jazz musician
Personal Information
Born Ramsey Emmanuel Lewis Jr. on May 27, 1935, in Chicago; married twice; four children
Education: Attended Chicago College of Music and DePaul University.
Career
Formed trio with bassist Eldee Young and drummer Redd Holt, 1956; group, as Ramsey Lewis Trio, recorded debut album, 1956; played Birdland and Newport Jazz Festival dates, 1959; released hit album The In Crowd, 1965; original trio dissolved; Lewis formed larger groups, late 1960s and 1970s; returned to small-group jazz, 1980s; named artistic director, Ravinia Jazz in June series, suburban Chicago, 1993; radio host, station WNUA (Chicago) and in syndication.
Life's Work
The divide between popular taste and elite critical opinion in jazz is amply illustrated by the career of pianist Ramsey Lewis. Lewis has consistently drawn large audiences and numerous record buyers over more than 45 years of musical activity, but since the appearance of his hit 1965 album, The In Crowd, he has been criticized by many jazz writers for what they have considered excessive commercialism. Scott Yanow of the All Music Guide was perhaps typical when he refused to classify much of Lewis's music as jazz at all, contending that "Lewis has mostly stuck to easy listening pop music during the past 30 years." Yet Lewis, who became well known to Chicago radio audiences in the late 1990s as an on-air jazz show host, set the tone for many of the successful jazz-pop fusions that followed his own 1960s breakthroughs. Ignoring critical orthodoxy, he became an unusually influential musician.
Ramsey Emmanuel Lewis Jr. was born in Chicago on May 27, 1935. He grew up in the Cabrini Homes housing project that also spawned soul vocalists Curtis Mayfield and Jerry Butler. When he was barely more than a toddler, his sister, Lucille, began taking piano lessons. Lewis raised a fuss until his parents gave in and agreed to pay 50 cents a week for lessons for him as well--with a local church organist who would hit his fingers with a ruler if he made a mistake. At age 11, Lewis switched to another teacher, Dorothy Mendelson, who, Lewis told Down Beat, told him, "'You must make the piano sing.' I found that fascinating. 'Listen with the inner ear.' Her lessons were a means to an end, about making music, not about technique." Inspired, Lewis began practicing until late in the evening, and his parents began to worry that he was neglecting his other studies.
Joined Seven-Piece Band
Lewis's first appearances as a pianist came at church where his father served as choir director. When he was 16 he joined the Clefs, a locally popular seven-piece band that found work performing at parties and college dances. Several members of the group were drafted into the military during the Korean War, but Lewis and two other band members, bassist Eldee Young and drummer Redd Holt, were not called. Chicago radio DJ Daddy-O Daylie, mindful of the rising popularity of straight-ahead jazz in the hands of musicians such as Ray Charles, advised the three remaining Clefs to join together as the Ramsey Lewis Trio.
In 1957 Daylie arranged an audition for Lewis's trio with Phil Chess, one of two brothers who created the Chess label and put Chicago on the rhythm-and-blues recording map. Chess was impressed, and Lewis's debut album, Ramsey Lewis and His Gentlemen of Swing, was released some months later when Daylie promised to give the music air play. It was the beginning of a string of several dozen releases for Lewis on Chess and related labels, stretching into the early 1970s, when Lewis moved to the Columbia label.
Though jazz purists value his music of the late 1950s and early 1960s over his later work, Lewis was alert to pop trends even at this early stage. In 1962, at the height of the country/rhythm-and-blues crossover trend stimulated by Ray Charles and vocalist Solomon Burke, Lewis's trio released Country Meets the Blues. That same year they released a bossa nova album to capitalize on that growing craze.
Appeared at Birdland
Lewis had honed his piano skills with studies at the Chicago Music College and DePaul University, and the trio won mainstream jazz fans with a 1959 appearance at New York's prestigious Birdland club and subsequent gigs at the Village Vanguard and the Newport Jazz Festival. They seemed on their way to an artistically rewarding but financially dicey future in modern jazz when, in 1964, a coffee shop waitress enamored of the Dobie Gray pop hit "The In Crowd" suggested that they cover the song. Introducing their instrumental version to a hardcore jazz audience at Washington, D.C.'s Bohemian Cavern, Lewis was nervous. But the audience was won over, and the resulting album, 1965's The In Crowd, brought the trio a platinum-selling album and a Grammy award for best small-group recording.
The other titles on The In Crowd were indicative of the range of Lewis's musical interests; they include a movie-score number (the "Love Theme" from Spartacus), a bossa nova song (Antonio Carlos Jobim's Felicidade), a country-pop standard ("Tennessee Waltz"), a jazz classic (Duke Ellington's "Come Sunday"), and yet more styles. "This album is one of the places where Afro and funk-jazz started," noted Matthew Greenwald of the All Music Guide, and in general even Lewis's critics have had to concede the rhythmic infectiousness of his playing. Lewis followed up his initial success with other covers that cracked pop charts--"A Hard Day's Night" and "Hang On Sloopy." In the 1970s the original Lewis trio broke up under the pressures of stardom, but Lewis forged ahead with a new group that included drummer Maurice White, who later founded the wildly popular R&B group Earth, Wind & Fire.
"Now heading a septet, Lewis toured with Earth, Wind & Fire twice in the 1970s, and recorded Sun Goddess, one of his most successful albums, with a band that included members of that group. Lewis experimented with synthesizer keyboards and horn sections, but much of his work after the early 1980s was in the more intimate trio and quartet formats with which he was most familiar. Lewis also emerged on occasion as a formidable solo pianist. The Los Angeles Times, reviewing a duet concert he played with pianist Billy Taylor, noted that "his solo during 'Body and Soul' was stunning, an imaginative impromptu that was a virtual definition of chamber jazz at its best."
Recorded with Classical Musicians
Lewis continued to branch out into new musical areas, recording with classical musicians on the 1988 release, A Classic Encounter with the Philharmonic Orchestra, and the following year employing contemporary dance rhythms on his Urban Renewal release under the tutelage of his producer son Kevyn. A pair of albums with chanteuse Nancy Wilson, 1984's The Two of Us and 2002's Meant to Be, were particularly successful. A year rarely passed without the release of one or more Lewis albums, and most, despite the critics' disapproval, reached the top levels of jazz album sales charts.
Lewis remains philosophical about the split between critics and audiences. "This is a very sensitive area that we're entering into," he told Down Beat. "Jazz as entertainment and jazz as art.... Count Basie and Duke Ellington's playing was for dancers, but something happened where jazz entertainment came to be looked down upon by musicians ... Well, that's OK, but the music became so complex you couldn't dance to it, and the guy who worked all day in an office, drove a truck, whatever, at the end of the week, he didn't feel that he could spend his 88 or his 810 going to school, so he stopped going [to jazz clubs]."
Indeed, as modernism loosened its stranglehold on jazz aesthetics, critics began to recognize Lewis's contributions and to treat his new releases more kindly. By the turn of the century, Lewis was a jazz leader and tastemaker in his own right, serving as artistic director of the jazz series at Ravinia, the summer concert venue of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and hosting a syndicated radio show based at Chicago's WNUA, light-jazz outlet. His 2000 album Appassionata, released on the Narada label, revealed that Lewis's taste for crossing musical boundaries remained undiminished. The album included arrangements of classical pieces by Fauré, Chopin, and others, an Art Tatum tribute, a gospel medley, and piece by Lewis's youthful Chess Records compatriot Charles Stepney. The release appeared to signal that Lewis had come closer to the jazz ideal of creative freedom than his critics had initially understood.
Awards
Selected: Gold record award (sales of 500,000 copies) for The In Crowd, 1965; Grammy award, best small-group jazz recording, for The In Crowd, 1965; gold record for Sun Goddess, 1975.
Works
Selected discography
- Ramsey Lewis and His Gentlemen of Swing, Argo, 1956.
- Lem Winchester and the Ramsey Lewis Trio, Argo, 1958.
- An Hour with the Ramsey Lewis Trio, Cadet, 1959.
- Stretchin' Out, Cadet, 1960.
- Never on Sunday, Cadet, 1961.
- Country Meets the Blues, Argo, 1962.
- Bach to the Blues, Cadet, 1964.
- The In Crowd [live], Chess, 1965.
- Wade in the Water [live], Jazz Time, 1966.
- Goin' Latin, Cadet, 1967.
- Up Pops Ramsey, Cadet, 1968.
- Them Changes, Cadet, 1970.
- Back to the Roots, Cadet, 1971.
- Upendo Ni Pamoja, CBS, 1972.
- Funky Serenity, Columbia, 1973.
- Groover, Cadet, 1974.
- Don't It Feel Good, Columbia, 1975.
- Salongo, CBS, 1976.
- Love Notes, CBS, 1977.
- Ramsey, CBS, 1979.
- Solar Wind, Columbia, 1980.
- Live at the Savoy, Columbia, 1981.
- Chance Encounter, Columbia, 1982.
- Les Fleurs, CBS, 1983.
- The Two of Us, Columbia, 1984 (with Nancy Wilson).
- Keys to the City, Columbia, 1987.
- A Classic Encounter, Columbia, 1988.
- Urban Renewal, Columbia, 1989.
- Fantasy, Columbia, 1991.
- Ivory Pyramid, GRP, 1992.
- Sky Islands, GRP, 1993.
- Between the Keys, GRP, 1995.
- Dance of the Soul, GRP, 1997.
- In Person: 1960-1967 [live], GRP, 1998.
- Appassionata, Narada, 1999.
- Meant To Be, Narada, 2002 (with Nancy Wilson).
- 20th Century Masters--The Millennium, Chess, 2002.
Further Reading
Books
- Contemporary Musicians, Volume 14, Gale, 1995.
- Kernfeld, Barry, editor, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, Macmillan, 1988.
- Billboard, February 12, 1994, p. 19.
- Chicago Sun-Times, June 7, 1998, p. Show-11.
- Down Beat, February 2000, p. 40; April 2002, p. 60.
- Los Angeles Times, September 24, 1987, p. Calendar-6; January 13, 1997, p. F10.
- St. Petersburg Times, October 16, 1991, Clearwater Times ed., p. X15.
- All Music Guide, http://www.allmusic.com
- Lycos Music, http://music.lycos.com
— James M. Manheim
