Ray Anderson, trombone Ray Anderson, trombone

Named five straight years as best trombonist in the Down Beat Critics Poll, Ray Anderson has led or co-led an assortment of tradition-minded and experimental groups, big bands, blues and funk projects. He has recorded more than 70 of his own compositions.
 
Born in 1952 in Chicago’s Hyde Park, Anderson is the son of theologians. He took up the trombone in fourth grade, influenced by his father’s Dixieland recordings. “The sound of the trombone was appealing to me,” he says. “All the people I heard play it sounded like they were having fun.” (The artists he strongly responded to included greats Vic Dickenson and Trummy Young.) Anderson attended the University of Chicago Lab School.
 
He played in R&B bands while attending college in Minnesota and LA and funk and Latin bands while living in San Francisco. On the West Coast, he worked with members of its progressive jazz community, saxophonist David Murray and drummers Charles Moffett and Stanley Crouch (now a leading critic, newspaper columnist and author).
 
In 1973, Anderson moved to New York. He studied and played with reed player, composer and music theorist Jimmy Giuffre, joined drummer Barry Altschul’s trio and played for three years with the quartet of saxophonist Anthony Braxton. In the ’80s, he worked with collective bands including the funk-oriented Slickaphonics and the trio BassDrumBone, featuring bassist Mark Helias and drummer Gerry Hemingway.
 
On a series of acclaimed recordings, he has ranged from Ellingtonia and jazz classics to originals. Anderson also has demonstrated supportive skills on a albums by Braxton, Murray, Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, Dr. John, the George Gruntz Concert Jazz Band, Luther Allison, Bennie Wallace, Henry Threadgill, Barbara Dennerlein, John Scofield, Roscoe Mitchell, the New York Composers Orchestra, Sam Rivers’Rivbea Orchestra and others.
Anderson has frequently returned to his early love of New Orleans music for inspiration. Both his Alligatory Band and Pocket Brass Band, are rooted in the Crescent City. “I feel like a spiritual son of that city,” he says. “Some part of me lives down there. Dr. John, Professor Longhair, the whole thing grabs me. You get caught up in those rhythms, right at the crossroads of jazz and funk, and you can’t quit them.”
 
Anderson also heads up the blues-dipped Lapis Lazuli Band, featuring singer/organist Amina Claudine Myers, and reunites with Lewis, Gary Valente and Craig Harris in the all-star trombone quartet, Slideride.
 
He was hired as the Director of Jazz Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2003 and has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals, the Oberon Foundation and Chamber Music America. In 2001 he became a John S. Guggenheim Fellow.

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