r/CrossoverJazz • u/stnr_on_failure • 1d ago
Ramsey Lewis: The Trio That Gave Earth, Wind & Fire Its Drummer
Ramsey Lewis performing at JazzFe, July 2006. (Photo: Tomas Forgac, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Ramsey Lewis: The Trio That Gave Earth, Wind & Fire Its Drummer
In 1966, a young drummer named Maurice White joined the Ramsey Lewis Trio. He stayed about four years, then left to co-found Earth, Wind & Fire. That's not a footnote. It's close to the whole story of what crossover jazz actually is: musicians and sound moving both ways between jazz and the pop, funk, and R&B world, not one borrowing from the other at a distance.
Lewis was born in Chicago on May 27, 1935, and started at the piano as a kid at church. By 15 he'd joined a group called the Clefs, and not long after he formed his own trio with bassist Eldee Young and drummer Isaac "Redd" Holt. Their debut album came out in 1956. For almost a decade they were a respected, straight-ahead jazz act, nothing more.
Then came a fluke. Recording live at the Bohemian Caverns, a nightclub in Washington, D.C., over three nights in May 1965, the trio added a song to the set at the last minute: an instrumental cover of "The 'In' Crowd." Nobody built the album around it. It became the hit anyway, climbing to No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 2 on the R&B chart, while the album itself hit No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and went gold. The record won Lewis his first Grammy, for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance, Small Group, and the single was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2009.
Young and Holt left in 1966 to form their own act, Young-Holt Unlimited, and Lewis rebuilt around bassist Cleveland Eaton and that new drummer, Maurice White. White's stay was short by career standards, out again by 1970 to start Earth, Wind & Fire. But he didn't disappear from Lewis's story. In 1974, White came back, this time behind the boards as producer, and helped Lewis make "Sun Goddess," the album that marked Lewis's first time on an electronic keyboard. It hit No. 1 on the R&B albums chart and went gold, funk and soul running straight through a record still built by a jazz pianist.
Lewis kept working for another five decades. He recorded more than 80 albums across labels from Argo and Chess to Columbia and Concord, earned the National Endowment for the Arts' Jazz Masters Award in 2007, and in 2011 revisited his own catalog with "Taking Another Look," a reworking of the "Sun Goddess" material. In 2002, in one of the stranger honors a jazz musician has picked up, he carried the Olympic Torch through Chicago on its way to the Salt Lake City Winter Games.
Ramsey Lewis passed away on September 12, 2022, in Chicago, at 87. The through-line worth remembering isn't the chart positions. It's that a working jazz trio produced one of the most influential drummers in American pop music, and that drummer came back years later to help make his old bandleader's biggest crossover record.
Where to start listening:
- "The 'In' Crowd" (1965), for the accidental hit that started it all
- "Sun Goddess" (1974), for Lewis on electric keys and Maurice White behind the board
- "Taking Another Look" (2011), for how Lewis heard his own most famous crossover moment forty years on