Studio
Howard Tyrone Ray Jr. (born July 30th, 1954 in Great Lakes, Illinois) has been playing bass guitar since his early teenage years. He was playing around in bands in the 1960’s with his life long friends, Bennie Wright on drums and Stuart Campbell on guitar. Howard took some time off to peruse a baseball and basketball career in the 1970’s but never got away from his love of music. During the surge of the 70’s funk with groups like, Sly and The Family Stone, Mandrill, Confunkshun, Ohio Players, Slave, Lakeside, Cameo, Earth Wind and Fire, Brothers Johnson, AWB, Jackson Five, Parliament Funkadelics, Pleasure,
Howard found it impossible not to pick his bass back up.
In the mid 1980’s after a 3 year military tour in Texas, Howard returned back to New England and quickly discovered that there was no funk scene. He began studying with several of the local teachers and after playing in several rock bands Howard decided it was time to put together his own band. He started one of the first successful local top 40 funk bands, Dezyne. After several years of performing with the group, Howard saw the music scene change with it returning back to the 70’s. While it seemed tempting, Howard had become an avid smooth jazz fan listening to artists like, Gerald Albright, Najee, Dave Koz, Brian Culbertson, Marian Meadows, Walter Beasley, Brian Bromberg, Peter White, David Sanborn, Rick Braun, Wayman Tisdale, and many others.
The thought of returning to the stage in an oldies band no longer seemed appealing. Howard became intrigued about possibly putting together a smooth jazz band with the vocal flavor of a Maxwell or Erica Badu. Needless to say, living in rural New England not only made venues difficult to come buy, but also finding like minded musicians prove a bigger challenge primarily due to the lack of airplay or actually no smooth jazz air play at all.
After deciding to get back into the DJ business in the late 1990’s, Howard added an addition onto his home and built a recording studio in order to pursue his love for smooth jazz. With help from good friends Mike Holley and Barry Kimmel, the studio has been up and running and gone through several positive upgrades over the past couple of years.
The release of his first smooth jazz CD entitled “Feelin It” was released in June of 2008 Sales have been very positive. The inability to perform the CD out live has not prevented Howard from continuing to record and write.
With several ideas for music, Howard is looking to produce a soulful female artist at some point in the future and also plans to produce a smooth jazz CD featuring local vocal talent in the future. Now that he’s created his own venue to record, don’t be surprised if you get asked to come down to the “Neighborhood Studio” and lay down a few tracks………..