Remembering Gentle Giant's Ray Shulman
The talented multi-instrumentalist/songwriter was a progressive rock legend
Thank you for spending part of your day with Michael’s Record Collection. It was with great sadness that I recently absorbed the news of the death of Gentle Giant multi-instrumentalist Ray Shulman. Ray passed away on March 30 after an illness.
I was fortunate enough to interview Ray back in May of 2021 to discuss the band’s reissue of the classic Free Hand album with a 5.1 and Dolby Atmos mix by Steven Wilson. I enjoyed that conversation quite a bit. Ray was extremely nice, generous with his time, and interesting. My YouTube video of that interview has been easily the most watched on my channel, with more than 13,000 views — more than twice the next-most watched and more than six times the number of views of my interview with his Gentle Giant bandmate and older brother Derek (the band’s lead singer!).
I felt it was worth remembering Ray in this space and I hope you’ll indulge me.
Ray Shulman could play just about anything and was one of those people who is annoyingly good at seemingly everything. He excelled as a musician, songwriter, and producer, and later in life he was very much in demand by musicians who wanted to put out high-quality concert DVDs / Blu-rays for his outstanding authoring and production services.
Shulman could have been an accomplished orchestra musician. He learned the trumpet — his father’s instrument of choice — as a child, and went on to learn the violin, viola, guitar, and bass, mastering all of them. He also played recorder, keyboards, drums, and other percussion instruments, and he sang. He and his brothers grew up on jazz and classical music and grew to appreciate pop and rock music as they got older. Those disparate influences went on to shape their careers.
Ray’s older brothers, Phil and Derek, were members of Simon Dupree and the Big Sound, and the younger Shulman brother was recruited to join the band, which eventually broke up in 1969. The Shulman brothers then started Gentle Giant. They were joined by guitarist Gary Green, keyboardist/vocalist Kerry Minnear, and drummer Martin Smith.
There weren’t many lineup changes over the band’s decade together. Smith left after two albums and was replaced by Malcolm Mortimore for the Three Friends album. John Weathers then became the band’s drummer. Additionally, Phil Shulman called it a day after the band’s fourth album, Octopus, which was Weathers’ first with Gentle Giant.
It was a unique band that pushed musical boundaries and created songs unlike any that had ever been heard before. They would have liked to have been commercially successful, but as Ray told me in our 2021 interview, the band would take what was shaping up to be a catchy pop/rock song and “ruin it” by adding textures, layers, changing time signatures, and unusual instrumentation. They just couldn’t help themselves.
Gentle Giant released 11 studio albums in a 10-year period from 1970’s self-titled debut to 1980’s attempt to be more commercial, Civilian. The band also released one official live album during their run as an active group, although several have been released since the band called it a day. Gentle Giant was an accomplished live act, where the band dropped any pretense of playing the songs as they sounded on the albums — an impossible task anyway, with the sheer number of instruments that the band members played on their recordings.
The band thrived as a live act despite rarely being paired on a touring bill with a band that was even remotely like them. That’s because there were no bands like Gentle Giant — and there still aren’t any, although their influence can be found easily enough.
The band was unable to attain commercial success but built an incredibly devoted cult following among fans of what came to be known as progressive rock, although they sounded nothing like contemporaries such as Genesis, Yes, King Crimson, and their ilk and they didn’t stretch out 25-minute epic pieces. Musicians especially gravitated to the complexities and textures of Gentle Giant’s music. Saga’s Michael Sadler has cited them as one of his biggest influences, and modern progressive rock greats like Steven Wilson and Neal Morse are fans.
Ray and Kerry were the band’s primary songwriters. As Ray told me in that 2021 interview, the band didn’t jam or bounce many ideas off each other. The songs were written individually and brought in. The other musicians would then improvise different things and add their textures. Recording happened quickly and then the band was back out on the road.
Although multiple members of the band played more than one instrument on the albums, Ray was essential to Gentle Giant for both his songwriting and his virtuosity. He excelled at finding ways to do something unexpected, unconventional, and imaginative that added so much to the band’s sound. His, and the band’s, ability to zig when listeners thought they would zag was off-putting to some music fans but it was what made them so damn special to those who “got” them. It’s fitting that their second album — and perhaps my personal favorite from them — is called Acquiring the Taste, because that’s what Gentle Giant was…an acquired taste. So much was going on in their music that it was difficult to take it all in on just one listen. Patient relistens rewarded those who took the time to explore the band’s albums more deeply than a cursory first listen.
I discovered Gentle Giant later in life. Even when I started diving deep into progressive rock in 1999 and into the early 2000s (thanks in no small part to Napster, a free music file-sharing service that ironically cost me hundreds of dollars in album purchases), Gentle Giant didn’t immediately cross my path. I went from the Genesis, Rush, Pink Floyd, and Yes back catalogs into more modern prog that was being played on internet “radio” stations — bands like Dream Theater, Porcupine Tree, Spock’s Beard, The Flower Kings, IZZ, The Tangent, etc.
It wasn’t until I dove deep into Spock’s Beard that I learned some of their amazing vocal counterpoint sections were inspired by a band called Gentle Giant. I went through multiple start-and-stop phases of checking them out. Derek’s voice isn’t for everyone, and it took me some time to warm up to it. Some of the weirdness was a bit too much for me early on, as I was so inundated with new progressive rock bands that I didn’t have the time for repeat listens. I was drinking from a progressive rock firehose and it wasn’t until maybe around 2008 or so that my appreciation for Gentle Giant started to really grow.
But slowly and surely I found myself wanting to go back to Gentle Giant. I’d remember a snippet of a song and throw on Acquiring the Taste or The Power and the Glory, or Free Hand, slip on a pair of headphones, and marvel at all the things in the music that I hadn’t noticed before.
Ray’s playing is almost always a highlight of a Gentle Giant song. His bass playing is every bit as essential to his band’s music as Chris Squire’s was to classic Yes or Geddy Lee’s to Rush. Those three are more than just bass players. They have taken their bass guitars beyond being rhythm instruments into some strange hybrid of rhythm and lead musicality that transcends those who merely lock up with the drummer to provide a foundation for others to play and sing over.
Following the release of the Civilian album, the band toured one last time and then split up. There are differing accounts of why that happened, depending on which band member is asked and at what point in time the question is put to them. Certainly the times were changing musically, and there was no doubt some angst among Ray and Derek about finding a way to break through to some kind of commercial success after years of recording some of the most creative and innovative music ever put on vinyl.
Derek became a successful producer and record company executive, and Ray was also successful at producing. Ray produced albums for the likes of Echo & the Bunnymen front man Ian McCulloch, the Sundays, and the Sugarcubes’ breakout debut album, Life’s Too Good.
Ray was 73 years old when he passed away and Gentle Giant had been over for more than four decades, despite a partial reunion as Three Friends by Green, Minnear, and Mortimore. Both Ray and Derek had been far too busy with lucrative work to be interested in a full reunion tour or even a concert. Ray’s death seemingly sticks a fork in even the most remote chance of a reunion ever happening and it would seem incomplete anyway now.
But beyond that, Ray’s loss is a sad one. Any time the world loses a gifted mind, it is all the poorer for it. I will personally remember the hour or so that I spent talking to Ray as one of the most enjoyable times I’ve had while pursuing this hobby. Ray was a legend and, although I may still be no one, back then I was a nobody who was just starting out in rock music media. He had no reason to give me the time of day and yet he was gracious and generous with his time. And he was nice, patient, polite, and easy to talk to — the consummate British gentleman. I enjoyed our talk and will never forget it.
Ray leaves behind a storied legacy of outstanding music that will be enjoyed worldwide for many years to come. As long as we have that, he’s still with us, and we are all richer for that.
For this week’s video and podcast version of MRC, I welcomed back John Galgano from IZZ. Much like Ray Shulman, John is known as a bassist but is a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, who formed a band with his brother (two brothers, in Ray’s case). He is also a fan of Ray’s work and Gentle Giant’s music, and he even got Gary Green to play on one of his band’s records, so I felt he was the perfect person to help me discuss Ray’s influence and musical legacy. For that discussion you can watch the video below or listen to Episode 105 of the Michael’s Record Collection podcast.
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I read this thoughtful tribute to Ray while listening to Octopus. Thanks for writing.