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NY Times June 3, 2011
Ray Bryant, Jazz Pianist, Dies at 79
By NATE CHINEN
Ray Bryant, a jazz pianist whose sensitivity and easy authority made him
a busy accompanist and a successful solo artist, beginning in the
mid-1950s, died on Thursday. He was 79.
His wife of 20 years, Claude Bryant, said he died at New York Hospital
Queens after a long illness. He lived in Jackson Heights, Queens.
Mr. Bryant had a firm touch and an unshakable sense of time, notably in
his left hand, which he often used to build a bedrock vamp. Even in a
bebop setting, he favored the ringing tonalities of the gospel church.
And he was sumptuously at home with the blues, as a style and a
sensibility but never as an affectation.
All of this contributed to his accomplishment as a solo pianist. His
first solo piano album was “Alone With the Blues,” in 1958, and he went
on to make a handful of others, including “Alone at Montreux,” “Solo
Flight” and “Montreux ’77.” His most recent release, “In the Back Room,”
was yet another solo album, recorded live at Rutgers University and
released on the Evening Star label in 2008.
Raphael Homer Bryant was born on Dec. 24, 1931, in Philadelphia, and
made his name in that city during its considerable postwar jazz boom.
Along with his brother, Tommy, a bassist, he played in the house band at
the Blue Note Club in Philadelphia, which had a steady flow of major
talent dropping in from New York. (Charlie Parker and Miles Davis were
among the musicians they played with there.) In short order Mr. Bryant
had plenty of prominent sideman work, both with and without his brother.
One early measure of his ascent was the album “Meet Betty Carter and Ray
Bryant,” released on Columbia in 1955. It was a splashy introduction for
him as well as for Ms. Carter, the imposingly gifted jazz singer. It was
soon followed by “The Ray Bryant Trio” (Prestige), an accomplished album
that introduced Mr. Bryant’s composition “Blues Changes,” with its
distinctive chord progression.
That song would become a staple of the jazz literature, if less of a
proven standard than “Cubano Chant,” the sprightly Afro-Cuban fanfare
that Mr. Bryant recorded under his own name and in bands led by the
drummers Art Blakey, Art Taylor and Jo Jones.
Mr. Bryant had several hit songs early in his solo career, beginning
with “Little Susie,” an original blues that he recorded both for the
Signature label and for Columbia. In 1960 he reached No. 30 on the
Billboard chart with a novelty song called “The Madison Time,” rushed
into production to capitalize on a dance craze. (The song has had a
durable afterlife, appearing on the soundtrack to the 1988 movie
“Hairspray,” and in the recent Broadway musical production.) He later
broke into the Top 100 with a cover of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie
Joe,” released just a few months after the original, in 1967.
But Mr. Bryant’s legacy never rested on his chart success or his nimble
response to popular trends. It can be discerned throughout his own
discography and in some of his work as a sideman, notably with the
singers Carmen McRae and Jimmy Rushing, and on albums like Dizzy
Gillespie’s “Sonny Side Up,” on Verve. “After Hours,” a track on that
album, begins with Mr. Bryant and his brother playing a textbook
slow-drag blues.
Along with his wife, Mr. Bryant is survived by a son, Raphael Bryant
Jr.; a daughter, Gina; three grandchildren; and two brothers, Leonard
and Lynwood. Mr. Bryant’s sister, Vera Eubanks, is the mother of several
prominent jazz musicians: Robin Eubanks, a trombonist; Kevin Eubanks,
the guitarist and former bandleader on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno”;
and Duane Eubanks, a trumpeter.
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