When the sun sinks into the sea (I always half expect a fierce hiss of steam, as if the whole state of California were an animated cartoon into which I’d unwittingly wandered), the oceanic air turns chill, and the room backstage becomes crowded, particularly near the fire pit. A mood of deep conviviality hangs in the air and jazz musicians greet their fellow nomads with a hyperbolic enthusiasm that hardly hints that they probably ran into each other somewhere on the road only days ago.

At these times, you can hear all the latest gossip of the music business, some of it malicious, a lot of it funny. And, of course, you can hear a great deal of straight shoptalk.

One evening during the 1959 festival, there was a bit of commotion backstage. A crowd was gathered in a corner. You couldn’t hear what was going on for the wail of a band on stage. Those whose curiosity was sufficiently piqued to press through the crowd soon learned the cause of the bother. In the center of a rude circle, a half dozen or more of the greatest names among jazz bassists were raptly listening to and watching the man whom all of them acknowledged the greatest bassist of them all.

In other words, some of the boys were getting a few pointers from Ray Brown.

It was a scene that has been repeated countless times all over America. You’ll hear that such-and-such a bassist was up in Ray’s room, playing duets. More likely, you’ll hear how when the Oscar Peterson Trio opened at So-and-so’s nightclub, all the pianists and bassists in town were there to listen, awe-stricken.

You’ve heard the expression, "This group is gonna scare everybody!" The Peterson group makes it more than an expression. One pianist-leader, whose group was to play opposite Peterson, quit drinking a week before the engagement. "I’ve got to have all my wits about me to work opposite the Man," he said. He warned his bassist, who had never worked opposite Brown, "You’re in for an experience."

During Peterson’s recent engagement at Chicago’s London House, Richard Evans, the gifted young Chicago bassist now working with the Eddie Higgins Trio, was asked how he like working opposite Ray.

"Well, I’ll tell you," he said slowly. "It’s as if your brother-in-law were going over a cliff in your new Cadillac. You don’t know whether to be drugged or delighted." He smiled a sly little smile. "One could lose one’s cool, right quick."

One could indeed.

Even allowing for the fact that bass players are an oddly clannish lot, and that Paul Chambers and Charlie Mingus (and, until his death, Oscar Pettiford) have, like Brown, attracted fellow bassists in swarms, Brown’s following is fantastic. Said one bassist, "This business of who is best on an instrument is a lot of nonsense, and most of the time, it’s impossible to say who’s best. The one exception is bass. There’s no question about bass. Ray Brown is the best there is. He’s so far ahead of everybody that there’s simply no comparison. He’s a tall man in a crowd of medium to small men. That’s how he stands out."

Brown is also the most imitated bassist of this period in jazz history. Many of the little figures he drops into his playing have been picked up by other bassists to become part of the standard bag of tricks. In fact, one bassist has built a career on one facet of Brown’s playing.

What is it that makes Brown so outstanding? Brown answered that question himself, without knowing it, when he said, "I still consider that the greatest assets a bass player can have are good time, good intonation, and a big sound."

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