The Ray Brown Story: One Day in New York, Then Charlie Parker

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Ray Brown had been in New York for about a day when he walked into a rehearsal with Charlie Parker.

It was 1945. He’d gone straight to 52nd Street, where he ran into the pianist Hank Jones. Hank introduced him to Dizzy Gillespie, and Dizzy hired him that same night.

The rehearsal was the next day. When he got there, he found out who else was in the band: Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and Max Roach.

Here’s how he put it years later, in an interview with Jazz Journal International:

“If I had known those guys any better I would have probably never gone to the rehearsal.”

Stand in that room for a second. You’re a year out of high school, you’ve been in town one day, the alto player is Charlie Parker, and you’re the one who has to keep the time.

Dizzy kept him.

The trombone his dad couldn’t afford

He almost didn’t play bass at all.

Ray Brown was born in Pittsburgh on October 13, 1926, and he grew up taking piano lessons. Then he got to high school and noticed how many piano players there were. So he thought about switching to trombone.

His dad couldn’t afford one.

There was a vacancy in the school jazz orchestra, and the school had a bass he could use. So he took up the upright bass instead.

That kid went on to play bass with Dizzy Gillespie, spent the 1950s and the first half of the ’60s in the Oscar Peterson Trio, and was married to Ella Fitzgerald. If you ask me, the reason all the singers loved him, so much so that Ella married him, is his two-bar phrases. I get into those in my post on Ray Brown bass lines.

He only picked up the bass because his dad couldn’t buy him a trombone.

The road years before New York

Everybody remembers the rehearsal with Bird. Hardly anybody brings up what came before it.

He finished high school in 1944. Then he went on the road: eight months with Jimmy Hinsley’s band, then Snookum Russell’s touring band. Hank Jones was a friend from those road days. By the time he got to New York, he’d been playing bass for a living, the last stretch of it in a band that toured.

Here’s what I think that bought him. Under the kind of heat that rehearsal brought, you don’t rise to the moment. You sink to whatever your hands can do without you. The smart part of you can be going to pieces while your hands keep walking quarter notes, as long as your hands have done it enough times.

Ray Brown’s hands had done it enough times. When that bandstand opened up on one day’s notice, his hands were ready before the rest of him caught up.

When your tune gets called

Yours is coming too. One day the tune you’ve been quietly avoiding gets called, on a gig or at a jam, in a room with a couple of players who scare you a little, and the front of your brain seizes up the way it always does.

The only thing that decides how it goes is what your hands can still do while it’s frozen.

So give your hands the road years now. Take the walking lines, the feel and the time underneath them, and run them enough times that they settle in below conscious thought. If you want a place to start, start with Ray Brown’s walking bass line formula, and walk it until you don’t have to think about it.