If you have listened to popular music anytime in the last 50 years, you have heard Nathan East play the bass guitar, probably hundreds of times. Flip on the radio or Spotify shuffle, play some Top 40 hits or country or jazz or R&B or classic rock, and you’ll eventually hear Nathan East grooving at the bottom of the mix, laying down a sonic foundation and driving the song forward.
Dolly Parton, Beyoncé, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Ringo Starr, Herbie Hancock, Whitney Houston, Andrea Bocelli, Celine Dion and Barbra Streisand have all recorded with Nathan. Kenny Loggins’s “Footloose,” Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” and Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” feature him on bass. The list keeps going, and clocks in at more than 2,000 records—including about 15 with the smooth jazz group Fourplay, which he cofounded in 1991. All told, Nathan East is one of the most widely recorded bassists in the history of music.
Nathan is based on the West Coast, but he tours the world with different bands. Usually, when he stops in Washington, D.C., perhaps at the Capital One Arena for a gig with Phil Collins, Nathan calls up his older brother Ray to see if he can make it over to the venue before the show. Ray is Msgr. Raymond East, the longtime pastor of St. Teresa of Avila Church in the city’s Anacostia neighborhood. The monsignor is a popular national speaker on the Catholic circuit and a gifted musician in his own right. Father Ray—as he is most widely known—is also one of the only 250 or so Black American priests in the United States.
His job when Nathan is in town is to lead the musicians in prayer backstage before they start the show. Aware of the range of faith practices represented in any group, Father Ray gathers with the players in a circle and tries to make sure he prays “in a way that everybody can say amen,” he told me. He will often use the Psalms as a starting point, especially Psalm 150, which exhorts its hearers to praise God with trumpet, lute, harp, dancing and clanging cymbals. Then, as he described in our interview, Father Ray might say something like this: “We ask the blessings of the one whose melodies inspire us and encourage us, and whose word fills us. We ask our good and gracious creator to be with us and to be with everyone who gathers to hear and enjoy and celebrate music this night. Amen—now let’s go bring the house down.”
Imagining this scene reminds me of my favorite quote about the intersection of art and the spiritual life. “You say grace before meals. All right,” G. K. Chesterton wrote. “But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”
I thought of this quote often as I got to know more about the Easts. You could put it on an East family crest. The story of Nathan and Father Ray—which can’t be told without including their parents, five additional artistic siblings and a Black Catholic parish in San Diego, Calif.—is a story of “saying grace” and sharing the gift of music in countless church halls and concert halls. Their faith feeds their music and their music feeds their faith. And in their own distinctive but related vocations, both brothers have used music to help others connect to something bigger than themselves.
The East Family Players
Father Ray and Nathan grew up in the 1950s and ’60s in San Diego, Calif., as the first and third children of Thomas and Gwendolyn East. Seven East kids plus their parents shared a small three-bedroom home where music was a constant presence. Thomas, an aerospace engineer, played piano by ear, and Gwendolyn, an early childhood educator, sang hymns. A family pastime was listening to vinyl albums on a record player housed in a huge credenza. The children were encouraged to pursue music, and before long they had a sort of family band, with singers, guitar, trombone, trumpet, French horn, flute and piccolo among their ranks. All seven siblings are engaged in the arts either professionally or as a hobby to this day. In junior high school, Nathan started playing the cello—a four-stringed, lower-register instrument that foreshadowed his future. He impressed classmates with his perfect pitch, able to identify or sing any note on demand.
Gwendolyn was Catholic and Thomas was a Baptist who attended a Methodist church—they had what Nathan told me was a “Catho-Bapto-Metho” family. In the years following the Second Vatican Council, as new styles of music were being introduced into the Catholic liturgy, Ray and David East—brother number two—got involved in the music ministry at their parish, Christ the King Catholic Church in the Logan Heights area of San Diego. Ray sang and David played the guitar. There wasn’t much published folk Mass music yet, so they wrote their own. Each week they would compose an original folk-style arrangement of the responsorial psalm to be used at the upcoming Sunday Mass. It’s hard to fathom, but it happened: Teenage Catholics wrote their own church music every week and taught it to the congregation Sunday morning.
Nathan would tag along with his older brothers; and one Sunday when he was 14 years old, he noticed a bass guitar sitting near the altar. Another parish musician must have left it there; no one in the family knows for sure. “I picked it up, had a go, and immediately felt, ‘This feels good in my hands,’” Nathan said. It was a spiritual experience. “To this day, all these years later, half a century plus, I’m still feeling the blessings of picking up that instrument purely by chance,” he said.
Immediately, Nathan joined the church band with his brothers and some friends. Word spread about the group and soon they were also playing Masses at the 32nd Street Naval Base for families who had a family member serving in Vietnam. They would play Masses at a Navy hospital and at the military prison in San Diego, where 30 or 40 inmates in chains would be crammed into a small room for the services.
“It’s great that I learned the bass in the church because it’s a very forgiving place,” Nathan said in a 2014 documentary about his career called “For the Record.” “If you make a mistake, they forgive you a lot easier than if you’re in a regular gig.”
And it wasn’t just the church’s patient listeners who helped Nathan grow as a musician. Nathan thinks the fact he started playing publicly in the church group right away—as opposed to teaching himself to play fast and showy alone in his bedroom, say—helped form him as a collaborative artist with whom so many of the world’s top professional musicians love to work. He learned how to be a great listener, when to play and when to leave space in the music.
“I just realized my role or responsibility as a bass player was to provide some choice notes to go underneath,” Nathan remembers of those early church days. He says his job as a bassist is to “be of service” and to honor the music—not to honor himself with “fast, flashy licks.” While he is an extremely talented and dexterous bassist with a great ear and enormous stylistic range, what fellow musicians emphasize about Nathan repeatedly is his team player attitude, his generous spirit and his personal warmth.
Barry White University
During high school, Nathan played in a local San Diego band called the Power. The legendary R&B singer Barry White heard them at a gig and hired them all as back-up players, just like that. So Nathan graduated from high school a few months early and went out on his first tour at age 16, playing at venues like Madison Square Garden and the Kennedy Center, earning an informal education through what he calls B.W.U.—Barry White University. He then attended college near home, earning a bachelor’s in music from the University of California at San Diego, before throwing himself into a career as a touring and session musician.
Meanwhile, Ray moved to Washington, D.C., for a job with the National Association of Minority Contractors, after earning his own degree in business administration at the University of San Diego. While the priesthood had long felt like a strong possibility for Ray, he had assumed that if he did go down that path, he would serve as a missionary in Africa, just like his grandparents and an aunt on his father’s side of the family had done. Ray’s local pastor and spiritual mentor in the District encouraged him to stay in the Archdiocese of Washington in pursuit of his vocation, and that’s what Ray did.
Nathan and the rest of the family were not surprised Ray entered the seminary. “I think he always had the qualities of a saint,” Nathan said. During their childhood, the East kids’ walk home from school included some uphill stretches that were tough going after a long day. Nathan remembers Ray walking behind him and David, a hand on each of their backs, urging them up the biggest hill. “I’m thinking, ‘Who does that?!’” Nathan recalled, struck by the sort of selfless affection that you don’t often see among young siblings. It’s no wonder to Nathan that Ray pursued a life of service.
As a priest, Father Ray has served in pastoral ministry with Black Catholics at the parish and archdiocesan level, and he has been an active leader in the national pastoral music community. I first encountered him as the emcee of the U.S. bishops’ annual social justice ministry conference. He was not content at that meeting merely to introduce speakers and update the agenda—Father Ray had all of us singing and praying aloud in a huge, drab hotel ballroom. (It was at this conference where he first met the political writer David Brooks, who became one of Father Ray’s biggest fans.) Genuine joy just pours out of him no matter the context.
“I’ve never seen him have a bad day,” said a longtime parishioner and friend, Ralph McCloud. “He can be doing a funeral and make it one of the most joyous occasions.”
Since his ordination in 1981, Father Ray has spent two separate stints as pastor of the historic St. Teresa of Avila parish, from 1988 to 1997 and from 2009 to the present. But if you head to the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington for a Sunday Mass at St. Teresa, the first thing you should know, according to McCloud, is that the Mass isn’t going to start on time. Father Ray is often running behind because if he meets someone who needs something, he is going to help.
Anacostia is historically one of the most economically challenged areas of Washington, and Father Ray is famous in the community for his compassion. If you’re out to dinner with him at a restaurant, he will probably ask to take everyone’s leftovers in doggy bags in case someone stops him on the street. Often, the food has been given away before you’ve made it to your car. If you give Father Ray a new pair of shoes to replace the old ones he wore down to almost nothing, don’t be surprised if he’s passed them to someone in need within a week. If your loved one is sick in the hospital, Father Ray will be at the bedside. (This was the reason he missed the first phone interview we had scheduled.)
Once the Mass starts on a typical Sunday, it will not be a transactional, 55-minutes-and-out-the-door experience. You can expect to be there for about two hours. “As I tell first-time visitors, when you leave home, make sure that your rice is on low,” McCloud said. There is more music and movement at a St. Teresa Mass than at most Catholic parishes. It’s a fully embodied liturgical experience.
Genevieve Mougey was a parishioner for eight years until she moved out of the area in 2022. She remembers how Father Ray would start singing in the middle of a homily if a point he was making reminded him of a song. “Chances are most people in the congregation would know the song, and so they’ll start singing, and then we’re two verses into a song in the middle of a homily,” Ms. Mougey said.
‘A Singing Church Is a Praying Church’
Whether Father Ray is presiding at St. Teresa’s or marching in one of Washington, D.C.’s many social justice protests, music is going to be part of the mix. He remembers that during a demonstration marking the 10th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the largely secular crowd of military veterans and peace activists didn’t have any music to bring them together or give voice to their experiences—so Father Ray and the church brought the music to the streets. He has done this at more recent Black Lives Matter and pro-immigrant protests, too.
“I would say a singing church is a praying church, a praying church is a growing church, and a growing church is a church that goes out with the Good News,” Father Ray told me. “Music is something that really brings people together in faith and inspires action. And faith that’s put into action accomplishes the work that Jesus would have us to do.”
The settings where Father Ray usually finds himself singing aren’t the same as where Nathan plays, but the bassist often calls 50,000-person crowds “congregations” and thinks music is “the language of God”—wherever it is being played.
“I don’t know what makes people drive for hours or fly to another part of the country or the world just to go be in a room to hear music,” Nathan said. “The thing that’s so magical and mysterious to me is that it’s just like faith. We can’t touch [music], we can’t see it, smell it, but it’s in our hearts. It’s something that we believe.” Passing the gifts of music and faith on to the next generation of Easts, Nathan often performs with his son Noah, a pianist, with whom he has just released a duo album. Noah usually leads the pre-show band prayers on the road these days, always ending them with the line, “In your name we play.”
I wanted to know if the East brothers felt like their vocations were similar: In their own ways, they are both performers, collaborators, creators, men who invite others into an experience of the divine. For his part, Father Ray sees parallels between pastoral work and playing music. “You’ve got to drop the ego when it comes to music,” Father Ray said. “You have to learn how to step back and let somebody else take a solo. You have to be very open to the gifts of others, encouraging them and supporting them. You have to forgive one another. Those are all talents that are very much needed in music and church life. It’s all about using our gifts, not abusing the gifts—not letting ego get in the way of a common mission, and really doing it with a joy and an enthusiasm that’s contagious.”
Nathan thinks music can help heal a wounded, polarized world—a belief that has deep roots in the Easts’ ecumenical, music-loving family. “If we like a Stevie Wonder song, it doesn’t matter who you voted for, what church you go to, what you believe in. This song resonates with you,” Nathan said. “I always hope that people of all sizes, shapes, colors and beliefs can be in the room and exist on this planet together, and try to make heaven here on Earth.”
