Ray Charles Robinson was one of the defining American musicians of the twentieth century, and only part of what he did belongs on a jazz reference site. He was an R&B singer, the architect of soul, and a country-pop hitmaker, and he was also a working jazz pianist, organist and bandleader who cut instrumental albums for Atlantic, Impulse! and his own labels. This profile covers the jazz career and says so plainly: the Atlantic small-group instrumental dates, the two albums with Milt Jackson, Genius + Soul = Jazz, the big band he ran from 1961, and the Tangerine and Crossover instrumental series of the 1970s. The R&B, soul, country and pop catalog, which is by any measure the larger and more famous half of his output, is deliberately left out rather than half-covered. The discography in this folder is scoped the same way.

Charles was born September 23, 1930, in Albany, Georgia, and raised in Greenville, Florida, by his mother Aretha Robinson. He was picking out boogie-woogie on the upright piano at Wylie Pitman's Red Wing Cafe at about three. His sight began to fail at four or five and was gone by seven, usually attributed to glaucoma although the diagnosis was never firmly established at the time. His younger brother George drowned in their mother's laundry tub at four, an event the 2004 film Ray rearranged for effect: the film has Charles frozen in shock, while the sourced accounts have him trying to pull his brother out. From 1937 to 1945 he attended the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine, where he was formally trained in braille notation, ensemble playing, and piano, clarinet, alto saxophone, trumpet and organ. Aretha Robinson died in the spring of 1945, when he was fourteen, and he left the school for good.

The next three years were spent working Florida for money. He played the Ritz Theatre in Jacksonville's LaVilla district for four dollars a night for more than a year, moved on to Orlando, and by 1947 was in Tampa holding several jobs at once, including a stretch as pianist for Charlie Brantley's Honey Dippers. Somewhere in this window he crossed paths with the Adderley brothers around Tallahassee's Frenchtown district, playing alongside a teenaged Julian "Cannonball" Adderley and his younger brother Nat while their parents taught at Florida A&M. The connection is well attested and both Adderleys spoke of it; the dating that usually travels with it is not reliable, and the notes file for this profile sets out why. In March 1948 Charles left for Seattle, about as far from Florida as he could get without leaving the country, and formed the McSon Trio, whose piano, guitar and bass format and smooth vocal delivery were a deliberate, close copy of Nat King Cole and Charles Brown. Recording for Jack Lauderdale's Down Beat/Swing Time label, the trio cut "Confession Blues" in late 1948; released in 1949, it reached number two on the Billboard R&B chart.

Atlantic bought his contract for $2,500 in June 1952, and the label's owners, jazz people first, gave him room to record instrumentally alongside the singles that were making his name. The Great Ray Charles, cut across 1956 and 1957 and released in August 1957, is an all-instrumental septet and trio album with Oscar Pettiford on bass, David "Fathead" Newman on saxophones and arrangements by Quincy Jones, whom Charles had met in Seattle when Jones was fifteen. Instrumentals held back from the same run of sessions became The Genius After Hours in 1961. Atlantic then put him in a studio with Milt Jackson of the Modern Jazz Quartet, and the two dates that resulted, September 12, 1957 and April 10, 1958, produced Soul Brothers (1958) and Soul Meeting (1961), with Charles playing piano and, on several tracks, alto saxophone, and Jackson occasionally moving off vibes to piano and guitar. Kenny Burrell, Billy Mitchell, Connie Kay, Percy Heath and Art Taylor appear across the two records. In July 1958 Charles played the Newport Jazz Festival with his own small band, which Atlantic released that November as Ray Charles at Newport, and that November he produced and played piano on his saxophonist's first leader date, issued as Fathead: Ray Charles Presents David Newman. The Genius of Ray Charles (1959) split its two sides between a big band drawn from the Count Basie and Duke Ellington ranks, arranged by Quincy Jones and Ernie Wilkins, and six ballads with strings.

ABC-Paramount signed him away from Atlantic in late 1959 with an advance, higher royalties and eventual ownership of his masters. The jazz consequence came fast: on December 26 and 27, 1960, at Rudy Van Gelder's studio, with Creed Taylor producing and arrangements by Quincy Jones and Ralph Burns, Charles cut Genius + Soul = Jazz for ABC's new Impulse! imprint, released February 1961 as catalog A-2. He plays Hammond B3 organ throughout and sings on only two tracks, backed by a band built largely from Count Basie's orchestra: Thad Jones, Joe Newman, Clark Terry and Snooky Young on trumpets, Billy Mitchell and Frank Foster on tenors, Frank Wess on alto per the session credits, Freddie Green on guitar, Roy Haynes and Sonny Payne on drums. It reached number four on the Billboard album chart across a forty-eight-week run and entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2011. The vocal-jazz duet album Ray Charles and Betty Carter, recorded between August 1960 and June 1961 with Marty Paich arranging and Sid Feller producing, followed in August 1961. That same year Charles expanded his road band into a full big band under alto saxophonist Hank Crawford as musical director, a unit captured live at the Kongresshaus in Zurich on October 18, 1961 and eventually issued by TCB in 2016 as Swiss Radio Days Vol. 41.

Charles founded Tangerine Records in 1962 and, later, Crossover Records, and used both to make jazz records nobody was asking him for. My Kind of Jazz, recorded January 1 to 10, 1970 at his own RPM Studios in Los Angeles and released that April, was the first: ten instrumentals for big band, including Horace Silver's "Señor Blues," Toots Thielemans's "Bluesette" and Benny Golson's "I Remember Clifford." Jazz Number II followed in 1973 and My Kind of Jazz Part 3 in 1975, the last of them reaching number 55 on the R&B chart. He kept a working big band on the road for the rest of his life, recorded George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess with Cleo Laine for RCA in 1976, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's first class in 1986. Ray Charles passed away on June 10, 2004, at his home in Beverly Hills, at 73, from complications of liver disease found after hip-replacement surgery the previous year. Two posthumous releases bracket the two halves of his career: Genius Loves Company (August 2004), a pop duets album that won eight Grammys, and Ray Sings, Basie Swings (2006), which lifted his isolated live vocals off 1973 soundboard tapes and set them against newly recorded Count Basie Orchestra charts.

Charles arrived as a note-perfect imitator ("you could close your eyes and you'd swear Nat King Cole was singing," the singer Ernestine Anderson said of his Seattle years) and spent the rest of his career being impossible to imitate back. As a jazz pianist he was a blues player first, spare and percussive, with a church sense of where the beat sits and a preference for saying one thing hard over four things quickly; the trio and septet sides of The Great Ray Charles and The Genius After Hours are the cleanest evidence, since there is no singing on them to distract from the playing. On Hammond B3 he sounded like nobody else in that instrument's jazz lineage, using almost none of the Leslie-speaker warmth other organists relied on and getting a dry, cutting, nearly electric-guitar attack out of the machine on "One Mint Julep" and "Moanin'." Critics split on it at the time, some hearing a real jazz musician reinventing himself on a new instrument, others calling the tone shrill. His larger effect on jazz was structural rather than pianistic: the gospel cadences, blues form and church rhythm he pushed into the mainstream with "I've Got a Woman" in 1954 supplied much of the vocabulary soul jazz was built from, and his small-group records with David "Fathead" Newman and Hank Crawford are cited as a direct influence on Horace Silver, Art Blakey and Cannonball Adderley. He also played creditable alto saxophone, audible on the Milt Jackson dates and photographed on the bandstand in Amsterdam in 1963, though he never claimed it as more than a second horn.