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| Vocalist Ray Greene, the Voice of Santana and Tower of Power, Kicks Off Tour for United States Release of His Album STAY at Stage Door Theater at the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center Blessed with a towering and tender tenor voice that is both down-home and up-South with a taste of Saturday night and Sunday morning, Georgia-born singer/trombonist Ray Greene, the voice of Santana and Tower of Power, kicks off his U.S. album release tour for Stay at the Stage Door Theater at the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center, 130 North Tryon Street, in Charlotte, NC, on Sunday, February 25, at 6:00 pm. Presented by Sun-Music, the concert features Ray Greene on vocals/trombone; Rodney Foster, bass/musical director; Antonio McKie, keyboards; Jonathan Knott, guitar; Ron Green, drums; and David Glympth, saxophone, in a sexy, funk-filled evening of soul music at its finest. Widely known as a vocalist with the celebrated supergroup Tower of Power and the legendary Carlos Santana, Greene also performed with Rick James, Aretha Franklin, The Isley Brothers and Natalie Cole, among others. A talented solo artist in his own right, Greene draws from a wide range of generations and genres of African American music to create his own unique and identifiable sound as a vocalist and instrumentalist. "At my core, I'm a soul singer, " Greene proudly says. "Sam Cooke, Al Green and Bobby Womack, those are real soul singers. I also love what Kem is doing. I love Frankie Beverly, Maxwell, Sade and I'm a big fan of Anthony Hamilton. But at my core, I'm a soul singer, who sings R&B, pop and gospel as well. Signed to the British-based Ubuntu Music Label, Greene, who now resides in Columbia, SC, has toured worldwide with his own band and with Tower of Power since 2013 and Santana since 2015. He is now focusing on introducing his latest album here in the States and celebrating his own music. "Audiences know Tower of Power. They know Carlos Santana, but they don't know me. When people come to see a show, I want them to be moved. I like to make my concerts sexy but make them funky at the same time. We try to touch on all the different emotions. It's important to me that you feel something from my show. So, I love the idea of an audience being right there in front of me, so they get a chance to feel the heat, to feel the emotion." Greene draws from the small town values he received from his hometown, Americus, GA. He credits his parents for his development as a musician. His mother had a large collection of records, and his father sang in a family gospel group called the Sky Tone Jubilee Singers. "My father was my first big musical influence. I can remember when I was much younger, my dad was a quartet-style gospel singer, " Greene recalls with fondness. "My mother had all the 45's – James Brown, Al Green and Joe Tex records. So, I got a lot of my interest in music from both sides." Greene began trombone lessons in the sixth grade. He later formed a duo with a friend who played guitar at several local venues. "We played these little side gigs, like in a VFW Hall, " Greene gleefully remembers. "My friend's dad was an insurance agent, so he had all these different connections to people who were looking to do little parties and events. There also was a huge Baptist church that recruited me to play some trombone behind their choirs and things of that nature." Greene's musical activities continued when he went to Americus High School. After his graduation, he originally planned to attend a nearby college. "I was offered a scholarship to go to Columbus College, which was about an hour from my hometown, " Greene recollected. "But I got this brochure in the mail from Berklee College of Music. I had never heard anything about the school; however, as I was looking through the pamphlet, I realized that all the instructors were not only teachers, but they were all working musicians. I decided at that point that this is where I wanted to go." At Berklee, the trombone was Greene's primary subject. But in his third year at the school, he was asked to audition as a singer in a nine-piece local band called High Function. "To this day, I still don't even know how they knew that I had these aspirations to sing, " Greene says. "The only reason I got the gig as a singer in that band was because it was a horn-driven band like Chicago and Earth, Wind & Fire, and there was already a trombone player. Once I got that taste of being a singer, being right there in front of the audience and seeing how people were moved, I was hooked. It was very moving for me, and I think that was really the starting point." After Greene graduated from Berklee, he worked in Boston and established himself with an assortment of bands including Nightshift and a five-piece group called Universal Language that played the music of Marvin Gaye and Maze featuring Frankie Beverly. Greene won a 1994 Boston Music Award, and he worked with a Las Vegas group named Wordplay. It was also in Boston where Greene started working as a background vocalist singing jingles and projects for many companies including Walt Disney, Cadillac and Converse. "Getting the chance to sing Amazing Grace during a Converse sneaker ad, which featured Magic Johnson, was definitely the highlight of my career as a jingle singer, " Greene remembers. He also sang the national anthem for the Boston Red Sox, the New England Patriots and the San Francisco Giants. Greene's voice was also featured on several TV soap operas including The Young and the Restless and One Life to Live as well as on the Grammy-nominated HBO documentary, Legacy. Greene's depth of feeling can be heard on several albums as a leader. They include the Sam Cooke-influenced gospel recording Tell Me the Story of Christmas (2007), Heaven Bound (2011), Nature Doesn't Legislate, Greene's eclectic, funky collaboration with Tower of Power member Stephen "Doc" Kupka, (2016) and this latest recording Stay (2023), which Greene regards as "the culmination of everything I've done throughout my career, because this is the first opportunity I got a chance to oversee every part of the record and the music." No doubt Ray Greene has staying power, as proven by his long associations with some of today's most outstanding musicians and soon to be proved by the acclaim coming for his own music featured on Stay. Tickets for Ray Greene's Stay concert at the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center on February 25 are $37.50 - $42.50 and are available here. 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