Ran Blake

Ran Blake
Ran Blake at Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, Half Moon Bay, California, June 14, 1987
Background information
Born	(1935-04-20) April 20, 1935 (age 82) Springfield, Massachusetts, United States
Genres	Jazz
Occupation(s)	Musician, composer
Instruments	Piano
Years active	1950s–present

Ran Blake (born April 20, 1935) is an American pianist, composer, and educator. He is known for his unique style that combines blues, gospel, classical, and film noir influences into an innovative and dark jazz sound. His career spans over 40 recording credits on jazz albums along with more than 40 years of teaching jazz at the New England Conservatory of Music, where he started the Department of Third Stream (now called the Department of Contemporary Improvisation) with Gunther Schuller.

Blake was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on April 20, 1935. He grew up in Suffield, Connecticut, and became fascinated by film noir after seeing Robert Siodmak's Spiral Staircase as a twelve-year-old. He began playing piano as a young child, and as a teenager studied with Ray Cassarino. In his teenage years, he became fascinated with gospel music and studied the compositions of Béla Bartók and Claude Debussy. After high school, he attended Bard College in New York, graduating in 1960 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Jazz, a major that had not previously existed at the school. At Bard he met Jeanne Lee, with whom he performed for many years. He also studied with John Lewis, Oscar Peterson, and Gunther Schuller at the School of Jazz in Lenox, Massachusetts.

Beginning in the late 1950s, Blake was part of a duo with vocalist Jeanne Lee. Together they recorded his first album The Newest Sound Around, which was released on RCA in 1962, and the next year they toured Europe together. The album shows Blake's signature style beginning to develop, as they paid homage to Blake's early influences with a tribute to David Raksin's "Laura" and a reworking of the gospel standard, "The Church on Russell Street". Lee and Blake continued to play together throughout their careers and released another album in 1989 entitled You Stepped out of a Cloud.