Ray Avery (photographer)

Murray "Ray" Bertrand Avery ( born September 28, 1920 in Canada, † 17 November 2002) was an American jazz photographer and distributors of jazz records.

Life and work

Avery was born in Canada; when he was six years old, his family moved to Big Bear Lake in California. Even as a student at the local high school, he started a record collection to create. His interest in photography was established in 1945, when he was presented with an Argus camera during the Second World War as a pilot in the U.S. Air Force from his father. After his discharge from the Army, he worked on the family farm to the end of the 1940s turn to the music business. In 1947 he opened his first record store, The Record Roundup on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles, which developed until its closure in 1986 to Ray Avery 's Rare Records. The store was located in Glendale, California and became a Mecca for collectors of jazz records. At times, Avery had the greatest jazz record collection and led four times a year by the sale mailing lists through.

Since many musicians were frequent visitors of his business, came to these friendly contacts that led in the early 1950s to Avery's first jazz photographs in which he protagonists of the West Coast jazz as Shelly Manne, Art Pepper ( Modern Art in 1954), Jack Wilson ( Ramblin '), Wardell Gray ( Memorial ) or Hampton Hawes ( The Sermon ) and Others for album covers from Prestige, Contemporary and GNP Records took pictures. He also photographed at the Monterey Jazz Festival and the Nice Jazz Festival as one of the official photographers of the TV series Stars of Jazz, in addition to the Los Angeles Classic Jazz Festival, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and the North Sea Jazz Festival in Holland. His photographs have appeared in over a hundred jazz books and over 150 LP covers. Avery photographed, inter alia, Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk, Chico Hamilton, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus and Sonny Rollins. A Renaissance saw many of his photographs from the late 1980s with the introduction of the Compact Disc and the re-release of historic jazz recordings, such as on Mosaic Records of Bobby Hackett and Johnny Smith. In 1990, Ray Avery, the Jazz Photographers Association of Southern California, as its chairman and later honorary chairman he acted. In 1997, a photo book Stars of Jazz and Avery appeared was with the Milt Hinton Award for Excellence in Jazz Photography Award. After his death, the collection of the UCLA Music Library was handed over.

Publication

• Stars of Jazz. Omnibus Press, London 2010, ISBN 978-1-84938-493-3.