Ray Brown

Way Out West

Sonny Rollins · 1957

Deciphering the Message

Makaya McCraven · 2021

Gettin' to It

Christian McBride · 1995

Hot Flutes

Tamami Koyake With Great Jazz Quartet · 1986

Ray Brown died in 2002, yet his name still appears in the credits of the 2021 album Deciphering the Message — a record built not from new sessions but from re-edited vintage Blue Note tape, so a half-century-old bass take turns up on a release dated almost two decades after the player's death.

Gettin' to It

Christian McBride · 1995

Christian McBride calls his teacher Ray Brown one of the few bassists whose time was strong enough to make drums feel unnecessary. On his 1995 debut Gettin' to It, McBride made that literal — a three-bass summit with Brown and elder statesman Milt Hinton carrying a track with no drummer at all.

— Statement stmt-christian-mcbride-on-ray-brown

The titles of World Statesman (1956) and Dizzy In Greece (1957) are not travel whimsy. Gillespie's big band was the first jazz orchestra the US State Department sent abroad as cultural diplomacy, in 1956, and both records are by-products of that assignment — the place names are an itinerary, not a mood.

Count Basie is known as the face of his own big band, but on the 1956 session 'Port of Rico,' he turns up simply as the piano player inside someone else's orchestra. For one date, the bandleader becomes the sideman.

In 1958, the same year Coleman Hawkins cut his own showcase album The Genius of Coleman Hawkins, he also backed a blues record titled after the hit Broadway character from South Pacific — a founding father of jazz tenor sax turning up on session work far outside his usual world.

The 1958 second volume of Ella Fitzgerald's Duke Ellington Song Book ends with "Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald," a four-part piece written for her rather than drawn from the existing catalogue. It is an instrumental: the orchestra plays it, and the singer whose name is on the cover sits it out.