Shades of Brown

It's not surprising that golf was Ray Brown's favorite sport. Stroking that little white ball around for 18 holes requires physical precision, strategic planning and versatility and a mixture of unwavering discipline and bold élan. That's an apt description of Brown on the bandstand in a career that spanned more than a half-century and made him the most recorded bass player in jazz before his death in 2002.

Nor is it surprising that bassist Christian McBride has initiated a tour in tribute to Brown. With a stentorian tone and nimble phrasing that overtly acknowledge Brown's influence, the 35-year-old timekeeper has assumed the mantle as jazz's most in-demand bassist.

McBride's tribute trio with pianist Benny Green and drummer Greg Hutchinson, both longtime Brown sidemen, visits the Dakota Jazz Club this week on a short tour of a handful of clubs.

"Along with so many others, we all consider ourselves children of Ray Brown," Green said from his home in New York. "I honestly believe I continue to learn every day from the example he set -- the consistency of his performance, the professionalism and yet the enthusiasm of how he presented his music for an audience.

"He played with an authority that defined the greatness and beauty of his instrument, yet he was still humble and thankful to be able to play this music and relentless in his hunger for it. I'll always remember that."

Green, who enlisted McBride for his first working trio back in the early '90s, said he believes that "Christian has that same natural strength and personality to make everyone feel comfortable onstage. They are from two different generations, but Christian and Ray are cut from the same cloth."

On McBride's first record in 1994, he included Brown in a bass trio summit (with Milt Hilton) on one song. That gave Brown the impetus to form the critically and commercially successful SuperBass trio with McBride and John Clayton, a protégé of Brown, two years later.

"Your sound is in your ear, in your body," Brown once told Clayton. He had an affinity for flamboyant soloists, including Ella Fitzgerald, his scat-singing wife of four years, and pianist Oscar Peterson, whose trio he anchored for 15 years. So anyone going to this week's shows should expect nothing less than fiery, feisty solos -- especially from Green, who before joining Brown in 1992 apprenticed in hard-bop's two most renowned finishing schools, Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and vocalist Betty Carter's band.

An offer he couldn't refuse

Brown was also famed for his business acumen. "I've never been around an artist who had such an ability to be both right-brained and left-brained," Green said. "He'd wake up in the morning and get on the phone and do all these bookings. You know he managed the Modern Jazz Quartet, Quincy Jones, Oscar Peterson, Roberta Flack, a lot of people. And yet in the evening he was totally the artist."

Dakota owner Lowell Pickett was on the receiving end of one of those phone calls. The result was a longstanding relationship that saw Brown play the club (then located in St. Paul) more than a half-dozen times.

"He called me up and said, 'How'd you like to have me and Milt Jackson and Cedar Walton and Billy Higgins play?' -- four incredible players that we eventually billed as the Giants of Jazz. I told him I couldn't afford it. He said, 'I'm making enough money during the two Saturday nights that if I can hang out there for a few days in the middle of the week, you can afford it.' I always got the feeling that because he had a club in L.A. for a short time, there was an undercurrent of kindness for people like me.

"Plus, there was someone in town he liked to play golf with."

In fact, Green recalled that the last time he played with Brown "was at a private party at the Dakota -- Ray and me and Russell Malone, about two weeks before he died. He was at the top of his game. His voice [on the instrument] seemed to deepen every day. He wasn't going backwards, that's for sure."

In July 2002, Ray Brown played a round of golf just outside Indianapolis, came back to his hotel room for a nap right before his concert that night and died in his sleep, a fittingly beautiful way to go.