Some bands are best understood on record, but Ray’s Music Exchange has always sounded like a group that needs a room, a crowd and enough space for the music to stretch. And their new collection A Live Family Rayunion 2025 LP captures exactly that.
Recorded during a sold-out performance at Cincinnati’s historic Woodward Theater, the six-track release marks the collective’s first live album in fifteen years and arrives as a fitting celebration of three decades spent blurring the lines between jazz-fusion, progressive funk and open-ended improvisation.
The core lineup brings the kind of confidence that only comes from years of shared musical history. Brad Myers, Michael Mavridoglou, Nick Blasky, Jason Smart and Matthew Hawkins lock into grooves that feel both tightly controlled and deliberately loose, allowing the music to push forward without losing its sense of spontaneity.
While Saxophonist Josh Kline and trombonist Spencer Merk join the performance alongside Jackson Steiger, Colin Thompson, Wayne Kilgard and Jonathan Wiseman from Ernie Johnson from Detroit, creating a much broader horn presence and giving the arrangements an explosive, communal quality..
The band’s history stretches back to the late-90s jam-band era, but the music here still feels driven by the same basic exchange between stage and audience: rhythm building into movement, improvisation feeding off response, and technical musicianship never becoming detached from the simple pleasure of a packed room.
Recorded by Nicholas Radina and mixed and mastered by Ashley Shepherd, the album preserves that live energy without making it feel overly polished.
After thirty years, A Live Family Rayunion 2025 LP sounds almost like a proof of endurance. Warm, muscular and joyfully collaborative, it captures a band whose greatest strength has always been what happens when everyone in the room starts moving together.