When you think of a jazz pianist, most people tend to think of Ramsey Lewis immediately. Ramsey Lewis has been on the jazz scene since 1956 with his own albums. His breakaway hit The In Crowd hit the pop charts in 1965, widening Ramsey’s appeal to non-jazz as well as jazz fans alike. 80 albums and 3 Grammys later, Ramsey Lewis is still thrilling crowds with his unique, masterful jazz piano playing. His accolades include being selected a Jazz Master by the National Endowment of the Arts, receiving an NAACP Image Award for Best Jazz Artist and being chosen to light the cauldron and carry the Olympic Torch in Chicago for the 2002 Winter Olympics. Last week, Ramsey Lewis sat down with me to talk about jazz, his music and his career.
Q: You started playing piano at 4 years old. When did you fall in love with jazz?
A: I started practicing and taking lessons at 4 and I fell out of piano at 5 or 6 because I didn’t realize you had to practice and I thought you only had to go to a lesson once a week. I ceased piano teachers at 12 and started classical music, Bach, Beethoven etc. Then I fell in LOVE with the piano at 15 years old, one of my church’s musicians wanted me to play with their band. They were in college so they played on weekends. Their piano player had left to go play with Sarah Vaughan. That should have been a signal to me that if he left to go play with Sarah Vaughan and I’d never played jazz in my life—-what am I doing? At our rehearsal they said ‘OK, we’re playing Friday night so show up’ and I showed up. None of the songs they were playing-I didn’t know how to play blues, 12-bar blues—I’d played church songs and Chopin. Wallace Bird, the leader of the band, was a very nice guy. He said ‘come over to my house in a couple days and I’ll show you what’s up with this stuff’. He did, and here you and I are talking!
Q: You’ve had several different groups over the years. Who are the Urban Knights?
A: The Urban Knights are a group of musicians that live here in Chicago and became part of my band and now they’re all of my band. Before we used the name as part of our band they were a studio band, but then we decided that we would be the Urban Knights and its trying to use Chicago musicians to the best advantage, in terms of recording and touring.
Q: Your main forte is jazz, but you’ve also had success with R&B and pop.
A: Well I don’t play R&B and I don’t play pop. I play jazz, and my music crosses boundries. I definitely do not play Bach and Beethoven or Chopin in concert, I’m not a classical piano player. But those elements are definitely found in my style and I think that’s what you’re alluding to.
Q: Ramsey, you had a period where you played electric keyboards and then went back to acoustic piano. Did you return to electric piano lately?
A: Well I actually didn’t go back to electric the second time. I played electric the first time, and a Steinway was sitting on the stage also; and I found myself playing the Steinway much more then the electric piano, so I decided to hire somebody to play the electric piano so I could spend the time playing the Steinway. I love the Steinway piano!
Q: What is special about doing a concert in a festival setting?
A: It’s partly due to a large group of musicians that would overflow a performing arts center, which usually seats anywhere from seven to eight hundred or a thousand, maybe twelve hundred people, so there’s an overflow of audiences. And then there’s a camraderie of meeting up and having a chance to talk and joke around with fellow musicians, much more then if you passed each other in an airport. ‘Hey, how ya doin’? Oh, good, OK, see ya. Where you playing? Gotta catch my plane. OK, goodbye’. So it’s wonderful to have a few minutes to check out other musicians, to listen to them playing and then have a conversation with them.
Q: Who are some of your favorite musicians that you’ve played with?
A: Well mainly singers, Nancy Wilson was probably the singer I played most often with. When she was touring, every year for at least eight, nine, ten, twelve concerts a year, we would tour together and of course I toured in Europe with Dee Dee Bridgewater and that was wonderful; that lady is quite the entertainer also. She’s one of the best. I did a couple of concerts with Ann Hampton Callaway and that was wonderful also.
Q: You have an interesting concept with your Taking Another Look album. What was the thought process with that?
A: Well it’s interesting that you asked that question, because we just decided to put together a group of songs that have stayed with me throughout the years and I play most of them still in person. So when they said, ‘what do you want to call the album now?’, we scratched our heads, looked at the list of tunes and well, were taking another look at these songs. So we just took off the word songs and left it Taking Another Look.
Q: Thanks, Ramsey for a great interview.
At 82, Ramsey Lewis is still touring and creating albums. Not only does he look younger then his 82 years, but his music still sounds fresh. He can play a traditional style, yet surrounds himself with electric keyboardist and other musicians that can bring out the latest in sounds. Ramsey Lewis still has a lot of music in him.
