Steve Gray:THE MUSICAL presence of Steve Gray, who has died aged 64, was transforming but subtle and unobtrusive.
As a session keyboard player in the 1970s, he played for Quincy Jones, Henry Mancini, Michel Legrand, Lalo Schifrin, Peggy Lee, Sammy Davis jnr, John Barry and many others, but he never regarded himself as a creative pianist and was shy of the role in the presence of the jazz players he loved.
In the 1980s he was the keyboardist in the guitarist John Williams' crossover band Sky, participating in several hit albums, but played down his part. After he left Sky, his achievements might surprise those who had only glimpsed his presence in the shadows.
He wrote a guitar concerto for Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra in 1988, a piano concerto for the French jazz-piano legend Martial Solal, two operas, a requiem Mass, orchestrated Brian Eno's works in collaboration with the composer and much more.
From 1991, he worked with the North German Radio (NDR) Big Band in Hamburg, with which he conceived a project devoted to the music of the South African Abdullah Ibrahim.
Gray was born in Middlesbrough and began to teach himself the piano at the age of 10. He played bassoon in the Middlesbrough Municipal Junior Orchestra but gravitated to the saxophone section under Ron Aspery, who later founded the Yorkshire fusion trio Back Door. Gray's ears were already teaching him all he needed. In his early teens, attending a Duke Ellington concert with Aspery, he began transcribing the music he had heard while on the bus on the way home.
He eventually became a pit pianist at the Middlesbrough Empire, moved to London in the early 1960s, and joined a quartet led by the great British bop drummer Phil Seamen. Typically, he felt that he was lucky to get the gig and that Seamen would rumble his shortcomings. Gray then joined the bands of Eric Delaney, Johnny Howard and Mike Cotton, and by the late 1960s was working on studio sessions.
Exploring composition, he wrote background music for movies, radio and TV, and released A Woman in Love (1969), an album of his own pieces. Within a few years he was running his own quintet, Wasp, with ex-Shadows drummer Brian Bennett and saxophonist-composer Duncan Lamont, and recording an incidental melange of light funk, classical, disco, Latin, jazz and electronics for the KPM company.
Gray's expertise blossomed. He arranged Jonathan Hodge's score for the Richard Burton film Villain (1971), and his sense of harmony and texture led him to reshape the Walker Brothers sound on their comeback albums No Regrets (1975) and Lines (1976). He also accompanied Olivia Newton-John for the 1974 Eurovision song contest, as well as Petula Clark and Tom Jones.
Gray disliked performing in public but an invitation in 1980 to join Sky for a performance in Westminster Abbey and an Australian tour was too hard to resist. He composed Singer (1986), with Georgie Fame, for the Holland Metropole Orchestra, which also played Gray's arrangements of Eno's music from the album The Shutov Assembly. He also composed two works for the W11 Opera in London for young people and an adaptation of Emilio de Cavalieri's 1599 work Rappresentazione di Anima e di Corpo for the Cologne Opera House.
It was after vocalist and composer Norma Winstone invited him to write settings for her atmospheric songs that he began working with the NDR Big Band. Gray had written some big-band arrangements for Winstone some years before, and the singer was startled by his appreciation of lyrics. "I suggested swapping eight-bar phrases with the band on Easy to Love," Winstone later remarked, "and he said, 'oh, but that would bring you back in the middle of a sentence'. He was right, of course."
Gray also wrote an arrangement for Winstone's haunting account of The Peacocks, written by former Billie Holiday pianist Jimmy Rowles, and also played piano on the recording. "That pianist really knows what he's doing," the vastly-experienced Rowles said.
Winstone's invitation led to the NDR's Kurt Giese suggesting a Duke Ellington project to Gray in 1991, and the NDR ball began to roll. The partnership included the Ekapa Lodumo album with Ibrahim in 2001 and a requiem Mass for big band and choir. In 1998, Gray was guest professor of composition and arrangement in the Berlin Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler jazz department.
The composer's untapped potential was immense, and the NDR offered him freedoms he had never known before.
His old playing partner Lamont once opined that his wit, wisdom and otherworldly intuitions made him seem "1,000 years old".
The bassist Chris Laurence, asking the self-taught Gray where he got his eerily-voiced chords from, was told: "I didn't know the right ones." He is survived by his wife Heather, daughter Suzanne and granddaughter Anna.
Steve Gray: born April 18th, 1944; died September 20th, 2008.