Ramsey Lewis is dead. If you want to encapsulate your lifetime achievement as a jazz pianist in one brief moment, it’s this touch that said “Funky!” with every note. The heaviness, the microscopic delays and accelerations, the ability to dissolve that into the comfort of pop harmonies at any time made him one of the most successful jazz musicians of all time.
He grew up in the Cabrini-Green Projects, the high-rise slum in Chicago that would become synonymous with urban catastrophe in the 1960s. His father encouraged his musicality at an early age. And so Lewis became a pianist with the rhythm and blue group while he was still in ninth grade The Clefs. When four of the seven members were drafted into the army because of the Korean War, he formed his first trio under his own name with the remaining bassist Eldee Young and drummer Isaac Holt. From 1956 to 1965 the group established itself between Chicago and New York in the premier league of modern jazz. They weren’t signed to one of the jazz labels, but to Chess Records, the company that laid the foundations for rock’n’roll with Chicago Blues and especially Chuck Berry. There the Lewis Trio had a hit with the song “The In Crowd” in 1965, which landed at number 5 in the pop charts. From then on, Lewis was the link between jazz and pop for over two decades. Purists sometimes thought that it was very painless. Although he landed his own songs like “Wade in the Water” in the charts, he often only delivered the jazz-pop versions of established hits like “Hang on Sloopy” or, for example, if you look at the album “Mother Nature’s Son” with Beatles songs and strings without reservation, one finds a masterpiece of pop-jazz.
In the early 1970s, Lewis switched to the electric piano. His rhythm section had established itself as a hit machine in its own right with pianist Gene Harris Young, Holt Unlimited spun off. His new drummer Maurice White was soon working with his own group Earth, Wind & Fire. Together with them, Lewis made his breakthrough into the fusion era with the song “Sun Goddess”.
He has recorded over eighty albums over the years. He was also a radio and television presenter. In 2007 the state cultural foundation NEA appointed him Jazz Master. He died at home in Chicago on September 12th. He was 87 years old.