All Music Guide (Allmusic)
Rick Anderson
“Arthur Schwartz doesn’t get album-length tributes as often as guys like Jerome Kern and Cole Porter and the Gershwin brothers, but he certainly should: even if you don’t know his name, you know the names of songs for which he wrote the music: That’s Entertainment, You and the Night and the Music, Haunted Heart, and Dancing in the Dark. On this sweet tribute album, pianist Ray Kennedy leads his trio and guest guitarist Joe Cohn through a set that includes all of those as well as a few less famous tunes, all of them played with decorous elegance and consummate taste. The band swings sturdily on an excellent rendition of Shine On Your Shoes and plays with the heartbreaking tenderness on a slow version of Make the Man Love Me, but perhaps the program’s finest moment comes on Kennedy’s wonderfully flowing solo piano arrangement of Haunted Heart. Highly recommended .”
Bucky Pizzarelli & The Kennedy Brothers Play Harold Arlen ~ Liner Notes
Sam Arlen (son of Harold)
“Having had the pleasure of working with Ray Kennedy, I expected (and received) a wonderful listening experience with this CD. His playing is tasteful and logical. Ray is an expert at always giving you the melody while creating his own special magic on the piano. Bucky Pizzarelli is masterful as always with his guitar, elegant and stylistic. Tom Kennedy handles the bass with authority and gentleness. This CD is an absolute pleasure to listen to.”
BOZ Magazine, London
Simon Becker
“Ray Kennedy, a pianist with a rare and electrifying talent… has his own sound which at times, produces a cascade of notes that sound almost death-defying. His solos produced deafening applause at the Palace Theatre event.”
BOZ Magazine, London
Keith Howell
“…Patrons will delight in the marvelous piano playing of Ray Kennedy. Earlier in jazz history the great boogie woogie pianists were said to possess ‘a left hand like God.’ This young man appears to have acquired the adjoining appendage, conjuring up some of the most outstanding, glittering and virtuoso keyboard work to have graced the Music Room in many a year.”
CD Review
Norman Vickers
“Pianist Ray Kennedy performs the music of Arthur Schwartz with his trio which includes his brother Tom on bass and Miles Vandiver on drums. Guitarist Joe Cohn is guest artist on this recording. Joe is the son of tenor saxophonist Al Cohn of the Woody Herman Band. These tunes are played with special finesse. Some of these songs will be familiar to most listeners: That’s Entertainment!, You and the Night and the Music, Something to Remember You By, Alone Together and Dancing in the Dark. Although these are instrumentals, some of the songs are so familiar you’ll want to sing along. Yet, these are played with such finesse that there is always a nuance or a surprise.”
City Paper, London
Jim Dilts
“The highlight for me was Just A Skosh, written by Ray Kennedy the major instrumental soloist on the recording.”
Daily Variety
Robert L. Daniels
“…display an inventive hard-bite swinging approach…”
The Hartford Courant
Matthew Erikson
“Pianist Ray Kennedy matches Pizzarelli’s skill with cascading figurations and other musical pyrotechnics. Kennedy’s solos, always interesting and rousing were among the highlights of the evening.”
Jazz Club of Sarasota
Bob Edwards
“Pianist Ray Kennedy (the biggest surprise of the evening) is a master technician who can take one exciting chorus after another with ideas to spare.”
“The audience went wild for Kennedy’s Sweet Georgia Brown feature starting with solo piano. This tune built and built to a frantic finish.”
Jazz Notes, Las Vegas
B.J. Verkeckmoes
“Ray Kennedy is a phenomenal pianist.”
JazzTimes
Thomas Conrad
The Ray Kennedy Trio Plays the Music of Arthur Schwartz
“Ray Kennedy is probably best known for his long association with John Pizzarelli. He and the other players here — brother Tom Kennedy on bass, Miles Vandiver on drums and guest Joe Cohn on guitar — have internalized the elegant, civilized melodic world of Arthur Schwartz. On most of these 15 tunes, Ray Kennedy delineates the theme gracefully and definitively in single treble note lines while Tom Kennedy and Vandiver make everything glide. Cohn interweaves counterpoints or makes concise, fully rounded statements of his own. It is orderly music, everything in its assigned place including disciplined improvisation. It is all eminently pleasant.
Except that Arthur Schwartz’s son Jonathan makes a provocative statement in the liner notes. He says, ‘The music my father composed was unusual for its frequent melancholy with occasional bursts of ebullience. The darker elements are often discarded by pianists of lesser perception than Ray Kennedy, but they are here on this album.’
Jonathan Schwartz in effect issues a challenge in how to listen. When you hear the hesitancy in Kennedy’s melodic portrayal of songs like A Rainy Day and Haunted Heart — when you hear the shadows of poignancy that Kennedy discovers in Schwartz’s bright music — then you can’t stop hearing those ‘darker elements,’ and this album gets even more interesting.”
Jersey Jazz - Compact Views
Joseph Lang
“Ray Kennedy is simply among the most swinging and creative pianists in jazz. Long a member of the John Pizzarelli Trio, where he always garnered enthusiastic responses from the audiences, Kennedy has now embarked on a career apart from the Pizzareilli group. Judging from the evidence on The Ray Kennedy Trio Plays the Music of Arthur Schwartz (Arbors – 19330), Kennedy should quickly attract a new legion of fans. His cohorts on this album are Tom Kennedy on bass and Miles Vandiver on drums with guitarist Joe Cohn joining in as a special guest. They play a 15-song program of Schwartz compositions ranging from such familiar tunes as Dancing in the Dark, That’s Entertainment, You and the Night and the Music, and Alone Together to rarely heard selections like The Dreamer and A Rainy Day. Kennedy’s selection of Arthur Schwartz as a focus of this disc is a wise one indeed. Schwartz, although not as much in the public consciousness as the likes of Gershwin, Berlin, Porter, and Kern, was a supreme melodist who wrote songs that lend themselves wonderfully to jazz improvisation that are perfectly delightful. This is a disc that will not be played once and forgotten by anyone who opts to obtain it.”
Just Jazz
“Ray Kennedy is recognized as an exceptional soloist for his inspired improvisation and lead lines…Ray takes on some outrageous tempos.”
KSD Radio
Leo Cheers
“Ray Kennedy: the piano player who carries you there and brings you back in grand style”
Los Angeles Times
Don Heckman
“Ray Kennedy was a nonstop ball of energy, pouring out solos with perpetual motion lines.”
The Midwest Record
Chris Spector
Ray Kennedy Trio Plays the Music of Arthur Schwartz:
“Although he isn’t remembered as one of Sinatra’s more ring a ding writers now, Schwartz did have his fair share of Sinatra covers, particularly during the moody Capitol period. This set does a fine job of sampling the range of Schwartz’s wares reminding listeners there was more to him than moody Sinatra songs. Bringing in bold commercial works and soundtrack songs, Kennedy paints an audio pallet that forces you to consider the colors in Schwartz’s music. One of the greats from the era of song craftsmen, this is a deserving look back at an artist who’s work deserves to be remembered and contemporized.”
Napa Valley Register
L. Pierce Carson
“An engaging artist, Kennedy has a feathery touch. His fingers gliding over the 88s like so much glass. He’s also a first class technician, demonstrated in spades on a couple of extended solos.”
New York Daily News
Wayman Wong
“…priceless pianist Ray Kennedy…”
The New Yorker
“…Ray Kennedy, making this the best sounding cabaret act in town.”
New York Times
Stephen Holden
“Mr. Pizzarelli and Mr. Kennedy exchanged ideas like manic mind readers, making music that wore an ear-to-ear grin. It made you want to jump for joy.”
“…Ray Kennedy the extraordinary pianist …a pianist that suggests a toned down fusion of Erroll Garner and Oscar Peterson with a dash of George Shearing…”
“Ray Kennedy contributed long circular runs that recharged themselves on spiky Errol Garnerish accents, adding an extra layer of panache that was just about perfect…”
People Magazine
Joseph V. Tirella
“…rocking Ray Kennedy…”
Pitch Weekly
John Pizzarelli
“Ray (Kennedy) is one of the finest piano players around. He can play anything.”
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
Jane Vranish
“Super smooth Ray Kennedy.”
Pittsburgh Tribune Review
Mark Kenney
“Ray Kennedy, a superb pianist”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Terry Perkins
“His fine solos made it very clear that Kennedy has the skill to work in any jazz style (and the talent to carve out his own distinctive niche in the jazz world).”
“Ray Kennedy made playing the piano seem effortless, spinning out sparkling runs of notes that always seemed to include an unexpected surprise or two along the way.”
“Ray Kennedy exhibited a discerning, masterful touch at the keyboard. His solo on Stella by Starlight was a thing of beauty.”
San Francisco Examiner
Philip Elwood
“…pianist Kennedy especially blew and wailed up a storm…”
Sarasota Jazz Festival
“It was fantastic! Pianist Ray Kennedy was amazing!”
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Gene Stout
“…remarkable Ray Kennedy on piano.”
Seattle Times
Misha Berson
“…superior pianist Ray Kennedy…”
Sound Check
“Ray Kennedy’s lyrical piano…first rate technician…sparkling improviser”
The Sun-Herald, Sydney, Australia
Kevin Jones
“By the end of an exhilarating evening of superb swinging jazz, the name on everybody’s lips was Ray Kennedy…he is relatively unknown in Australia. I was not prepared for what I heard. In his light fingers and sure touch, one can detect the influence of Nat Cole. His swings like the clappers. It was interesting to note the reaction of two pianist I sat with as Kennedy spun out inspired chorus after chorus of an up-tempo Cherokee — one had her head in her hands muttering “How can I ever touch the piano again?” The other sat with his mouth open in amazement.”
Szene (Scene), Hamburg, Germany
“Pianist Ray Kennedy is brilliant.”
Talkin’ Broadway Theatre News, Pittsburgh
“…Ray Kennedy, whose phenomenal fingers fly up and down the keyboard. I’m convinced that Ray is an alien because there’s no earthly way a regular human being could play all of the hundreds of notes that he does; he’s out of this world.”
Time Magazine
Terry Teachout
“…the group burns on a Kennedy-penned tribute to master swinger Oscar Peterson called (what else?) Oscar Night.”
Union News, Springfield, MO
Clifton J. Noble, Jr.
“…keyboard genius Kennedy, who comfortably married the lightness and spare elegance of Waller and Basie with the blinding dexterity and lightening mental magic of Tatum and Peterson…”
Village Voice
“The John Pizzarelli trio has never been tighter, Pizzarelli himself has never been looser. Performing at Rainbow and Stars with the virtuosic Ray Kennedy on piano and his stalwart younger brother Martin on bass.”
WNYC Radio
Jonathan Schwartz
“Ray Kennedy is one of our finest jazz pianists. It’s as simple as that. As a member of a trio or larger group, as a supportive musician behind a singer, or as his own man under his own banner, Kennedy is ingenious, masculine, and terrifically musical, an absolute joy to hear, a pianist who suggests, at least to me, Ella Fitzgerald’s great Paul Smith. Throughout this CD he’s a masterful swinger, and on a couple of tracks with singer John Pizzarelli, with whom he’s been working for years, he is subtle and warm. He is inevitably respectful to the composer, but harmonically surprising time and time again. He holds the heart of each song in the palm of his mind, and what more could you ask from any musician?”