Steve Gray; keyboardist and composer
Hyfler/Rosner
His modesty hid his extensive contribution to modern music
John Fordham
The Guardian,
Friday October 31 2008
The musical presence of Steve Gray, who has died aged 64,
was transforming but subtle and unobtrusive. As a session
keyboard player in the 1970s, he played for Quincy Jones,
Henry Mancini, Michel Legrand, Lalo Schifrin, Peggy Lee,
Sammy Davis Jr, John Barry and many others, but he never
regarded himself as a creative pianist and was shy of the
role in the presence of the jazz players he loved.
In the 1980s he was the keyboardist in the guitarist John
Williams' crossover band Sky - participating in several hit
albums - but played down his part. After he left Sky, his
achievements might well surprise those who had only glimpsed
his presence in the shadows. He wrote a guitar concerto for
Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra in 1988, a piano
concerto for the French jazz-piano legend Martial Solal, two
operas and a requiem mass, orchestrated Brian Eno's works in
collaboration with the composer, and much more. From 1991,
he worked with the North German Radio (NDR) Big Band in
Hamburg, conceiving with them a project devoted to the music
of the South African Abdullah Ibrahim.
Gray was born in Middlesbrough and began to teach himself
the piano at the age of 10. He played bassoon in the
Middlesbrough Municipal Junior Orchestra but gravitated to
the saxophone section under the direction of Ron Aspery, who
later founded the groundbreaking Yorkshire fusion trio Back
Door. Gray's ears were already teaching him all he needed.
In his early teens, attending a Duke Ellington concert with
Aspery, he began transcribing the music he had heard while
on the bus on the way home.
He eventually became a pit pianist at the Middlesbrough
Empire, moved to London in the early 1960s, and joined a
quartet led by the great British bop drummer Phil Seamen.
Typically, he felt that he was lucky to get the gig and
feared that Seamen would rumble his shortcomings. Gray then
joined the bands of Eric Delaney, Johnny Howard and Mike
Cotton, and by the late 1960s was working on studio
sessions. Exploring composition, he wrote background music
for movies, radio and TV, and released A Woman in Love
(1969), an album of his own pieces. Within a few years he
was running his own quintet, Wasp, with ex-Shadows drummer
Brian Bennett and saxophonist-composer Duncan Lamont, and
recording an incidental melange of light funk, classical,
disco, Latin, jazz and electronics for the KPM company.
Gray's expertise blossomed. He arranged Jonathan Hodge's
score for the Richard Burton film Villain (1971), and his
sense of harmony and texture led him to reshape the Walker
Brothers sound on their comeback albums No Regrets (1975)
and Lines (1976). He also accompanied Olivia Newton-John for
the 1974 Eurovision song contest, as well as Petula Clark
and Tom Jones.
Gray disliked performing in public, but an invitation in
1980 to join Sky for a performance in Westminster Abbey and
an Australian tour was too hard to resist. He composed
Singer (1986), with Georgie Fame, for the Holland Metropole
Orchestra, which also played Gray's arrangements of Eno's
music from the album The Shutov Assembly. He composed two
works for the W11 Opera in London for young people and an
adaptation of Emilio de Cavalieri's 1599 work
Rappresentazione di Anima e di Corpo for the Cologne Opera
House.
It was after vocalist and composer Norma Winstone invited
him to write settings for her atmospheric songs that he
began working with the NDR Big Band. Gray had written some
big-band arrangements for Winstone some years before, and
the singer was startled by his appreciation of lyrics. "I
suggested swapping eight-bar phrases with the band on Easy
to Love," Winstone later remarked, "and he said 'oh, but
that would bring you back in the middle of a sentence'. He
was right, of course."
Gray wrote an arrangement for Winstone's haunting account of
The Peacocks, written by former Billie Holiday pianist Jimmy
Rowles, and played piano on the recording. "That pianist
really knows what he's doing," the vastly experienced Rowles
said.
Winstone's invitation led to the NDR's Kurt Giese suggesting
a Duke Ellington project to Gray in 1991, and the NDR ball
began to roll. The partnership has included the Ekapa Lodumo
album with Ibrahim in 2001 and a requiem mass for big band
and choir. In 1998, Gray was guest professor of composition
and arrangement in the Berlin Hochschule für Musik Hanns
Eisler jazz department.
The composer's untapped potential was immense, and the NDR
offered him freedoms he had never known before. His old
playing partner Duncan Lamont once opined that his wit,
wisdom and otherworldly intuitions made him seem "1,000
years old". The bassist Chris Laurence, asking the
self-taught Gray where he got his eerily voiced chords from,
was told: "I didn't know the right ones."
He is survived by his wife Heather, his daughter Suzanne,
and grand-daughter Anna.
. Steve Gray, musician, born April 18 1944; died September
20 2008