- Title: USA: JAZZ AND BLUES LEGEND RAY CHARLES EMBARKS ON 135TH WORLD TOUR.
- Date: 10th May 2002
- Summary: LOS ANGELES, UNITED STATES (APRIL 17, 2002) (REUTERS) SOUNDBITE (English) RAY CHARLES SAYING: " Music has always been like my breathing, how do you do without breathing, you can't do without breathing, I can't do without music. It's truly my life, it's all I got, it is the one thing I know when everything else fails me I can count on music I know that cos I've been throug
- Embargoed: 25th May 2002 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA , NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND AND VARIOUS FILM LOCATIONS
- Country: USA
- Topics: General
- Reuters ID: LVAMU1JWRS6RED7VCE584T6U5UY
- Story Text: At age 71, music legend Ray Charles is showing no signs of slowing down. Having just released his first album in six years "Thanks for Bringing Love Around Again" the blues master is also currently on his 135th world tour.
On November 11, 1957 music legend Ray Charles had his first hit, since then he's been winning fans and audiences around the world with hits like "Georgia" and " I Can't Stop Loving You".
Now at age 71, Charles is releasing his first studio album in six years entitled, "Thanks for Bringing Love Around Again." The record has been launched on his own label, Crossover Records. Charles produced the new album, as he does most of his projects (though he has worked with other producers in the past, like Quincy Jones). "Love" is being released on the label. He started the label, originally called Tangerine Records, back in the '70s.
Charles is also currently on his 135th world tour, to mark the album's release. Despite his advancing years, Charles says he still loves touring
" the public can't come to you, you've got to go to the public I mean that's the way it is. I have to go to Chicago, I got to go to New York, I got to go to Miami, I got to go wherever . That's where the people are and they want to see me or want to hear me so I must go to them, so it makes is very, very nice," says Charles.
From country to blues to jazz to R&B and even funk, Charles has set the aesthetic standard for more than 50 years, earning fans across the globe and setting standards that his legion of fans - in and out of the entertainment industry aspire to.
His career has borne that title out. He has won 12 Grammys, and garnered a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame. He has been inducted into numerous music Halls of Fame: Jazz, Rock and Roll, Rhythm and Blues - a testament to his inescapable influence on all genres. Few artists, living or not, can claim to have had such a wide ranging impact on music, and even fewer have altered the course of so many musical streams - from his soul-jazz combos to his crucial R&B bands, to his landmark country music recordings "Modern Sounds in Country Music."
Born into grinding poverty in Georgia in America's Deep South in 1930, Charles grew up in Greenville in northwest Florida. At the age of five he saw his only brother drown in a washtub, at six he went blind due to glaucoma and at 15 he was orphaned. He was saved from despair by his musical gifts and the training he was given at the St Augustine's School for the Deaf and Blind. He was a willing pupil whose keyboard talents soon became apparent.
Then, in the far northwest Charles discovered a thriving jazz scene. By 1949 he had cut his first record and the following year he moved down the coast to Los Angeles where his records, based upon the style of his musical heroes Nat "King" Cole and Charles Brown, were beginning to create a stir in the industry. Soon, what Charles calls "one of the happiest relationships of my life" began. Ahmet Ertegun, the cultured son of the Turkish Ambassador to America, had latched on to the new R&B scene and created his own New York-based label, Atlantic Records.
He signed Charles and then went about helping the star to reinvent himself. Out went the smooth "cocktail jazz" vocal and keyboard stylings and in came the sounds of the church and the street - the sounds of blackness, the sounds of soul.
"I Got a Woman", a joyous mixture of blues and gospel from 1954, remains one of the pivotal records of the postwar music scene. It was quickly followed by tracks such as "Come Back Baby" and
"It Should Have Been Me".
But for the white record-buying public, Charles was a well-kept secret. It wasn't until a two-part record entitled What'd I Say, with an inspired call and response vocal and one of the most famous intros in pop history, began scaling the charts in 1959 that Charles's audience began to grow.
Blindness has never been a bar to Charles's active love life, either. He has been married twice and his second marriage, to Della Bea Howard, lasted 21 years before she filed for divorce in 1976. But there were hundreds of affairs on the road, often with members of his hand-picked backing band, the Raelets. He was also renowned in the early Seventies for keeping a harem of admirers happy in Los Angeles.
With so many records under his belt he is unable to count them Charles says he is determined to keep his fans happy. While others musicians of his generation have retired years ago Charles says it is not something he's thinking about, " I don't know anything to retire to, you understand what I mean. I'm doing what I love doing and as long as I have my health and my strength I'm going to do that until the good Lord tells me you can come out to pasture now, you've been a good horse and he takes me away," Charles says.
Charles has his own studios in Los Angeles and keeps a close eye on up and coming talent. But he says unlike the freedom he had as a young artist, today singers and songwriters face increasing pressure from record companies.
"I'm not as excited as I would like to be, in other words when I was coming up you had people in the business who were truly creative to start with. Had their own identity, you knew exactly who they were and where they were coming from and they had their own mark, " Charles believes.
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