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In calmer moments I can put my admiration for Ray Charles in context, seeing him, for instance, as a direct descendant of Louis Armstrong’s in the extended family of African-American music, an older brother of Aretha Franklin’s, and an uncle of Stevie Wonder’s. For a long five seconds I and the entire audience sat stuck in our seats before we could scream back in welcome release. At the Blue Note the moment came at the end of “How Long Has This Been Going On?” when a scream cut across the trumpets’ high harmony like a chainsaw through polished parquetry. Every time I hear Ray Charles in person, at some point he breaks through the smooth surface of the entertainment with surges of communication so intense as to be almost painful. Until Charles’s version I had never really heard Hammerstein’s line “All the sounds of the earth are like music.” I love the conspiratorial “heh-heh” Charles throws into a lyric whenever lie’s moved by silliness. Like any fan, I love my idol most for the jolts of musical pleasure he’s given me: dazzling piano solos during a week of shows at the Circle Star, near San Francisco, which are still etched in my mind eighteen years later the first time I heard him sing “Oh What a Beautiful Morning,” on Saturday Night Live in the fall of 1977. This time my bond with Charles has lasted, becoming stronger every time I hear his music. Then I heard him with Aretha Franklin at the Fillmore West in 1971, and devoured his two masterpiece albums from that era, A Message From the People and Volcanic Action of My Soul.

For a few years, caught up with the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan, I didn’t listen to Charles much.

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My earliest vivid memory of Ray Charles’s music dates from 1961: “Hit the Road, Jack” blasting out of dormitory windows freshman year at Yale.

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Perhaps you’ve seen Charles in the movie The Blues Brothers, with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, or kidding around with Joe Montana in Diet Pepsi ads. Or you may own none, but when you were in high school, your parents took you to a concert, or you danced to “What’d I Say” at a great party one summer night. Who, for example, is Ray Charles to you? You may own a dozen of his albums, or just a battered copy of The Ray Charles Story, Vol. Ray Charles has succeeded so well in making music for millions that today he swims in our common consciousness.

By this standard, I think, Ray Charles ranks among the masters of modern music. “Seniority by sonority” determines precedence in music, Dizzy Gillespie says. With each year Charles’s music becomes more playful and profound, and displays richer understanding. Listeners love the contrast of his rough-sweet voice with the sound of his big band, strings, and chorus. Listening blind to the sounds of life around him, he has absorbed whole idioms as if by osmosis-blues, jazz, country, and ballad-reinvigorated them with his empathy, intelligence, and sexy sense of humor, and then sung them back to the world. In the thirty-five years since he merged rhythm-and-blues and gospel in “I Got a Woman,” the crossover hit that opened the pop market to his sound, Ray Charles has grown unstoppably as a musician.

The gray hair that once touched his temples with distinction now crowns his whole head, and he has earned the title he was introduced with each night of a recent engagement at the Blue Note jazz club, in New York-“The Legendary Genius of Soul” - many times over.

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