Ray Alexander

Born on 7 February 1925 in Lynbrook, Long Island, and passing away on 9 June 2002 in New Hyde Park, New York, Alexander grew up surrounded by music thanks to his mother, a concert pianist, and took up the piano almost as soon as he could reach the keys. While still at school he assembled a harmonica ensemble and initially intended to pursue the trumpet, yet childhood asthma forced him to abandon that goal. Around 1940 a performance by Gene Krupa at New York’s Paramount Theatre prompted him to take up drumming instead, and he spent countless nights absorbing the sounds of ‘Big’ Sid Catlett, Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and others in Manhattan clubs, occasionally sitting in alongside violinists Stuff Smith and Joe Venuti.

Military service in World War II interrupted his progress, but after returning he worked with groups led by Chubby Jackson and Bobby Byrne. By the close of the 1940s he had added the vibraphone to his skills, practising the instrument during the hours when he was not already employed as a daytime drummer. In the mid-1950s he played drums for Claude Thornhill before moving, toward the end of the decade, into George Shearing’s Quintet, where he switched permanently to vibraphone.

Remaining based primarily in New York, he performed both formally and informally with Charlie Barnet, Coleman Hawkins, Stan Getz and Bill Evans, alternating between drums and vibes according to the occasion. In the early 1960s he briefly co-owned a jazz club in Westchester County, and in the early 1970s he assembled the quartet Alexander’s The Great alongside Mousey Alexander. He continued working the New York circuit through the late 1960s and 1970s, then in 1983 made his first recording under his own leadership with Kenny Barron and Warren Vaché Jnr. Although he remained most active in the New York area during the early 1990s, the success of that debut album—issued in the UK only in 1990—enabled him to begin annual summer tours of Europe. An eager performer, he consistently drew an affectionate response from listeners.