A Cincinnati Improvisational Institution Reopens The Door To Its Electric Live Chemistry
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Ray’s Music Exchange sound like a room in motion: elbows brushing, amps humming, horns rising above the crowd, everything held together by instinct and years of shared musical memory. On A Live Family Rayunion 2025 LP, the Cincinnati collective capture that chemistry on their first live recording in 15 years. Recorded before a sold-out crowd at the historic Woodward Theater, the six-track set feels less concerned with preserving a performance than with preserving what happens between musicians when the room begins pushing back.
For three decades, Ray’s Music Exchange have occupied their own corner of the Midwest improvisational scene. Emerging from the creative orbit around the University of Cincinnati and sharpened by extensive touring in the late ’90s, the group built its identity around musicianship that remains responsive rather than rigid. Funk, jazz fusion and progressive jam traditions provide coordinates, but rarely boundaries. Their music stretches, doubles back and changes shape according to what the players hear from one another in the moment.
That instinct runs through A Live Family Rayunion 2025 LP. Founding keyboardist Paul Hogan’s compositions provide the underlying architecture, but the band continually finds ways to open them up. Brad Myers’ guitar brings wiry tension and flashes of melodic colour, while Michael Mavridoglou moves between trumpet and keys, widening the ensemble’s tonal range. Nick Blasky’s bass supplies a deep, flexible foundation as Jason Smart’s drums and Matthew Hawkins’ percussion keep the arrangements shifting beneath the surface.
The additional horns from Ernie Johnson from Detroit push that movement outward. Their Afrobeat influence adds another rhythmic dimension, thickening the ensemble without crowding it and reinforcing the communal character of the performance. At its fullest, the group doesn’t sound like a collection of soloists waiting for space. It sounds conversational: phrases answered, rhythms redirected, ideas passed across the stage before being transformed by somebody else.
That interplay also gives the album its sense of continuity. Ray’s Music Exchange have stepped away and regrouped over the years, yet the live setting remains a natural centre of gravity. There is history in the way these musicians respond to one another, but little sense of trying to reconstruct an earlier version of the band. Familiarity instead becomes permission to take chances. The structures are secure enough for the edges to remain loose.
The physical edition extends that sense of occasion through a limited run of hand-numbered, hand-stamped vinyl accompanied by concert photography and liner notes. It is an appropriately tactile home for music built around presence: the impact of a horn section arriving together, a rhythm suddenly locking into place, or an audience responding quickly enough to become part of the performance.
A Live Family Rayunion 2025 LP captures Ray’s Music Exchange where their music seems most at home: inside the exchange itself. After three decades, the essential idea remains remarkably simple — trust the players, trust the room, and leave enough space for something unexpected to happen.
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