Ray Brown did not choose the upright bass out of passion. In 1940s Pittsburgh his high school was flooded with piano players, his father could not afford a trombone, and the one empty chair in the school orchestra was the bass. This episode follows how that pragmatic decision produced one of the most legendary bassists in jazz history. Brown hauled the school’s instrument onto the bus every weekend for paying gigs with the Jimmy Hinsley Sextet and the Snookum Russell band, then bought a one-way ticket to New York in 1946, where Hank Jones introduced him to Dizzy Gillespie and he was hired on the spot.

The hosts explain why Brown’s study of Jimmy Blanton made him the exact technical solution bebop needed, how the Gillespie rhythm section with Milt Jackson, Kenny Clarke and John Lewis spun off into the Modern Jazz Quartet, and how a 1947 Southern tour led to his marriage to Ella Fitzgerald, the adoption of Ray Brown Jr., and a divorce in 1953 that never ended their musical partnership. They cover his 14-year run with the Oscar Peterson Trio, his role as Norman Granz’s house bassist for Clef and Verve, his move to Los Angeles studio work on records by Steely Dan and Elvis Costello, the LA Four, seven albums with Andre Previn, discovering Diana Krall in a Nanaimo restaurant, and his final years touring with young players like Benny Green and Karriem Riggins until his death in 2002.

• Why bebop’s 200-beats-per-minute chord changes demanded a new kind of bass player
• How Brown and Ella Fitzgerald kept performing together for years after their divorce
• What made Steely Dan call a middle-aged jazz bassist for Razor Boy
• The Gravy Waltz Grammy, a Berklee honorary doctorate, and the Austrian Cross of Honor
• Why a living legend chose to sweat on bandstands with musicians in their twenties