Biography
Bert Keyes—sometimes spelled Burt—belongs among the essential figures whenever the story of New York City R&B is told, because he served as music director for Rama Records, one of the city’s earliest homegrown R&B imprints to reach a national audience. His professional life at the keyboard had already begun in the 1940s alongside Ruth Brown, and by the early 1950s he was performing with jazz trumpeter Taft Jordan. The pivotal opportunity arrived in 1953 when George Goldner launched Rama, installing Keyes as the label’s A&R director, musical director, and principal arranger; in that capacity he oversaw recordings by the Five Buds, the Blue Notes, and the Larke Sisters. Under his own name he released five singles as pianist and bandleader, the most prominent being “I Was Such a Fool” and “Write Me Baby,” all of them firmly rooted in the R&B idiom, yet his greater influence came through the arrangements and productions that defined the bulk of the label’s catalog during its four-year existence. Afterward he accompanied LaVern Baker as pianist on Atlantic and supplied arrangements and compositions for several other imprints, among them sessions with Willie Bobo on Verve and with Albert King. In the 1960s and 1970s he shifted toward scoring for film and television, contributing music to Laurence Harvey’s Welcome to Arrow Beach and the animated feature Hugo the Hippo. He remained active well past that decade, later providing arrangements for Sylvia during the period just before her disco-era resurgence.