A TASTE OF HEAVEN: The Ecstatic Song & Gospel of Maestro Raymond Anthony Myles

I was a skeptical New York journalist, on assignment for Billboard magazine, when I first saw Raymond perform in the Gospel Tent at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 1982. Raymond seemed to have something very much like healing powers. His artistry was charged with the most stirring and soulful music I had ever heard.  He spoke to me in ways that other music never had.

Ten years later, when no one else would, I produced “A Taste of Heaven,” Raymond’s first and only full-length studio album of original material, and released the album independently.

Raymond poured his heart and soul into the project. But the gatekeepers in the mainstream gospel music industry refused to acknowledge Raymond as a marketable artist. The perception that he was queer would alienate their evangelical base, they said. To Raymond, the notion that his sexuality might actually alter his destiny was unthinkable. And the burden fell upon my shoulders, as his producer, to break this heartbreaking news. 

“‘If I’m a Christian,’" he demanded, ‘"doesn’t that make me a child of God, too?’”

Then he grew defiant. "‘Don’t they know I’m talented?’”

It was only after Raymond’s murder that I fully understood the significance of why he chose to call the album “A Taste of Heaven.” Call it the intuition of man who was always in touch with a higher spirit. 

Raymond's triumph and tragedy lay in his failure to grasp the artistic and creative goals just when they were within his reach, and just before he might have won the acceptance he so deeply craved as an artist and a man. 

Had he lived, who knows where Raymond's journey might have taken him. A TASTE OF HEAVEN takes us down those untraveled roads. It's almost like Raymond is still here, waiting in the wings for his next star turn.

New York City
Spring 2025