Walt Dickerson, Sirone, Andrew Cyrille

Life Rays is a trio session led by vibraphonist Walt Dickerson with bassist Sirone and drummer Andrew Cyrille, recorded at Barigozzi Studio in Milan on February 4 and 5, 1982 and released that year by Soul Note. Dickerson wrote three of the four pieces; the fourth is the Gershwin brothers' It Ain't Necessarily So, which he stretches to eighteen minutes, the longest performance on the album. The drummer and the leader went back a long way: David Johnson of Indiana Public Media's Night Lights notes that Cyrille made some of his earliest recording dates with Dickerson.

Giovanni Bonandrini produced the sessions, Giancarlo Barigozzi engineered them and Nat Hentoff wrote the liner notes. The record opens with No Ordinary Man, about nine minutes long, followed by Good Relationship, which runs past thirteen and a half; the title track is the shortest piece at under five minutes, before the long Gershwin reading closes the record. There is no piano and no horn in the group, so the vibraphone carries the harmony alone. In the tribute he wrote after Dickerson's death, Johnson said he had "always marveled at how quiet and lustrous Dickerson's vibraphone playing was". The news of that death on May 15, 2008, from cardiac arrest at the age of 80, had come to the jazz radio community from Cyrille himself, who passed on a message from Dickerson's wife Elizabeth.

This is the Soul Note CD 121028-2, which Discogs lists as a later reissue, probably not before the mid-2000s judging from its manufacturer and design, of the album first released on LP in 1982 as SN 1028.