in playing for an instrumentalist and a vocalist.


FJ: Give me your impressions of Art Blakey, whom you briefly played with.

RAY BRYANT: I never actually was a member of Art Blakey's band, never. We met when I came to New York and we got to be good friends. Once and a while, Art, he knew what I could do and he knew that I was a composer and once and a while, he would get something in his head. For instance, those percussion things that I did with him, Drum Suite where he had all those drums and just me and a bass player. He was experimenting with things and thankfully, I was a part of his experiments back there. That happened on maybe two or three different occasions where he would call me to come and just play along with his percussion ensemble, which included "Papa" Jo Jones and Philly Joe Jones and all the Latin guys, Ray Barretto, Candido, because he was thinking in terms of Latin jazz back in those days too, Afro-Cuban things. In most cases, there was no horn on the session. It was just me. He felt like that was all he wanted. He wanted percussion and then me. Except on one of them, they had flute. I think Herbie Mann was on flute. Oscar Pettiford was on bass on one of those things. On one of Oscar's compositions on the Drum Suite, Candido was actually playing the bass (laughing). Oscar Pettiford was playing the cello. But anyway, there was never any big band thing with those percussion things. He just wanted all those percussions and then for some melodic variances, the piano and so he would call me. Once and a while, he would call me and say that he was going to do a new recording and what did I have that was an original composition that he might be able to use. So I would tinker around and get something and write it out and go down to the recording session and it would be recorded like "Cubano Chant," that is on Drum Suite. But, like I said, I was never a member of his band, like the Jazz Messengers. I was never a part of the Jazz Messengers. I was a fan. I loved those bands that he had with Bobby Timmons and Horace Silver and Clifford Brown and all those people. It was really great. But I was never a part of that. I was only a part of his percussionistic experiments.


FJ: Betty Carter.

RAY BRYANT: Betty. OK. John Levy, who was a, John is an ex-bass player and he decided to go into the managerial field and he called me and I would like to try and do something with you. I have a new, young singer and perhaps you and Betty could do something together. And that is how our, it was my first recording and it was also Betty's first recording. It was called Meet Betty Carter and Ray Bryant, if you recall, Fred. This record has been re-released and re-released (Columbia/Legacy) and it is still around today, but that was Betty's and my first recording. I think that it came off very, very well and of course, Betty went on to further things and I was always a fan of hers throughout her entire career. But we never did anything on record together after that.


FJ: Miles Davis.

RAY BRYANT: I was in Philadelphia and was playing as the house pianist at the Blue Note. Miles Davis was coming in and the Blue Note called me and said that they had Miles Davis coming in as a single and they would like me and my trio to back him up. I said, "Fine. Good." So we got through the week and it was a very wonderful week of listening to Miles play. After that, a couple of months later, I got a phone call. The phone rang and said, "This is Miles Davis. I have a recording session coming up and I would like for you to come and make a record with me." Of course, I did it. It was a recording called Quintet/Sextet (Miles Davis and Milt Jackson Quintet/Sextet), the one with Milt Jackson, Jackie McLean, Art Taylor was on drums, Percy Heath, Miles, and me. That was around '55 or so. But that was how I happen to be on many recording sessions with different people. I met them at the Blue Note in Philadelphia and then they would call back later and ask me to do something further with them. It was a gear honor and a great pleasure to do things like that.


FJ: Let's touch on your latest release on Joel Dorn's new venture, Label M, entitled Somewhere in France.

RAY BRYANT: OK, some months ago, Joel Dorn called me. I had been associated with Joel throughout the years. I did one of my previous solo recordings, Alone at Montreux, that was produced by Joel Dorn at the Montreux Jazz Festival. I also knew Joel back in Philadelphia, where he was a radio personality, a disc jockey, a jazz man that was on the radio. That was where I first met him. We were both from Philadelphia. It was inevitable that we should meet and we became friends. So anyway, a few months ago, Joel called and told me about this new project that he had in mind, which would involve not producing new recordings, but taking already existing things that I may have around and seeing how well we could do it as far as making a new recording out of that. So he said to look around and see, sometimes when you are performing, somebody makes a cassette tape or something like that, which is true. Sometimes when I am performing, cats make tapes, which they give to me. I bring them home and promptly put it in a drawer and just forget about it. So he said to look around and see if I could find some of those things and maybe we might end up with a CD and so I did and I ended up with a grocery size plastic bag full of them, which I took down. We picked out certain things and one of the tapes was surprisingly good. It had been well recorded and obviously, I was playing on a very fine piano that night and I wasn't playing too badly that night myself (laughing). We decided that we would go with this tape first. We have a whole bag of tapes. We have enough for many, many CDs. But this is one that we decided to go with first. On the tape, there was no indication as to where it had been recorded or anything like that or not even when it had been recorded. I had to figure that out from things that I said as I spoke to the audience. I noticed that I tried speaking a little French, a few French words and so I said, "Oh, I must be speaking to French people." I said, "OK, this must have been recorded somewhere in France." That is the title.


FJ: Hopefully, one of our French readers will remember that gig and call you or Joel.

RAY BRYANT: It is possible, Fred (laughing). You never get that kind of relaxed live feeling and the interaction between the audience and me, the warm ambience. It just really comes off sweet. It is things that you can't get in the studio with somebody behind the mike saying, "Take one." You can't get that feeling of spontaneity and relaxation that you can get from a live recording.


FJ: As the uncle of Kevin Eubanks, do you watch the Tonight Show?

RAY BRYANT: Every night that I'm here (laughing). Keep my eye on him.


Fred Jung is the Editor-In-Chief and believes every battle is won before it is ever fought. Email Him.