Percussionist Daniel Ray was asked for by name from the biggest names in jazz history.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY TRAVIS SHINN
With each step, Daniel “Big Black” Ray descended into a dream-like state. The young conga drummer approached the ticket booth in the basement of New York City’s famed Birdland jazz club and realized his life-shaping goal was within reach.
It was the early 1960s. Ray, who was born in Savannah, Georgia, had recently left his adopted hometown of Nassau, Bahamas, for the Big Apple, leaving behind much of what defined his adult life: the nightclub where he honed his natural talent into performance art and Ginger, the Bahamian wife with whom he would raise four children; she would join him in New York once he was settled.
Dizzy Gillespie was headlining Birdland that night, and Ray was determined to see him perform. He had ventured stateside with the intention of meeting and someday playing with the celebrated trumpeter and bandleader.
Gillespie was an architect of bebop, a genre Ray loved. Also known as bop, bebop surfaced in the 1940s, integrating jazz, swing, fast tempos, adventurous improvisation, complex harmonies, chord progressions — and individual virtuosity. Ray considered it to be rooted in Shango, “the ultimate African deity of rhythms.”
Bolstered by a friend and musician in Miami who said Ray could drop his name when meeting Gillespie, the recent transplant entered Birdland with confidence. He had a surefire connection to the bebop virtuoso. Almost immediately, he saw Gillespie chatting with a man near the ticket booth.
“I was shocked when I saw Dizzy standing there,” Ray recalls. “I bought my ticket, and I just stood aside and waited. When he got through talking to this cat, I walked up to him, and I said, ‘Mr. Gillespie’ — and I had my hands [outstretched] like this — I said, ‘A good friend of yours, Blue Mitchell, sent me. He told me to say that to you, and you would give me a gig.’
“Dizzy looked at me like I was crazy,” Ray continues. “He looked at my hands and turned around and left me standing there. I was shocked. I didn’t say nothing. I went into the club, and I heard him play. Afterwards, I left.”
Months of struggling to find band work followed until Ray convinced a bar owner in Harlem to allow him to convert a downstairs banquet room into a performance space. Ray called it The African Bag. He hired Ray Bryant to play piano and charged $2 for admission. Ray’s rule was that anyone who performed at The African Bag, including Bryant, had to play with him.
Pianist Randy Weston would show up to support Bryant on piano, and Ray eventually joined Weston’s sextet. Increasingly, Ray was accepted into a community of Black jazz and bebop musicians who supported one another. “Big Black” — the nickname his older brother, William “Fish” Ray, proudly bestowed after watching his 6-foot-2½-inches-tall little brother give an impressive performance — had become a respected stage name.
As a favor one Friday night, Ray agreed to relay Weston’s apologies when a case
of bursitis prevented the pianist from performing at a star-studded event honoring actor Paul Robeson. Ray saw it as an opportunity to promote his upcoming gig with a flutist.
While passing out flyers in the Americana Hotel lobby, Ray saw a familiar guest walk in and gave him one of the handbills. It was Gillespie.
“I don’t say nothing because I remember how he treated me,” Ray says. “He looked at the flyer. He said, ‘Hey, Black, I heard about you. You want to play with me?’ ”
Gillespie didn’t mention their abrupt meeting six months earlier, and Ray kept his cool. He agreed to perform with the bandleader and his orchestra the following Monday night at The Village Gate.
It was a show Ray will never forget. He laughs as he recalls arriving at the nightclub and being told Gillespie had left his name at the door as “Big Black, my new discovery.”
“What a night that was,” Ray says. “Let me tell you, we cooked. And from that night on, wherever Dizzy was playing, if I walked in the room, he would call me up to play. Or if he had a gig for me, he would call me.”
Ray performed many times over the years with Gillespie and his orchestra, including at internationally acclaimed jazz festivals. One of his favorite festival gigs, in Monterey, California, is immortalized on Gillespie’s album, Live at the 1965 Monterey Jazz Festival.
As Ray’s reputation spread, opportunities to record increased. Players he admired invited him to collaborate, such as on the live recording, “The Night of the Cookers,” with Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan. He also recorded his own albums, including Lion Walk, Elements of Now, Big Black and the Blues, Message to Our Ancestors, Ethnic Fusion, and If You’re Diggin’ What You’re Doin’, Keep on Doin’ What You’re Diggin’.
Now 86 and living with Ginger in Cathedral City, Ray attributes his career achievements to the individuality he brings to his work. He infuses many of his bebop performances with “environmental rhythms,” which he describes as the sounds of birds, insects, and other elements of nature’s orchestra.
Ray will soon demonstrate environmental rhythms for a new audience as part of a course at the Harrison House artist residency in Joshua Tree. He has led drum circles and performed there many times over the years. In this program, he will collaborate with Harrison House director Eva Soltes, who has known Ray since the 1970s. Participating students will perform with sticks crafted from branches by artist Mark Bulwinkle. The course will take place April 22 through May 6. Details are available at louharrisonhouse.org.
Adam Rudolph, a percussionist and composer whom The New York Times describes as “a pioneer in world music,” credits Ray with inventing a prototypical approach to bebop drumming. Ray’s approach “was oriented toward spontaneous musicmaking and flexibility to dialogue with other musicians in the creation of the moment,” Rudolph explains. It was unlike anything he had ever heard or seen.
“Let me tell you, we cooked. And from that night on, wherever Dizzy was playing, if I walked in the room, he would call me up to play.”
“When I first heard his record Ethnic Fusion, I had no idea how he was doing what he was doing,” Rudolph says. “I had been playing myself then for 15 years, and it changed my whole way of thinking. He opened the door to creative freedom on hand drums for me.”
Ray’s musical talent emerged when he was 8 years old, growing up in South Carolina, where he lived for a time before moving to Miami and, later, the Bahamas. He didn’t read music, but he watched and listened to others play the drums. These performances fueled his imagination and restless hands. He discovered he has “a photographic memory for rhythms,” an ability to play any tune after hearing it one time.
“All I did was eat [and] sleep rhythm, but I didn’t have a drum,” Ray says. “I would play on the floor. I’d play on the table. When I went to school, I’d play on the desk. I was always in trouble for making noise. To be great at anything, you have to become a fanatic. It becomes a part of you, and you just got to get it out.”