Ran Blake

Ran Blake (born April 20, 1935) is an American pianist, composer, and educator.

He is known for his unique style that combines blues, gospel, classical, and film noir influences into an innovative and dark jazz sound.

His career spans over 40 recording credits on jazz albums along with more than 40 years of teaching jazz at the New England Conservatory of Music, where he started the Department of Third Stream (now called the Department of Contemporary Improvisation) with Gunther Schuller.

Blake was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on April 20, 1935.

He grew up in Suffield, Connecticut, and became fascinated by film noir after seeing Robert Siodmak's Spiral Staircase as a twelve-year-old.

He began playing piano as a young child, and as a teenager studied with Ray Cassarino.

In his teenage years, he developed a love for gospel music and studied the compositions of Béla Bartók and Claude Debussy.

Beginning in the late 1950s, Blake was part of a duo with vocalist Jeanne Lee.

This was a summer program that existed from 1957 to 1960.

It was unique in that it brought together many of the world's foremost jazz musicians of the time, including Dizzy Gillespie and William Russo, to teach students about jazz for an intensive three weeks.

Schuller coined the phrase "Third Stream" in 1957 during a talk at Brandeis University.

According to Schuller, Third Stream is "a new genre of music located about halfway between jazz and classical music".

This new genre was created, in Schuller's opinion, to combat purists in both the jazz world and the classical world: to play Third Stream music one had to be proficient in both.

When Schuller met Blake, two years after creating Third Stream, Blake's blend of influences, from free jazz and gospel music to classical composition and film noir soundtracks, appealed to him.

When the two of them created the department at the NEC, it was natural that Blake would be the chairman.

Blake met Gunther Schuller in a chance encounter at Atlantic Records in 1959.

Recognizing Blake's talent, Schuller asked him to study at the School of Jazz in Lenox, Massachusetts.

Blake attended the School in 1959 and 1960.

During his summers in Lenox, Blake began to develop his signature style.

Schuller became a great friend and mentor to Blake throughout his career.

Schuller organized the recording of The Newest Sound Around for Blake and Lee, and it was he who brought Blake to Atlantic Records, and later to the New England Conservatory.

Blake met jazz pianist, composer, and arranger Mary Lou Williams during a performance at The Composer, a New York nightclub.

She later became a mentor and a significant influence on his work.

During his time as a student at Bard, Blake often travelled to see Williams perform and to take lessons from her.

Later, Williams and Blake worked together while she was a visiting faculty member at the School of Jazz.

After high school, he attended Bard College in New York, graduating in 1960 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Jazz, a major that had not previously existed at the school.

At Bard he met Jeanne Lee, with whom he performed for many years.

He also studied with John Lewis, Oscar Peterson, and Gunther Schuller at the School of Jazz in Lenox, Massachusetts.

Together they recorded his first album The Newest Sound Around, which was released on RCA in 1962, and the next year they toured Europe together.

The album shows Blake's signature style beginning to develop, as they paid homage to Blake's early influences with a tribute to David Raksin's "Laura" and a reworking of the gospel standard, "The Church on Russell Street".

In 1966, Blake released his first record as a soloist, Ran Blake Plays Solo Piano, on New York-based label ESP Disk.

In 1967, Schuller, president of the New England Conservatory, recruited Blake to fill a faculty position as the Conservatory's Community Services Director.

In this position, Blake was responsible for putting on concerts in prisons, retirement homes, and community centers.

Blake remained in this role until 1973, when he took on the chairmanship of the new Third Stream Department (now Contemporary Improvisation) at the New England Conservatory, an initiative he started with Schuller.

He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for composition in 1982 and a MacArthur Genius Grant six years later.

Blake has continued recording throughout his career as an educator and has amassed over forty recording credits on jazz albums.

Lee and Blake continued to play together throughout their careers and released another album in 1989 entitled You Stepped out of a Cloud.

He remained in that position until 2005.

He is a faculty member at the New England Conservatory.

Musicians Don Byron, Matthew Shipp, John Medeski, Frank London, Grayson Hugh, and Yitzhak Yedid have studied with Blake at NEC.