Ray Charles
Known as "The Genius" since the early 1950s, Ray Charles started out primarily as a jazz and blues pianist and singer in the style of his early musical idols such as Nat "King" Cole and pianist Charles Brown. But over his more than 50 years in show business, Charles built a career that defied genre, bringing his soulful voice, keyboard prowess and songwriting talent to the pop, country and R&B charts.

It seems I can never hear enough of Ray Charles. I first saw him in the early seventies, and for anyone who's never seen him live,...I'm really, truly sorry. That first concert had me coming back to his shows for years.

I collected his records over the years, lots of records. I'm not sure if I could pick a favorite, but there was one record that always got more play time than any of the others. "The Genius After Hours," under the Atlantic label released in 1961. It was always the perfect late night listening jazz album.

After misplacing the disc, I spent countless hours searching, trying to find it again. It was out of print in the U.S. and not yet available as a CD. It wasn't until November, 2001 that it came out as a CD (Import) with the Wea/Rhino label. You can currently find it under an "Atlantic Masters" label.

It's not what most listeners would expect from Ray Charles. To explain it best, I'd like to quote directly from the liner notes;

"Today, without having lost the Southern Juke-Box audiences for whom his church-flovored early hits were geared, Charles has found a mass market that has earned him international identification, almost exclusively as a singer. In this respect, his career has duplicated Nat King Cole's: it was as leader of a Cole-style combo, patterned along the lines of Nat's trio of the early 1040's, that Ray got under way as an instrumentalist in 1949. Today, as in Nat's case, many of those have followed his development as a singer are only conscience secondarily, if at all, of his background as a musician."

View the Official Ray Charles Website.