Ray Conniff rose to prominence through his innovative use of wordless vocal ensembles alongside understated orchestral backings, blending 1960s chart successes with familiar standards. He had previously played trombone in Bunny Berigan's Orchestra and Bob Crosby's Bobcats until Mitch Miller recruited him in 1954 as an arranger at Columbia Records. After crafting charts for several major Columbia releases in the mid-1950s, Conniff launched his own recording career by extending those same arranging methods into instrumental easy listening aimed at the expanding adult album audience. This approach yielded twelve Top Ten LPs and more than fifty million albums sold overall, securing his place among the era's leading LP artists, even as his increasingly mainstream style attracted limited younger listeners by the close of the 1960s. Although he kept releasing records and touring internationally through the 1990s, his albums disappeared from the charts in the early 1970s.
Born in November 1916 in Attleboro, Massachusetts, Ray Conniff acquired much of his early musical grounding at home. His father, a trombonist, directed a local ensemble while his mother performed on piano. During high school Ray started leading his own neighborhood group, taking up the trombone only shortly beforehand, and began creating arrangements for the band. Following graduation he relocated to Boston, joining Dan Murphy's Musical Skippers where, in addition to playing and writing charts, he handled driving duties for the group. By the mid-1930s he felt prepared for larger stages, arriving in New York just as the swing era began to flourish. He worked various jobs around Manhattan for several years before securing an arranging and performing position with Bunny Berigan in 1937. Two years later he joined Bob Crosby's Bobcats, one of the era's most popular ensembles, though he remained only briefly before moving on to Artie Shaw and later Glen Gray.
With the United States entering World War II in 1941, Conniff enlisted in the Army, which stationed him in Hollywood as an arranger for Armed Forces Radio. After the war he collaborated with Harry James but gradually lost enthusiasm for arranging once bop gained dominance in the late 1940s. Stepping away from the industry entirely, he devoted the early 1950s to studying conducting and music theory, returning in 1954 to accept an offer from Columbia Records and producer Mitch Miller. The next year he applied his concepts to a Top Five hit, "Band of Gold," recorded with vocalist Don Cherry. Additional major successes followed in 1956 and 1957, among them the chart-topping "Singing the Blues" by Guy Mitchell and "Chances Are" by Johnny Mathis, as well as Top Five releases by Johnnie Ray with "Just Walking in the Rain," Frankie Laine's "Moonlight Gambler," and Marty Robbins' "A White Sport Coat (And a Pink Carnation)." Impressed by these results, Columbia permitted Conniff to produce an instrumental album, leading to 'S Wonderful in 1956, which remained on the album charts for months. Sharing a similar goal—though achieving milder outcomes—with Lambert, Hendricks & Ross' Sing a Song of Basie, which converted classic Basie solos into vocal lines, Conniff scored parts for a relaxed vocal chorus in the same manner he had previously used for instrumentalists. The album supplied relaxed background music that adults could enjoy while still hearing voices, establishing a technique that came to characterize much of the light adult pop sound throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Over the remainder of the late 1950s, four Ray Conniff albums entered the Top Ten, highlighted by the gold-certified 'S Marvelous and Concert in Rhythm. Strong sales continued into the early 1960s with well-received theme projects such as Say It with Music (A Touch of Latin), Memories Are Made of This, So Much in Love, 'S Continental, and We Wish You a Merry Christmas, the last of which kept charting each holiday season for six years after its 1962 release. The mid-1960s ascent of rock & roll reduced Conniff's overall sales, yet his treatment of "Lara's Theme" from the 1966 film Doctor Zhivago reached number nine on the singles chart and supported the million-selling album Somewhere My Love. In the late 1960s he began incorporating softer rock material and Bacharach-David compositions into his catalog, giving the Conniff treatment to works by Simon & Garfunkel, the Carpenters, and the Fifth Dimension. He maintained an active schedule of recording and performing for his substantial Latin American following into the 1990s. On October 12, 2002, Conniff died at age 85 after suffering a head injury in a fall.
