Ray Brown never had a signature style you could pick out in one note the way you can with some horn players. What he had was a sound: big, warm, perfectly in time, and somehow always exactly where the music needed it to be. He played on more jazz records than almost anyone else who ever picked up a bass, across nearly six decades, and he made nearly all of them better.
He got to New York from Pittsburgh in the mid-1940s, right as bebop was breaking open, and started playing with Dizzy Gillespie before he was even out of his teens. There was no awkward early period on his records — he showed up already fully formed, and within a couple of years he was one of the most recorded bassists in jazz.
For nearly two decades starting in the mid-1950s, he was the bass in the Oscar Peterson Trio, and that's probably where most listeners first really heard what he could do. The trio format leaves nowhere to hide — every instrument is exposed — and Brown thrived on it. His lines weren't decoration; they were structure. Night Train (1963) is the record to hear it on. The pocket he creates underneath the piano is enormous.
He also spent years as musical director for Ella Fitzgerald during her Verve years under producer Norman Granz — which put him at the center of some of the most polished jazz recordings of the era. That same instinct for what a session needed shows up in This One's for Blanton! (1975), a duo record with Duke Ellington paying tribute to Jimmy Blanton, the bassist who first showed jazz what the instrument could do as more than timekeeping. It's a quieter, more exposed side of Brown than the trio records — just two players, no rhythm section to lean on.
In his later decades he led his own trios and small groups, and those records are worth seeking out if you've mostly heard him as a sideman. This Is Ray Brown (1981) catches him well into that stretch, playing with the authority of someone who no longer has anything to prove.
He died in 2002, on the road, still touring. What he left behind isn't a puzzle to untangle — it's just a body of work that sounds great. Put on almost anything he played on and the bass sounds the way you want the bass to sound: present, warm, swinging without apparent effort. His full catalog, as leader and as the most in-demand sideman of his generation, is on his artist page.