Professional drummer Ray Levier is a veritable Swiss Army Knife on the kit, facile at finessing jazz-fusion grooves, swinging a jazz combo, laying down rugged hip-hop beats and nasty funk, accompanying singer-songwriters with subtle grace, and bashing away at rock beats with panache and precision.



As a career musician, Ray is in an in-demand sideman who also divides his time with teaching, clinics, and speaking dates; and composing for film and TV. When he’s not hard at work in one or more of these outlets, Ray can be found woodshedding his chops, or composing for his solo career.



“You always have to be ready to adapt; sometimes on the spot, just like a chameleon,” Ray says. “You also have to be an intuitive person and get out of your way to really understand who the artist is as a person and what they want. You have to be well-versed in many styles, and you have to work really hard because there’s always someone behind you lined up ready waiting for your gig.”



The Nyack, New York-based artist has had the rare feat of being a sideman to urban folk and jazz artist KJ Denhert for 20 years. He’s the co-producer and co-founder of a successful music production company, composing TV tracks for such esteemed networks as TLC, Discovery, FOX Sports, CBS, NBC, History Channel, National Geographic, and the Oxygen Network. In this realm, Ray fields a diverse barrage of TV cues, and intuitively composes music that strongly translates in the audiovisual medium. He conducts this work, and live drum track sessions for other artists, at his state-of-the-art professional production recording studio 30 minutes from Manhattan. In addition, Ray has earned endorsements from Yamaha, Paiste, Vater and Evans.



Ray has also recorded with jazz fusion icons guitarists Mike Stern and John Abercrombie. Ray attended William Patterson College’s prestigious music program headed by legendary bassist Rufus Reid. He has studied with such heavyweights as Keith Crane, Sal LaRocca, Adam Nussbaum, Dom Famularo, John Riley, Jojo Meyer, Lenny White, Marvin “Smitty” Smith, Horace Arnold, Kenny Washington, Tommy Campbell and Kim Plainfield.