Ray's Music Exchange, a six-piece Cincinnati instrumental band, strives for this sea of rhythm when it plays. The band wants a layer of crowd involvement and a high-class blend of instrumentation and melodies. You need to be open to be truly creative. Independence and craftsmanship is blatant in Ray's music. There are no vocals, just jam session-esque tunes, a modern symphony taking talent to entertainment.
Sounds go from horn solos to jazzy bass riffs and high-energy drum beats.
Their quick changes are evident internally, too, with several personnel changes since the band's inception in the late 1990s. Co-founder Joe McLean is still around, but many other faces have changed. We charted it once, and I think we found out we had six or seven guitarists, five drummers and several different horn players. But that's normal in the music business, he adds, and to be expected when people and groups reconfigure priorities. It will be recorded music, but it doesn't simplify Ray's base of spontaneous musical tangents.