Ray Brown at 100: His Lasting Impact on Bassists

October 13th, 2026 marks 100 years since jazz bass legend Ray Brown was born. The bassist, who passed away in 2002 at 75, left an indelible mark on the bass, on jazz, and on music as a whole. His unmistakable sound and swagger helped define the art of walking bass and gave generations of bassists a model to study.

That influence runs deep in the bass community, and today we’re revisiting interviews from our archive to explore Brown’s continued impact. Whether they learned from records, studied with him, or played alongside him, these world-class bassists have shared stories of Brown’s high musical standards, generosity, humor, and love of the bass.

We’re celebrating Ray Brown’s centennial with seven bassists’ reflections on what made Ray Brown so important.

Edgar Meyer is a bassist who defies categorization beyond “virtuoso.” He’s phenomenal at classical, jazz, bluegrass, and anything else he feels like playing. Early in his career, he quickly learned a lesson in tone from Ray Brown.

“I was 19 or 20 years old and I told my dad, ‘I think I’ve about figured out how to get that sound like Ray Brown. I just need a slightly different bass, I think,'” he told us. “And then Ray played my bass and I found out that the bass was fine. [laughs]”

It was surely a surreal experience, since Brown had been Meyer’s model from the beginning, thanks to his father.

“Ray was very outgoing and loved supporting younger players. It was incredible. When I was young, I was really begging my father to let me play bass like him. He finally let me and the first thing he did was put on We Get Requests by the Oscar Peterson Trio and he said, ‘Now, this is how you play bass.’ From day one, that was the only consistent model for me. That was how you do it. That never really changed. I’ve been interested in this and that, but Ray is the only bass player who has stayed consistent.”

Meyer’s elevated musical influences reach far beyond the bass, but Brown holds a particular place in his approach.

“Most of my influences are pretty diverse. They’re from all kinds of music and they include a lot of dead people and people who sing and people who write and people who do all kinds of stuff. But it’s hardly ever a bass player in there. Ray is the main bass player in my list of influences.”

For West Coast Get Down bassist Miles Mosley, it all started with Ray Brown.

“At first the only thing I wanted to be was Ray Brown,” he said. “I transcribed every solo and every walking line. That was probably the first five years of my playing. The more I sounded like Ray, the happier I was.”

However, becoming that in tune with Brown’s style became a lesson in itself, teaching him that he needed to expand to find his own voice.

“I remember one day buying a record with Ray Brown playing with a big band as a soloist. This CD release included outtakes of Ray performing the same piece multiple times. At one point I realized that he had more or less mapped out his solo for the sake of consistency. I had studied him so closely for so long I was able to predict each solo as I heard it. It was in that moment that I decided to stop transcribing bass players and start transcribing other instruments. I felt I had really soaked up all the Ray Brown I could use at that moment and wanted a new challenge.”

Similarly, Larry Grenadier got off to a good start on the bass. He encountered the master before he had even picked up an upright, and immediately knew there was something special.

“[Ray Brown] was the first upright bass player I ever saw live before I was even playing upright. He was someone who I could tell was super badass but I didn’t know why. I didn’t know his history with the instrument or anything like that. It’s such a curious thing to be looking back so many years later to see how we still connect with things that affected us at a very young age. We can’t just say we were young and didn’t know any better. We already had a sense of taste and the way our aesthetics were going to develop eventually.”

Kristin Korb has the rare talent of being both a tremendous bassist and a transcendent vocalist. Brown was a key figure in her career. Her recording debut was with him on Introducing Kristin Korb with the Ray Brown Trio.

When we interviewed her back in 2014, we asked about how she brought her singing and bass playing together so fluidly.

“At first the voice will have to be automatic while the voice is exploring things or the bass has to be automatic while the voice is exploring things. I think one of the things I got from Ray Brown is that he really expected all of his students to be able to sing and play at the same time. It wasn’t a concept of having someone singing and playing on their next concert, but the idea [that] your bass line is a countermelody to the melody.”

This was a deeper lesson about jazz and music in general that still informs her playing today.

“If you can’t sing the melody, do you really know what it is? And do you know the relationship of those melodic notes against the roots? So if you know the line and you can sing it, then you can figure out within your bass lines where that needs to go to complement the melody in the best way. So even to take it from a basic root motion thing, you can take it and build them to interweave.”

John Clayton was one of Ray Brown’s true pupils. He took him under his wing with advice on the bass and the music business.

“[Ray Brown’s teaching was] demanding, but not unreasonable. Everything he said made sense. He’d say, ‘You have to learn all of your triads – major triads, minor triads. All of your chord types – major 6th, minor 6th, dominant 7ths, minor 7ths, major sevenths, minor with a major 7th, augmented 7ths, diminished 7ths. You have to learn all of your scales. You have to learn how to play the whole bass – from the scroll to the bridge.’ He’d say, ‘You know, music is going to kick your butt enough. You don’t want to have the bass kick your butt, too.’ He was relentless about that. He’d say, ‘You’re playing tunes. You’ve got to learn tunes. Learn them in all keys.’ It was like that. He was tough, but not unreasonable.”

We asked whether that rigor showed up in his personality, and Clayton gave us insight into Brown as a man.

“Yes. I wouldn’t say tough when I talk about his personality. I would say strong. He was strong about what he felt and strong in his business practice. Strong in his conviction about the bass. But, he was such a community guy. He was such a village guy. He was totally about fun. He hated being in L.A. because he thought about the fun that he could be having touring. If he was home two or three weeks in a row, he’d say, ‘Get me out of here!’ [laughs] He just loved playing. He was a remarkable guy.”

Buster Williams is a jazz bass legend himself. He was living in Los Angeles during the 1960s when Brown settled there after leaving the Oscar Peterson Trio. Brown, Williams explains, was supportive by sharing the wealth of work.

“He had spent all of those years with the Oscar Peterson Trio, and he decided to leave the trio and settle in Los Angeles. At that time I was living in Los Angeles because I moved out there with Nancy Wilson. I was there from April of ’65 to November of ’68. In that time, Ray Brown settled in Los Angeles. Of course, when he arrived, they gave him the key to the city. Fortunately, I had met Ray Brown and we were friends so he started calling me for all of the work he couldn’t do, which was a whole lot of work. He kept me quite busy.”

Christian McBride is another of Brown’s pupils and, along with Clayton, one of his biggest proponents. He regularly performs “Remembering Ray Brown” concerts to celebrate his legacy alongside Brown’s former trio members like pianist Benny Green.

Beyond his musical wisdom, McBride remembered Brown as someone you could go to for nearly anything.

“I think all those guys from that generation… well, they were hard. They came from that era of hard living. Now, Ray Brown, of course, in many ways was sort of like Dr. Billy Taylor in that sense that he was very sweet and very elegant and very sophisticated, just like Hank Jones and Oscar Peterson. But Ray Brown was a no-nonsense kind of guy who was sort of like everybody’s father. He had so much wisdom. He never found things that difficult. You could go to him about different problems you were having musically or just in life, revolving around life or relationships, and Ray always had these real short one-sentence answers that seemed to crack the code. You’d look at him like, “Of course, yeah! It’s not that difficult, is it?” And that’s because the man lived so long and understood so much. Like I said, that generation… I think most of those guys were like that.”