For the primary half of the twentieth century, jazz musicians would interpret the favored music of the age, with Tin Pan Alley hits, Broadway showtunes, blues songs and Latin dance numbers offering the premise for each jazz musician’s set listing. However by the mid-60s, many jazz musicians felt minimize adrift by the ascent of rock’n’roll, Motown and the British invasion. Nearly uniquely amongst jazz musicians, Ramsey Lewis – who died this week aged 87 – didn’t see this as an issue. As a substitute of simply revisiting the showtunes of earlier many years, his piano trio would play the hits of the day, setting every one to a cool backbeat. It proved enormously profitable.
“I at all times thought it was a disgrace when jazz stopped being a music you may dance to,” mentioned Lewis. “It’s why we at all times preferred to function a couple of butt-shakers and toe-tappers.” In 1965, after a advice from a waitress in a Washington DC espresso store, his trio took a Motown-style Prime 20 hit by Dobie Grey known as The In Crowd and performed it in a DC membership known as the Bohemian Caverns. The recording of that efficiency was launched as a 7in single and, amazingly for a jazz instrumental, it entered the US Prime 5 and bought 1m copies. You may hear the viewers whooping, cheering, singing and clapping alongside. “They had been actually dancing within the aisles,” mentioned Lewis. “I really like how an viewers can fully rework a efficiency like that.”
The place the unique tune noticed the sharp-suited Dobie Grey unilaterally getting into an “in” crowd and setting himself aside from his followers (an exclusivity maintained by Bryan Ferry’s later cowl), Lewis’s model appeared to ask his viewers to hitch him within the cool set. His improvisations had been effortlessly hip however by no means too “on the market”, by no means alienating. He stayed near the unique melodies, including crunchy, bluesy slip notes, and caught to easy, chant-like repetition. Lewis, who began piano classes aged 4, recalled how his first instructor at all times instructed him to “make the piano sing”, and his enjoying was closely knowledgeable by his expertise enjoying gospel piano in Chicago’s Black Methodist church buildings from the age of 9.
“I can, if vital, play fairly difficult jazz improvisations,” he as soon as mentioned. “However you’ve acquired to be sure you carry the viewers with you. Most individuals don’t have an MA in music scholarship, they haven’t sat a jazz improvisation 101, they don’t need to hear you enjoying bebop impressed by Béla Bartók. You’ve acquired to comply with the viewers, and play off their vitality.”
He continued to do that all through the Sixties. Like his model of The In Crowd, his cowl of Dangle on Sloopy by the McCoys and his funky studying of an previous African-American non secular known as Wade within the Water, made well-known by the Staple Singers, bought 1,000,000 copies every. Eschewing swing rhythms and enjoying exhausting bop to a rock backbeat grew to become Lewis’s USP. He began enjoying hard-grooving variations of Beatles songs, reminiscent of A Onerous Day’s Evening, Day Tripper, And I Love Her, Woman Madonna and One thing. He even recorded Mom Nature’s Son, a 1968 album that includes 10 reinventions of tracks from the White Album.
He was no in a single day success. By 1965, Lewis and his trio had already recorded round 20 albums for Argo, the jazz imprint of Leonard and Phil Chess’s blues label Chess. These LPs typically reached exterior of the same old jazz repertoire. There have been variations of Bizet, Puccini and Rimsky-Korsakov arias, together with Alex North’s theme to Spartacus and folks tunes from Greece, Mexico, Scotland, Italy and Spain. From 1958, All the way down to Earth options gospel-infused variations of conventional tunes like Greensleeves, Typically I Really feel Like a Motherless Youngster and the Neapolitan folks commonplace Come Again to Sorrento; 1962’s Nation Meets the Blues – recorded across the similar time as Ray Charles’s Fashionable Sounds in Nation and Western Music – noticed Lewis add some gospel soul to nation requirements by the likes of Hank Williams, Willie Dixon and Hoagy Carmichael. In the identical 12 months Lewis was one of many first US jazz musicians – alongside Stan Getz and Quincy Jones – to document a complete album of bossa nova tunes; whereas 1964’s Bach to the Blues noticed him enjoying exhausting bop variations on themes by Bach, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Brahms.
Nevertheless it was Lewis’s embrace of rock and soul that was a game-changer, and the likes of Herbie Hancock, Cannonball Adderley and Joe Zawinul all acknowledged their debt as they adopted him into the crossover world. Lewis additionally led the way in which in his embrace of electrical keyboards, together with the Fender Rhodes electrical piano, and had a fruitful dialogue with modern R&B. When his first rhythm part – bassist Eldee Younger and drummer Crimson Holt – left him to kind the much-sampled funk outfit Younger Holt Limitless, Lewis enlisted musicians who had been simply as funky: his later accomplices included the star producer, arranger and songwriter Charles Stepney and the drummer Maurice White (later the founder and lead singer of Earth, Wind and Fireplace). White performed a vital position in rebooting Lewis’s profession when he co-wrote and produced two tracks on the 1974 album Solar Goddess, that includes a number of blissful digital R&B tracks that took off on the dancefloor and paved the way in which for the jazz-funk of Roy Ayers and the quiet storm soul of Smokey Robinson. By the tip of the century, Lewis had change into one of the crucial sampled musicians of all time, with the likes of A Tribe Known as Quest, the Fugees, Public Enemy, Gang Starr, Run DMC, Beck, Mos Def, Jurassic 5, Wiz Khalifa, J Dilla and Firm Circulation among the many a whole lot of acts to pattern his Nineteen Seventies recordings.
He by no means moved from his native Chicago, the place he hosted a morning present for an area {smooth} jazz station, offered a TV sequence known as Legends of Jazz, and was creative director of the Jazz at Ravinia competition. In later many years, Lewis began enjoying extra orthodox jazz, recording a number of albums together with his previous pal Nancy Wilson, a duet album together with his fellow piano populist and broadcaster Billy Taylor, an album of jazz readings of classical themes (1999’s Appassionata), and 7 albums with the smooth-jazz and fusion supergroup City Knights that includes heavyweights reminiscent of Freddie Hubbard, Omar Hakim and Grover Washington Jr. He additionally used his early classical coaching to finish extra formidable works: in 1998 he wrote an eight-movement piece for Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet; in 2010 he accomplished a tribute to Abraham Lincoln, a symphonic poem entitled Proclamation of Hope.
Nevertheless it was his easy, extra direct interpretations of jazz and his magnificent contact that Lewis shall be remembered for. Critics had been snooty (Richard Prepare dinner and Brian Morton’s canonic Penguin Information to Jazz Recordings dismisses most of Lewis’s output as “happy-clappy soul jazz”) however a few of jazz’s best names had been far more beneficiant. Dizzy Gillespie known as him “a gust of recent air on the musical scene” whereas Duke Ellington described Lewis’s music as “a bouquet of tonal delight”. Nevertheless it’s because the musician who introduced jazz again on to the dancefloor – and was capable of inject a much-needed dose of funk into an more and more cerebral artform – that Ramsey Lewis shall be greatest remembered.