Ray Gallon is a lifelong New Yorker who has spent more than three decades on the city's jazz scene as a pianist, composer and educator, and he still lives in Hell's Kitchen, the Manhattan neighborhood he grew up around. Between 1976 and 1987 he studied privately with a string of major pianists, including John Lewis, Jaki Byard, Jimmy Rowles and Steve Kuhn, and studied composition with Mario Davidovsky, David Del Tredici and Ed Summerlin. He earned a B.F.A. in music, magna cum laude, from the City College of New York in 1982, and an M.A. in music composition from the same school in 1989. In between, a 1982-83 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship funded a year of private study with Hank Jones.

Gallon's professional touring and recording career took shape through the 1980s and 1990s. He began his long association with Ron Carter in 1986, receiving a "musical assistance" credit on two Carter-connected Blue Note/EmArcy dates, Helen Merrill and Carter's duo album Duets (1989, EmArcy) and Carter's Jazz, My Romance (1994, Blue Note). He worked with Lionel Hampton's big band on and off between 1988 and 2001, and plays keyboards on Hampton's Cookin' in the Kitchen, recorded in 1988 and reissued on Jazz Heritage in 1992, which was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Big Band at the 1991 ceremony, alongside albums by Louie Bellson, the Count Basie Orchestra, the Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra and the Bob Florence Limited Edition. He is the pianist on George Adams's Old Feeling (1991, Blue Note/Somethin' Else) and on the Harper Brothers' You Can Hide Inside the Music (1992, Verve), and his own compositions have since been recorded by both George Adams and drummer T.S. Monk, Thelonious Monk's son and a bandleader in his own right.

As an accompanist, Gallon built a parallel career behind singers, working with Sheila Jordan, Jon Hendricks, Dakota Staton, Gloria Lynne, Grady Tate, Nnenna Freelon, Jane Monheit and Chaka Khan, and he has appeared on NBC's The Tonight Show and Today, as well as in concert broadcasts on BET and NPR. From 1997 to 2003 he toured and recorded with T.S. Monk's band, playing piano, electric piano and synthesizer on Monk's Higher Ground (2002, Thelonious Records). He has also worked with Art Farmer, Dizzy Gillespie, Milt Jackson, Benny Golson, Frank Wess, Lew Tabackin, Wycliffe Gordon, Harry "Sweets" Edison, Les Paul and the Mingus Big Band, the repertory band that carries on Charles Mingus's book, and has performed at gala concerts at the White House and the Kennedy Center. Alongside performing, Gallon has taught jazz piano, harmony and history at New York University (1995-99), the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music (1995-2010), the Juilliard School's Jazz Studies Division (2001-02) and the Vermont Jazz Center's summer workshops, and he has been full-time jazz faculty at the City College of New York since 2007.

Gallon's sideman work continued into the 2010s and 2020s alongside a growing profile as a leader. He plays piano on several tracks of the Michi Fuji Quartet's Warmth & Innocence (2015), on the Jon De Lucia Octet and Ted Brown's Live at the Drawing Room (2018, Gut String Records), and on vocalist Naama Gheber's Dearly Beloved (2020, Cellar Music). He also contributed three original compositions, though not piano, to singer Angela Verbrugge's Love for Connoisseurs (2022, Gut String Records), and is credited as a co-billed collaborator on her In the Wonder of the Night (2025), released as "Angela Verbrugge with Ray Gallon."

Gallon's own leader catalog arrived comparatively late. His debut, Make Your Move (2021, Cellar Music), is a trio session with bassist David Wong and drummer Kenny Washington, with liner notes contributed by Ron Carter. Two years later, Grand Company (2023, Cellar Music Group), recorded at Van Gelder Studio and billed jointly to "Ray Gallon, Ron Carter & Lewis Nash," turned Carter from mentor and studio colleague into an actual working trio partner, thirty-seven years after their first association. In 2026 Gallon joined guitarist Roni Ben-Hur's touring sextet for a performance of Ben-Hur's Abriendo Puertas material at Dizzy's Club, Jazz at Lincoln Center, on June 25, 2026, alongside Ingrid Jensen on trumpet, Martin Wind on bass, Jason Tiemann on drums and Marianne Solivan on vocals. Gallon does not appear on the Abriendo Puertas studio album itself (Dot Time Records, 2026), which was recorded in Havana with an all-Cuban band led by pianist Alejandro Falcón.

Gallon describes his own playing as rooted in bebop and blues, and reviewers consistently note how he folds older, harder-swinging vocabulary into a personal, contemporary style rather than treating it as a museum piece. That grounding traces directly to his teachers: private study with John Lewis, Jaki Byard, Jimmy Rowles, Steve Kuhn and, on an NEA fellowship, Hank Jones gave him a firsthand line back to the pre- and post-bop piano tradition those players represent. His long dual career as a bandstand accompanist for singers and a section pianist for big bands (Lionel Hampton, T.S. Monk, the Mingus Big Band) shows in his playing's responsiveness and sense of arrangement, while his two trio albums as a leader, made with two different generations of A-list rhythm partners (David Wong and Kenny Washington on Make Your Move, Ron Carter and Lewis Nash on Grand Company), reflect a mainstream, blues-and-bebop-centered aesthetic built for a working, swinging trio rather than for stylistic experiment.