Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, August 12, 1994 TAG: 9408120063
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Ebbett explained, starting with jazz. Ebbett and his trio will be the host group Sunday at the second Jamfest jazz fund-raiser at the Henry Street Music Center and Jazz Institute.
His musical beginnings date back to before he can remember, to his native Vermont, where he was born into a musical family. His father was a violinist, his mother was a piano teacher and his grandfather played mandolin in the local string band.
"There was no question about being interested in music," Ebbett said.
He tried both the violin and the piano, choosing the piano after getting a dose of his father's old-school violin tutelage. "His technique was to tie a brick to the end of the violin and make me hold it under my chin ... I rebelled quick."
Ebbett and his family came to Roanoke when he was 12 years old, when Ebbett's father went to work at General Electric in Salem. The senior Ebbett also played violin with the Roanoke Symphony.
In Roanoke, Ebbett's first public gigs came at the old Colony Club in the basement of the Patrick Henry Hotel while he was still in high school. The Colony Club was a private-bottle club, perfect as a nurturing ground for jazz. "The bartender would pour your own whiskey and charge you two bucks for it," he said.
The piano player at the club didn't show up one night, and the house band's saxophone player, Bernard Morrison, recruited Ebbett to fill in. He had never played with a group before. But Morrison was reassuring: "I don't care, just make noise," he said.
From there, Ebbett got his own solo piano bar slot at the club, playing what he called "cocktail style, Nat King Cole" music. He also would sit in occasionally with a semi-famous regional group of the time, the Vikings, at the old Rathskeller club under the long-ago-razed American Theatre downtown.
He graduated from Jefferson High School in 1961 and joined the Army, where he wasn't given much time for music. His detail was in the medical corps. And when he returned to study biology at Roanoke College, while moonlighting at an insurance company, again he didn't have much time for music.
After school, however, while working as a school teacher, he returned to the fold. Five evenings a week, he played piano at the Charcoal Steak House restaurant, a job it turned out that lasted longer for teaching.
After two years, Ebbett left teaching for better money in sales. Eventually, he changed piano gigs, jumping to the old Gourmet restaurant, which later became La Maison. He stayed there seven years.
He moved to Clifton Forge, then to Richmond, and then Maine. During about a decade-long period, he didn't play much. "My father convinced me not to go into music as a profession," he said. "He just didn't think there was a future in it, and basically, unless you're very very lucky, he was probably right."
In 1982, he returned to Roanoke, still in sales, with no intention of returning to his piano bar ways. But a substitute stint back at La Maison lasted three years. Then he moved over to the former Jarbas restaurant.
At the same time, he opened a camera shop. He also became the lobby piano player at the Hotel Roanoke. It was a grind: camera shop all day, hotel in the evening, the restaurant into the night.
"I have tendinitis in both arms," he said.
But the camera shop closed after two years, which brings the story around to cockroaches. Instead of returning to sales, in 1989, Ebbett returned to school in the entomology department at Virginia Tech.
His area of study is the genetics of resistance of pesticides in cockroaches.
"Why not?" Cockroaches are easy bugs to work with, he said. They don't take long to raise and study through several generations. And the trend in pesticides is to use less of them, so figuring out why some species of cockroaches become immune to them seemed like important work.
Plus, Virginia Tech has one of the best cockroach collections around. "We've got a strain of South American cockroaches," Ebbett boasted, "that you could strap one on each foot and use them like rollerskates."
Meanwhile, he has continued playing music. When Jarbas and the Hotel Roanoke closed, he moved to the former Scarlett's Lounge. He started a trio, the Ray Ebbett Trio, the first group he has played with really since sitting in at the Colony Club or the Rathskeller.
Today, the trio includes Lenny Martin on bass and Tyrone Walker on drums, and is the house trio at the private Shenandoah Club in Roanoke. The group also just began playing Tuesday nights at the Roanoke Airport Marriott.
For the Jamfest Sunday, Ebbett's trio will provide the nucleus behind what is mostly an improvisational jam open to any jazz players who wish to join in. Ebbett said he was impressed by attendance at the first Jamfest. "And it wasn't free.... If that kind of interest continues, I think it's definitely going to be good for the music scene," he said.
by CNB