Carey Frank “Carei” Thomas (* July 23, 1938 in Pittsburgh; † May 28, 2020 in Minneapolis) was an American jazz musician (piano, composition, also vocals) who was active in a six-decade career as a jazz pianist, composer, educator, and organizer of art exhibitions in Minneapolis.

Thomas spent his teenage and early adult years in Chicago, where he met one of his idols, the bandleader and pianist Sun Ra. There he founded a doo-wop group and worked with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. After serving two years overseas in the US Army, Thomas moved to Minneapolis in 1972 to study music education and therapy at the University of Minnesota. He was involved in many organizations in the Twin Cities in the years that followed, serving as music director for the Interact Center for Visual and Performing Arts and as a music educator at the West Bank School of Music and St. Paul’s High School for Recording Arts. In 1993, he was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, and invented new ways to play the piano. The nerve disorder required years of physical therapy and limited his finger movements.

Thomas was known for developing experimental and genre-bending pieces of music under his own name and with groups and collectives such as Zeitgeist, The Elders, and the Neighborhood Ensemble. He also pioneered musical concepts such as controlled improvisation and sound generation. In 2000, Thomas recorded the album Minding Our Bid’ness with his Feel Free Ensemble at the Bryant-Lake Bowl Theater in Minneapolis, which featured saxophonist George Cartwright, among others. On it he played his own compositions such as “Tippy/One Ahead (For All Victims of Violence)” and “Invention #1: Way North of the Order (Dedicated to Paul Bley and Ornette Coleman)”. In 2003 he participated in an album by the formation Fat Kid Wednesdays; around 2005 he released his last album under his own name, Sound Window(s), which was released on Innove Records.[4] In 2011 he published “Compositions and Concepts” with notes and stories behind his pieces from 1959. Thomas died in late May 2020 when complications of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy occurred after a fall, leading to heart failure.

Jazz singer José James, who performed with Thomas’ many Twin Cities ensembles and was his student, called him “a brilliant pianist, composer and mentor to a generation of artists”.