SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2015
VOLUME ONE NUMBER TWO
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2015
VOLUME ONE NUMBER TWO
THELONIOUS MONK
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
ESPERANZA SPALDING
January 31-February 6
MARY LOU WILLIAMS
February 7-13
STEVE COLEMAN
February 14-20
JAMES BROWN
February 21-27
CURTIS MAYFIELD
February 28-March 6
ARETHA FRANKLIN
March 7-13
GEORGE CLINTON
March 14-20
JAMES CARTER
March 21-27
TERENCE BLANCHARD
March 28-April 3
BILLIE HOLIDAY
April 4-10
[In glorious tribute and gratitude to this great legendary artist we celebrate her centennial year]
VIJAY IYER
April 11-17
CHARLES MINGUS
April 18-24
http://www.furious.com/perfect/ceciltaylor.html
CECIL TAYLOR ON JAMES CARTER IN JANUARY 2001 INTERVIEW WITH JASON GROSS
I'll tell you an interesting guy that I heard,
was a man named James Carter. The night before, I spent with [members of
Carter's current electric band, drummer] Calvin [Weston] and Jamaladeen
[Tacuma, electric bassist]. And the next night I go into practice, and
in walks James Carter. So I ask him, he talked about his control over his
instrument and he went into [talking about] Eric Dolphy. And I asked him
what he thought about Anthony Braxton's music, and he dropped his head
and said, "What can you say?"
So I said to him, "One courtesy deserves another.
I'll be there tonight when you play," and lemme tell you! I'm backstage,
and that band starts, and Jamaladeen and Calvin... you know there's a difference
between the blues and rhythm and blues, and man, when that band started,
the intensity of the new rhythm and blues that they played! Carter is off
stage, and when he walked in he stunned me with what he can do! Know what he
did? He made one harmonic sound, [imitating] eeerrrrrrrrgh, and then he
walked off the fucking stage! And he comes back and makes another sound.
Now, when he starts playing, when he was confronted, when he had to deal
with that rhythm and blues shit, it wasn't about notes. And when James
did this obbligato, man, it wasn't just technical, it was passionate! So
James, at the end of that first number came and gave us his theme that
demonstrated all of his control, and it was something.
This is where I almost cried. He starts a piece,
alone, and he's got a sense of humor, and he knew he had the audience,
and he started playing "Good Morning Heartache". Gross, I was almost reduced
to tears by what he did. I thought of Charlie Gayle, and he gave us that,
but he also gave us Don Byas, and then he played softly, and went into
a bossa nova..
When he walked off, I'm standing there mesmerized,
and he sees me and comes over and I say, "Hey, give me some more of that
shit!" [laughs] I gotta hear that band again, cause man, the music is alive!
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
James Carter Ruined My Life
On June 21,
1995 I posted this tale of woe on the Usenet discussion group
rec.music.bluenote. It became an internet sensation in the online jazz
world of the day: folks reposted it far and wide (I remember planning a
trip to Paris and stumbling upon it on a website devoted to jazz in
France!), and it was translated into Dutch for the Amsterdam-based
e-zine Writers Block.
Years later, jazz chanteuse Dee Dee Bridgewater used it on her NPR program Jazz Set (hearing the glorious Ms. Bridgewater purr the name “Kelly Bucheger” — intoned perfectly since her producer had contacted me to figure out how the hell to pronounce it — was a highlight for me...). I’ve met people from all over the world who’ve read it, and I still get emails about it. Lots of folks can relate to the experience, and have been through similar things themselves — when you’re striving to excel in any discipline, there will always be somebody out there better than you. And some of those folks will be younger than you. Get used to it.
My adventures with James were ultimately a sort of “vaccination” for me — I had my musical “mid-life crisis” at the age of 24(!!), which has given me plenty of time to ... get over it! In the years since, I’ve encountered plenty of dazzling younger players who’ve amazed and impressed me. Instead of inducing me to ditch the horn, I just want to practice more. I mean, once you’ve been humbled by the best: bring ’em on!
There are also some postscripts to this story, but I’ll save that for ... you know ... after the story. Anyways, maybe you’ve read this before, or maybe it’s new to you, but here’s the true tale of my brush with (young) jazz greatness...
Years later, jazz chanteuse Dee Dee Bridgewater used it on her NPR program Jazz Set (hearing the glorious Ms. Bridgewater purr the name “Kelly Bucheger” — intoned perfectly since her producer had contacted me to figure out how the hell to pronounce it — was a highlight for me...). I’ve met people from all over the world who’ve read it, and I still get emails about it. Lots of folks can relate to the experience, and have been through similar things themselves — when you’re striving to excel in any discipline, there will always be somebody out there better than you. And some of those folks will be younger than you. Get used to it.
My adventures with James were ultimately a sort of “vaccination” for me — I had my musical “mid-life crisis” at the age of 24(!!), which has given me plenty of time to ... get over it! In the years since, I’ve encountered plenty of dazzling younger players who’ve amazed and impressed me. Instead of inducing me to ditch the horn, I just want to practice more. I mean, once you’ve been humbled by the best: bring ’em on!
There are also some postscripts to this story, but I’ll save that for ... you know ... after the story. Anyways, maybe you’ve read this before, or maybe it’s new to you, but here’s the true tale of my brush with (young) jazz greatness...
In the summer of 1985 I was preparing to tour Europe with a big band fronted by Detroit trumpeter Marcus Belgrave. The band was made up of faculty and staff of Michigan’s Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, and was a very hot group — in addition to Marcus and Detroit piano legend Harold McKinney, we had folks who’d played with Buddy Rich, Woody Herman, and other name big bands.
Due to an ego-meltdown on the part of one of the guys who was supposed to tour in the sax section, it was announced that his replacement was going to be this 16-year-old kid from Detroit, a camper who was at that moment touring Europe with a Blue Lake student group, but was due back in a couple of weeks. Despite considerable skepticism on the part of some of us (including me), folks who knew this kid, including Marcus, said he’d do fine — and besides, he was going to hold the second tenor chair: what harm could he do?
His name was James Carter.
I was the first tenor player...
As I began to hear more and more testimonials about James along the lines of “oh, this kid’s a muther, just you wait, you’ll be amazed,” I started to view his arrival with a little apprehension. As the only guy in the band who’d be playing the same axe as this kid, I didn’t want to be amazed. I was 24 years old, so I had eight years on him. He couldn’t be that hot. I wanted him to stay out of the way, do a competent job, and that’s about it. In a big band, there’s the first tenor player, and then there’s some other guy. As the first tenor player in this band, I thought this scheme had its merits....
One day, between sessions, during that languid pause when faculty and staff hang out and talk about what a great place camp is when there aren’t any kids around, somebody I hadn’t heard before was in the woods wailing on a tenor sax. James was due back, and I realized it had to be him.
Damn! I was in trouble.
Believe it or not, James at 16 was not all that far removed from James today. He already had that massive, glorious sound. That same grandstanding confidence and youthfully exuberant tendency toward excess. He knew he was bad.
I considered him evil.
It was not like he was Mozart and I was Salieri. It was more like he was Mozart, and I was a plumber.
I became James’s baby-sitter. James was my roommate. Although I had ample opportunities to smother him with a pillow, or push him in front of a moving car, I did not do so. This may have been the greatest contribution to jazz I will ever make. I hope not.
So: how did he become the monster player he is? Well, first of all, he’s a born player. The camp had a museum of rare and exotic instruments. While most folks weren’t permitted to touch them, James, indulged as he was by everyone (sigh), got chances to give things a try. He could pick up anything, and in a matter of minutes get something happening. (A serpentine? Been there... Sackbut? Done that... Didjeridoo? Doin’ it tomorrow...)
However, that is of course only half of it. James was also, sad to say, very disciplined about practicing. Not that he’d play scales and stuff (I never heard him do that...), but rather he’d just be playing. Constantly. Always. He always had a Walkman on, playing tapes of saxophonists and figuring out their stuff. In fact, there were times when I’d awaken to James, in the dark, quietly — but not quietly enough! — trying to cop some licks off his Walkman.
“James, Jesus, it’s THREE in the morning! I’m up in a few hours! Bed time, already!”
“Sorry. I was trying to figure something out.”
It sounds like a cliché, but there were times when I’d find James asleep in bed with his horn, as if he had just one more thing to work out but didn’t quite make it... I’d gingerly take his horn and put it in its case.
Here are some of my musical recollections of James at 16: first of all, and I think this offers insight into James today — James had R&B bar-walking tenor down COLD. He could totally do that screaming blues thang (I still can’t), and it would electrify audiences.
And here’s another important thing: James was into electrifying audiences. I’ve seen him incite near riots! He’d get honking on a single note, juicing it up and fingering it about nine different ways, then let loose with a grating altissimo shriek that also happened to be exactly the right thing to do for that moment.
A trumpeter in the band, trying to cheer me up, noted that at the time James was listening to a lot of baritonist Leo Parker. “Aw, man, he’s just doin’ Leo Parker!” And in fact, I think James was getting a lot of stuff from Leo Parker back then. Though he had many other goodies in his bag of tricks as well....
While we prepared for the upcoming tour, we lived in the basement of the Heidi House, which was where the visionary founders of the camp, Fritz and Gretchen Stansell, live. I’m a good friend of their son, Tom, who lived for many years in Copenhagen with his wife and daughter — he met his wife on this tour, so it wasn’t a disaster for everybody. Tom had a great record collection, and James voraciously dived into it. I know that’s the first time he heard the Johnny Griffin/Lockjaw Davis stuff, and he seriously checked it out. (Serious is the word, too — when James heard something he liked, he didn’t smile and say “wow, that’s cool” or whatever. Instead, he’d frown and concentrate — and try to figure it out.)
On a personal level, we related together OK, I guess, considering I was the guy who’d have to get James to bed at night and up in the morning, and just in general keep him out of trouble, while at the same time I envied the hell out of him. (He was also handsome and very popular with the girls at camp — basically, he was the polar opposite of everything I was at age 16...)
James knew, and so did everybody else, that my playing couldn’t touch his. He was playing the second chair book, but taking the lion’s share of the solos — he’d just end up with them: “hey, let’s let James blow on this one, ’cuz he’s a youngster and folks will get a kick out of how well he can play.” I lived in terror that someone would propose a tenor battle: James would’ve been Julia Child, while I would have been the groggy lobster, soon to be dinner, ready for the pot.
It didn’t happen, because the other band members knew I was in a tough spot, and were gentle about it. Marcus was very cool and always encouraging to me, even though my ego and self-esteem were at a low that summer, I’m sorry to say.
And, unfortunately: James was a good kid. He had a big ego, of course — I mean, he was a 16-year-old kid who could do stuff on a sax that was phenomenal, and he knew it. And yet, he wasn’t egotistical, if that makes sense — just supremely confident. On any tune, at any tempo, in any key, if somebody would say “who wants to blow on this” he’d nod his head and get into the queue. And smoke!
If he was a kid like most kids, it wouldn’t have been surprising if he had said to me, his jail keeper, something along the lines of “I could kick your ass on tenor.” He never did that.
He did start calling me “Lip” all the time, both for the fact that I had the nervous habit of constantly cracking jokes, and because I had an embouchure problem back then that James, a natural student of the horn, spotted right away. It wasn’t said to be cruel; he just wanted to make sure that I knew he knew.
One musical vignette: in Arhus, Denmark, there was a jam session after our concert. James picked up somebody’s alto and ripped through the changes of an up-tempo Cherokee as if he were the guy who’d thought them up. Fred Noren, a fine Swedish trumpeter and member of the band (today he leads the Stockholm Jazz Orchestra), put it this way (insert Swedish accent here): “Bird, man! He sounds like Charlie Parker!”
MY NEMESIS: James getting into trouble on the band bus, somewhere in Europe.I quit playing at the end of the tour. While everybody else went home, I went to Paris to lick my wounds and spend what I made on the trip with the woman who’d eventually be my wife — she was living in Paris at the time. I renounced the saxophone because it didn’t seem like there was room for a tenor-player like me on a planet that had 16-year-old kids who could play like James.
I picked it up again about six months later, when I realized that, James or no James, if I wasn’t a saxophonist then I really didn’t know who or what I was.
I’m very proud of James and his accomplishments. I watched him work hard, and he’s earned what he’s got. However, the youthful Mr. Carter leaves me in a paradoxical position: when I grow up, I want to play like the kid!
POSTSCRIPT
In 2006, for the first time in the more than twenty years since the tour, I ran into James in New York, at a Selmer saxophone event at Steinway Hall. That evening, I was directed to a roomful of Selmer saxes available to play test. Heading down the corridor I heard an impossibly WAILING bari and instantly said to myself: “What the ... James!"
I turned the corner, and ... there he was! Last time I’d seen him, more than two decades before, he was a teenager, and I was younger. And hairier. I went up to him. He pondered me for a moment, exclaimed “Kelly!” and gave me a great big hug.
I pointed out that last time I saw him he was 16, and now he was all grown up and looking great. He said that I looked good too, which was sweet of him. Maturity has been good to James. He is a super nice and humble person, enthusiastic about music, a friendly, warm fellow. He is a great, successful adult. An inspiration, even.
I am totally glad that I never smothered him in his sleep with a pillow.
POST-POSTSCRIPT
From an interview with K. Leander Williams, published in Time Out New York:
K. LEANDER WILLIAMS: Speaking of your youth, there’s an article on a blog about you at 16 called “James Carter Ruined My Life.”
JAMES CARTER: [Laughs] Yeah, by Kelly Bucheger. We’re totally cool.
POST POST-POSTSCRIPT
In May of 2012 NPR’s jazz blog, A Blog Supreme, featured this piece. I was delighted, of course, but there was an unexpected side-effect: my blog traffic spiked insanely, prompting Google to suspend me from their AdSense program, convinced that some sort of fraud was afoot. Good times.
In 2006, for the first time in the more than twenty years since the tour, I ran into James in New York, at a Selmer saxophone event at Steinway Hall. That evening, I was directed to a roomful of Selmer saxes available to play test. Heading down the corridor I heard an impossibly WAILING bari and instantly said to myself: “What the ... James!"
I turned the corner, and ... there he was! Last time I’d seen him, more than two decades before, he was a teenager, and I was younger. And hairier. I went up to him. He pondered me for a moment, exclaimed “Kelly!” and gave me a great big hug.
I pointed out that last time I saw him he was 16, and now he was all grown up and looking great. He said that I looked good too, which was sweet of him. Maturity has been good to James. He is a super nice and humble person, enthusiastic about music, a friendly, warm fellow. He is a great, successful adult. An inspiration, even.
I am totally glad that I never smothered him in his sleep with a pillow.
POST-POSTSCRIPT
From an interview with K. Leander Williams, published in Time Out New York:
K. LEANDER WILLIAMS: Speaking of your youth, there’s an article on a blog about you at 16 called “James Carter Ruined My Life.”
JAMES CARTER: [Laughs] Yeah, by Kelly Bucheger. We’re totally cool.
In May of 2012 NPR’s jazz blog, A Blog Supreme, featured this piece. I was delighted, of course, but there was an unexpected side-effect: my blog traffic spiked insanely, prompting Google to suspend me from their AdSense program, convinced that some sort of fraud was afoot. Good times.
NEW YORK -- The steep prices, cheesy blue lights and gift
shop at the Blue Note emit a tourist trap vibe, but occasionally the
bookings at this long-standing Greenwich Village jazz spot offer
compensation. Certainly a packed house got its money's worth on the last
Tuesday in June. Saxophonist James Carter's Organ Trio blew the roof
off the club, but, then, what else is new? J.C. was on the set, and the D
was in the house.
• Video: The James Carter Organ Trio: "Come Sunday"
• Video: The James Carter Organ Trio. "Going Home"
The Detroit-born Carter, one of the most celebrated jazz prodigies of recent vintage, has matured since his wild-oats days, but at 43 he still plays like a volcano erupting. The second set opened with a cappella tenor: a long trill, loud and resonant enough to hear all the way to Harlem, ending in a violent squawk that Carter choreographed with a whiplash snap of his body. He barked. He brayed. He played the blues. He used circular breathing -- taking air through the nose without stopping the sound.
With tension at a fever pitch, the trio roared into a swinging soul-jazz groove laid down by fellow Detroiters Gerard Gibbs on organ and Leonard King on drums. Carter rode the finger-popping beat, strutting side to side, chest puffed, pinstripes flashing. He built a swaggering, spontaneous solo in his image, pushing the time and referencing a big chunk of jazz history -- from the gruff vibrato and vocalizations of the old school tenors he so worships to frenzied squeals associated with free jazz. If the bar had been closer to the stage, he might have leapt up and walked it like an R&B saxophonist of yore.
Carter's more-is-more aesthetic is not for everyone. He can turn into a circus in the blink of an eye. But if you're willing to surrender to the charisma of his virtuosity, and if his taste antennae are fully engaged as they mostly were that night, the results can be exhilarating. There's nobody else like him.
It's been more than 25 years since James Carter began turning heads in Detroit as a precocious 16-year-old man-child. Much was made early on that his initial champions (and employers) represented camps seen by many as philosophical opposites: traditionalist Wynton Marsalis and avant-garde heroes Lester Bowie and Julius Hemphill. The historical sweep of Carter's playing was highly unusual in a musician so young, and the freakish facility he revealed on every size saxophone and clarinet (plus flute) was stunning. If he was prone to showboating and reducing certain jazz idioms into tropes, well, he was frighteningly gifted and young. It wasn't clear where he was going, but you knew it would be fun to watch.
Now that he's grown up, Carter's identity has settled. More than anything, he's a gunslinger, the kind of high-energy virtuoso and benevolent assassin that can mow down friends and foes alike at a jam session. He's not a path-breaking innovator, composer or bandleader but rather a stylist of larger-than-life proportion who thrives on variety. He's the Tough Tenor of his generation, bringing the manly countenance and swing-to-bop rhythm and phrasing of heroes like Don Byas and especially Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis into a contemporary idiom.
His discography is loaded with attractive concept recordings and projects -- an homage to the nicotine-stained music of gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, a Billie Holiday tribute, a hybrid classical-jazz concerto written for him by Roberto Sierra and premiered by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Still, Carter sounds most at ease with a frisky, uncluttered rhythm section and a set list of untapped jazz repertoire and standards.
"I think James was probably born too late in that what he would love to be doing is killing other saxophonists in Kansas City in 1939 or on stage with Jazz at the Philharmonic in the '40s and '50s, duking it out with other great saxophonists," said his current producer, Michael Cuscuna. "He is so good at that; it's his essence."
Carter's cross to bear has been the same challenge all former prodigies and virtuosos face: finding ways to focus and edit, to move beyond imitation and the excesses of youth. He's getting there. At the Blue Note, he played shorter solos than in the past, relied less on rote devices and revealed a stronger sense of structure in his solos. Though many multi-instrumentalists pare down their arsenal as they age, Carter divided his time between soprano, alto and tenor.
Critics and others have varying opinions, but to me he's most compelling on tenor and two basement-register horns he left at home that night: baritone sax and bass clarinet. Don't expect Carter to mellow with age; volatility is too much a part of his DNA, and so is the exuberance he takes in his own furioso technique. But he's a wiser and more experienced musician (and man) at 43 than he was at 27.
"I want to say that there's more refinement and space in my playing now," Carter said. "I'm a bit more lyrical in my eccentricities, if you will. I listen to a whole lot more vocalists, and the more I listen, the more I incorporate certain phonetic devices they use in order to make the language of a non-vocal instrument more palatable -- where you can hear the vowels, lyrics or an implied lyric. The stories I'm trying to tell are more informed, as opposed to looking at a song from just a theoretical standpoint."
Sam Ash is a landmark instrument dealer and repair shop, and Carter is a regular. He greeted every staff member by name (and vice versa) before heading up the stairs to the inner sanctum where the repair staffers do their magic. "Sometimes we lock the store and forget he's still here," said a clerk, laughing, as Carter's blue frame vanished up the stairs.
He owns a world-class collection of rare vintage saxophones and other reed instruments. How many? He danced around the question, passively allowing that it was at least 100. He's always buying, selling, repairing. He started taking saxophones apart soon after learning to play them and could make a living as a repairman.
Donald Washington, Carter's saxophone teacher and key mentor when he was growing up in Detroit, is one of the rare people to have seen the collection. "He opened that door, and they were stacked to the ceiling," said Washington. "I didn't think he had that many. You could hardly get in the room."
Carter needed a new cork for the neck of the tenor he had brought with him, a Selmer Super Balanced Action made around 1951 that he paid $4,300 for in 2000. He also wanted to ask the cost of gold-plating the keys of a dinged-up vintage baritone sax and silver-plating the rest of the horn. Behind the counter, Josh made a phone call.
"Their price on the silver with the gold keys is $2,600."
Carter raised his eyebrow: "So, that's just the plating, not even the collision work?" He paused, dubious: "That's one to grow on."
When the neck work was done, he played an impromptu, dazzling cadenza, checking the sound from the notes below street level to those as high as the spire at the top of the Empire State Building. "This horn has over a 50-year head start on it," he said, comparing it to a new instrument.
"It's been used, obviously, but once you feel where the pearls have been worn in, it feels like it was custom-made, even though it was mostly played by someone else. Once you find those idiosyncrasies and live with them, it's like hand in glove."
Carter settled onto a stool in a cozy practice room at the back of the store and began to talk about growing up in Detroit. As he spoke, he casually assembled his tenor again, playing it once to illustrate a point but otherwise letting it rest on his knee like an infant. He has always carried the banner for Detroit. He recorded live at Baker's Keyboard Lounge, introduced the unsung veteran bebop alto sax wizard Larry Smith to a wider audience with a guest spot on a CD and has kept his bands stocked with Detroiters, even when pressured by record companies and promoters to use "name" sidemen.
Carter came from a musical family. His mother played piano and violin, a brother played guitar with Parliament Funkadelic and another brother sang in a soul band. He took up the saxophone at 11, but the big bang came a year later when he came under the wing of saxophonist Donald Washington, a sage private teacher and school band director. Carter calls him Pops.
"Pops always emphasized sound," Carter said. "That's basically your calling card. That's the first thing that's going to permeate somebody's core. If you don't have a sound, your ideas aren't going to mean anything. If a tree falls in Brooklyn but I'm on Staten Island, how are you going to get to me if you don't have that sound?"
Washington, who moved to Minneapolis in 1987, said that Carter, whom he nicknamed Mash, had the music "in his blood." Every Saturday he'd give him a lesson to learn, and by the next week Mash would have it perfect. Washington introduced him to scales and improvisation immediately. He practiced for hours on end and devoured records the way other kids inhaled burgers. He played along with the Basie, Ellington and Billie Holiday records he discovered at home and borrowed LPs from Washington and drummer Leonard King that covered the modernist waterfront.
Carter quickly became a member of Washington's legendary youth ensemble, Bird-Trane-Sco-Now, a group that nurtured several important musicians, including bassist Rodney Whitaker. The name represented a contraction of saxophonists Charlie (Bird) Parker, John Coltrane and Roscoe Mitchell. It's not unusual for junior high and high school students to play Parker and Coltrane, whose music forms the common-practice mainstream. But it's unheard of for students so young to tackle exploratory group improvisation and strategies associated with Mitchell, a member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, a seminal avant-garde band.
"I went all the way up to Mitchell and Sun Ra," said Washington. "A lot of teachers don't do that. I didn't tell them that any particular music was better than any other. But they got the whole spectrum. Mash didn't leave anybody out."
Like any great teacher, Washington's lessons transcended music. He taught students to respect their elders and members of the opposite sex, and he made sure the young men understood it would be their responsibility to provide for their families, even if things didn't go their way in a music career. He also taught them that not everybody was going to like what they did but that their responsibility was to be honest and serious with their art and themselves.
"If it wasn't for Pops, I would probably be a beaker-head scientist right now," Carter said.
Everything about his musical education was accelerated. He started attending the Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp at 14 and two summers later in 1985 toured Europe as a member of the camp's faculty band. Wynton Marsalis met him on a school visit and invited him to play a handful of gigs when he was 16. In 1988 he sat in with Lester Bowie at the Detroit Institute of Arts and two years later moved to New York. By the mid '90s he was a bona fide star and, despite the turmoil within the recording industry and the broader contraction of the jazz business, his career has shown no sign of retreat.
In the middle of the set, Carter cued up a little-known ballad by Byas called "Gloria" that's steeped in romance. Carter's a cappella introductory cadenza sneaked up on the tune, and aside from a growling multi-phonic -- where Carter played two notes at once, a playful love bite -- he played the melody with a tender caress and bedroom eyes.
King swept his brushes across the snare drum in a walking tempo, and Gibbs outlined the warm harmony. Carter's virile vibrato, wide and deep, picked up intensity, and as the tension built, you could feel the audience leaning forward, bracing for an explosion. But this time, Carter played it cool, and the music soared higher for it. With J.C. on the set, you've got to be ready for anything.
Contact Mark Stryker: 313-222-6459 mstryker@freepress.com
EVENT INFORMATION
Concert of Colors: Thursday-July 15. Midtown Detroit: Max M. Fisher Music Center, Detroit Institute of Arts, Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Free admission. 313-624-0215. www.concertofcolors
5th Don Was Detroit "All-Star Revue, Detroit Jazz City Edition Featuring James Carter, Sheila Jordan, Regina Carter, Marcus Belgrave and more. 8:15 p.m. Saturday. Orchestra Hall, Max M. Fisher Music Center. 3711 Woodward.
The James Carter Organ Trio -- Carter, tenor sax; Gerard Gibbs, organ; Leonard King, drums -- performing "Come Sunday" (Duke Ellington)
• Video: The James Carter Organ Trio: "Come Sunday"
• Video: The James Carter Organ Trio. "Going Home"
The Detroit-born Carter, one of the most celebrated jazz prodigies of recent vintage, has matured since his wild-oats days, but at 43 he still plays like a volcano erupting. The second set opened with a cappella tenor: a long trill, loud and resonant enough to hear all the way to Harlem, ending in a violent squawk that Carter choreographed with a whiplash snap of his body. He barked. He brayed. He played the blues. He used circular breathing -- taking air through the nose without stopping the sound.
With tension at a fever pitch, the trio roared into a swinging soul-jazz groove laid down by fellow Detroiters Gerard Gibbs on organ and Leonard King on drums. Carter rode the finger-popping beat, strutting side to side, chest puffed, pinstripes flashing. He built a swaggering, spontaneous solo in his image, pushing the time and referencing a big chunk of jazz history -- from the gruff vibrato and vocalizations of the old school tenors he so worships to frenzied squeals associated with free jazz. If the bar had been closer to the stage, he might have leapt up and walked it like an R&B saxophonist of yore.
Carter's more-is-more aesthetic is not for everyone. He can turn into a circus in the blink of an eye. But if you're willing to surrender to the charisma of his virtuosity, and if his taste antennae are fully engaged as they mostly were that night, the results can be exhilarating. There's nobody else like him.
Versatile prodigy
Carter returns home this week to participate in the 5th Don Was Detroit All-Star Revue on Saturday at the Concert of Colors. Organized by Was, a Grammy Award-winning pop and rock producer with a wide enough musical vision that he's become president of the Blue Note jazz label, the revue features national and local musicians tied to Detroit by birth or residence, including Carter, singer Sheila Jordan, trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, violinist Regina Carter and others.
It's been more than 25 years since James Carter began turning heads in Detroit as a precocious 16-year-old man-child. Much was made early on that his initial champions (and employers) represented camps seen by many as philosophical opposites: traditionalist Wynton Marsalis and avant-garde heroes Lester Bowie and Julius Hemphill. The historical sweep of Carter's playing was highly unusual in a musician so young, and the freakish facility he revealed on every size saxophone and clarinet (plus flute) was stunning. If he was prone to showboating and reducing certain jazz idioms into tropes, well, he was frighteningly gifted and young. It wasn't clear where he was going, but you knew it would be fun to watch.
Now that he's grown up, Carter's identity has settled. More than anything, he's a gunslinger, the kind of high-energy virtuoso and benevolent assassin that can mow down friends and foes alike at a jam session. He's not a path-breaking innovator, composer or bandleader but rather a stylist of larger-than-life proportion who thrives on variety. He's the Tough Tenor of his generation, bringing the manly countenance and swing-to-bop rhythm and phrasing of heroes like Don Byas and especially Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis into a contemporary idiom.
His discography is loaded with attractive concept recordings and projects -- an homage to the nicotine-stained music of gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, a Billie Holiday tribute, a hybrid classical-jazz concerto written for him by Roberto Sierra and premiered by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Still, Carter sounds most at ease with a frisky, uncluttered rhythm section and a set list of untapped jazz repertoire and standards.
"I think James was probably born too late in that what he would love to be doing is killing other saxophonists in Kansas City in 1939 or on stage with Jazz at the Philharmonic in the '40s and '50s, duking it out with other great saxophonists," said his current producer, Michael Cuscuna. "He is so good at that; it's his essence."
Carter's cross to bear has been the same challenge all former prodigies and virtuosos face: finding ways to focus and edit, to move beyond imitation and the excesses of youth. He's getting there. At the Blue Note, he played shorter solos than in the past, relied less on rote devices and revealed a stronger sense of structure in his solos. Though many multi-instrumentalists pare down their arsenal as they age, Carter divided his time between soprano, alto and tenor.
Critics and others have varying opinions, but to me he's most compelling on tenor and two basement-register horns he left at home that night: baritone sax and bass clarinet. Don't expect Carter to mellow with age; volatility is too much a part of his DNA, and so is the exuberance he takes in his own furioso technique. But he's a wiser and more experienced musician (and man) at 43 than he was at 27.
"I want to say that there's more refinement and space in my playing now," Carter said. "I'm a bit more lyrical in my eccentricities, if you will. I listen to a whole lot more vocalists, and the more I listen, the more I incorporate certain phonetic devices they use in order to make the language of a non-vocal instrument more palatable -- where you can hear the vowels, lyrics or an implied lyric. The stories I'm trying to tell are more informed, as opposed to looking at a song from just a theoretical standpoint."
World-class collector
The afternoon of Carter's gig at the Blue Note, he walked into Sam Ash Music in the theater district with a wide grin and a tenor saxophone case slung over his shoulder. Well over 6 feet tall and built like a linebacker, Carter is a handsome man with fleshy cheeks and an imperial presence and manner of speaking. Dressed in a baby blue track suit and a custom straw cap, he was a peacock in the heart of Manhattan. Married with two children, he divides his time between a New York apartment and a home in Detroit.
Sam Ash is a landmark instrument dealer and repair shop, and Carter is a regular. He greeted every staff member by name (and vice versa) before heading up the stairs to the inner sanctum where the repair staffers do their magic. "Sometimes we lock the store and forget he's still here," said a clerk, laughing, as Carter's blue frame vanished up the stairs.
He owns a world-class collection of rare vintage saxophones and other reed instruments. How many? He danced around the question, passively allowing that it was at least 100. He's always buying, selling, repairing. He started taking saxophones apart soon after learning to play them and could make a living as a repairman.
Donald Washington, Carter's saxophone teacher and key mentor when he was growing up in Detroit, is one of the rare people to have seen the collection. "He opened that door, and they were stacked to the ceiling," said Washington. "I didn't think he had that many. You could hardly get in the room."
Carter needed a new cork for the neck of the tenor he had brought with him, a Selmer Super Balanced Action made around 1951 that he paid $4,300 for in 2000. He also wanted to ask the cost of gold-plating the keys of a dinged-up vintage baritone sax and silver-plating the rest of the horn. Behind the counter, Josh made a phone call.
"Their price on the silver with the gold keys is $2,600."
Carter raised his eyebrow: "So, that's just the plating, not even the collision work?" He paused, dubious: "That's one to grow on."
When the neck work was done, he played an impromptu, dazzling cadenza, checking the sound from the notes below street level to those as high as the spire at the top of the Empire State Building. "This horn has over a 50-year head start on it," he said, comparing it to a new instrument.
"It's been used, obviously, but once you feel where the pearls have been worn in, it feels like it was custom-made, even though it was mostly played by someone else. Once you find those idiosyncrasies and live with them, it's like hand in glove."
A mentor's influence
Carter settled onto a stool in a cozy practice room at the back of the store and began to talk about growing up in Detroit. As he spoke, he casually assembled his tenor again, playing it once to illustrate a point but otherwise letting it rest on his knee like an infant. He has always carried the banner for Detroit. He recorded live at Baker's Keyboard Lounge, introduced the unsung veteran bebop alto sax wizard Larry Smith to a wider audience with a guest spot on a CD and has kept his bands stocked with Detroiters, even when pressured by record companies and promoters to use "name" sidemen.
Carter came from a musical family. His mother played piano and violin, a brother played guitar with Parliament Funkadelic and another brother sang in a soul band. He took up the saxophone at 11, but the big bang came a year later when he came under the wing of saxophonist Donald Washington, a sage private teacher and school band director. Carter calls him Pops.
"Pops always emphasized sound," Carter said. "That's basically your calling card. That's the first thing that's going to permeate somebody's core. If you don't have a sound, your ideas aren't going to mean anything. If a tree falls in Brooklyn but I'm on Staten Island, how are you going to get to me if you don't have that sound?"
Washington, who moved to Minneapolis in 1987, said that Carter, whom he nicknamed Mash, had the music "in his blood." Every Saturday he'd give him a lesson to learn, and by the next week Mash would have it perfect. Washington introduced him to scales and improvisation immediately. He practiced for hours on end and devoured records the way other kids inhaled burgers. He played along with the Basie, Ellington and Billie Holiday records he discovered at home and borrowed LPs from Washington and drummer Leonard King that covered the modernist waterfront.
Carter quickly became a member of Washington's legendary youth ensemble, Bird-Trane-Sco-Now, a group that nurtured several important musicians, including bassist Rodney Whitaker. The name represented a contraction of saxophonists Charlie (Bird) Parker, John Coltrane and Roscoe Mitchell. It's not unusual for junior high and high school students to play Parker and Coltrane, whose music forms the common-practice mainstream. But it's unheard of for students so young to tackle exploratory group improvisation and strategies associated with Mitchell, a member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, a seminal avant-garde band.
"I went all the way up to Mitchell and Sun Ra," said Washington. "A lot of teachers don't do that. I didn't tell them that any particular music was better than any other. But they got the whole spectrum. Mash didn't leave anybody out."
Like any great teacher, Washington's lessons transcended music. He taught students to respect their elders and members of the opposite sex, and he made sure the young men understood it would be their responsibility to provide for their families, even if things didn't go their way in a music career. He also taught them that not everybody was going to like what they did but that their responsibility was to be honest and serious with their art and themselves.
"If it wasn't for Pops, I would probably be a beaker-head scientist right now," Carter said.
Everything about his musical education was accelerated. He started attending the Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp at 14 and two summers later in 1985 toured Europe as a member of the camp's faculty band. Wynton Marsalis met him on a school visit and invited him to play a handful of gigs when he was 16. In 1988 he sat in with Lester Bowie at the Detroit Institute of Arts and two years later moved to New York. By the mid '90s he was a bona fide star and, despite the turmoil within the recording industry and the broader contraction of the jazz business, his career has shown no sign of retreat.
A bit of restraint
Back at the Blue Note, Carter's trio continued to hit hard throughout the set. The elemental power of the organ and its grits 'n' gravy lineage suit the saxophonist's gutbucket temperament, and Gibbs and King put out enough energy to keep him stoked. No wonder the trio has lasted 10 years.
In the middle of the set, Carter cued up a little-known ballad by Byas called "Gloria" that's steeped in romance. Carter's a cappella introductory cadenza sneaked up on the tune, and aside from a growling multi-phonic -- where Carter played two notes at once, a playful love bite -- he played the melody with a tender caress and bedroom eyes.
King swept his brushes across the snare drum in a walking tempo, and Gibbs outlined the warm harmony. Carter's virile vibrato, wide and deep, picked up intensity, and as the tension built, you could feel the audience leaning forward, bracing for an explosion. But this time, Carter played it cool, and the music soared higher for it. With J.C. on the set, you've got to be ready for anything.
Contact Mark Stryker: 313-222-6459 mstryker@freepress.com
EVENT INFORMATION
Concert of Colors: Thursday-July 15. Midtown Detroit: Max M. Fisher Music Center, Detroit Institute of Arts, Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Free admission. 313-624-0215. www.concertofcolors
5th Don Was Detroit "All-Star Revue, Detroit Jazz City Edition Featuring James Carter, Sheila Jordan, Regina Carter, Marcus Belgrave and more. 8:15 p.m. Saturday. Orchestra Hall, Max M. Fisher Music Center. 3711 Woodward.
The James Carter Organ Trio -- Carter, tenor sax; Gerard Gibbs, organ; Leonard King, drums -- performing "Come Sunday" (Duke Ellington)
Thursday, January 3, 2013
In Celebration Of the Musical Brilliance, Swagger and Joie de Vivre of James Carter on His 44th Birthday!
JAMES CARTER
(b. JANUARY 3, 1969)
All,
TODAY MARKS THE 44TH BIRTHDAY OF ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST COMPELLING ARTISTS ON THIS PLANET: JAMES CARTER, MULTI-INSTRUMENTALIST, COMPOSER, AND BON VIVANT FROM DETROIT, MICHIGAN...WHO HAPPENS TO BE A MUSICAL GENIUS...
SO HAPPY BIRTHDAY BROTHER...AND IN HONOR OF BYAS, WEBSTER, PRES, BEAN, BIRD, DEXTER, TRANE, ORNETTE, ERIC, AYLER, JULIUS, WAYNE, JOE AND ALL THE REST OF THAT MIGHTY SONIC PANTHEON PAST AND PRESENT PLEASE KEEP PLAYING WITH THAT INDOMITABLE AND BEAUTIFUL ROAR OF YOURS AND DON'T (N)EVER STOP!
Kofi
IN HONOR OF JAMES CARTER ON HIS BIRTHDAY:
http://www.alwaysontherun.net/jamescarter.htm
http://www.alwaysontherun.net/jamescarter.htm
Born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1969,
James Carter began playing saxophone at age 11, first recorded with a
Detroit student ensemble in 1986 and, by 1991, had recorded with
legendary trumpeter Lester Bowie on The Organizer and contributed to the
1991 collection The Tough Young Tenors. Mastering a family of reed
instruments, from sopranino to contrabass saxophones to contrabass and
bass clarinets, James Carter mesmerized the jazz world after arriving in
New York City in 1988 to play under the auspices of Lester Bowie. His
debut recording, JC On The Set, released in Japan when Carter was a mere
23 years old, heralded the arrival of a significant and powerful new
musical force in jazz. Recorded at the same session as his debut,
Carter's next release, Jurassic Classics (1994), found him entering the
Top Jazz Albums chart for the first time. It was a feat to be echoed
with four of Carter's subsequent releases: The Real Quiet Storm (1995),
Conversin' With The Elders (1996), In Carterian Fashion (1998), and
Chasin' The Gypsy (2000). Gardenias For Lady Day is the first James
Carter collection since the simultaneous release, in June 2000, of
Layin' In The Cut, an electric jazz/funk collective jam session, and
Chasin' The Gypsy, an homage to Django Reinhardt. In a review of those
two albums, Rolling Stone (August 3, 2000) asserted that
"....saxophonist James Carter is as near as jazz gets nowadays to a
Young Turk -- not some ironically avant-post-rock experimentalist but a
cocky scene stealer with...a knack for coming up with noticeable
records." Carter has performed, either live or in the studio, with the
Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the late Julius Hemphill, Ronald Shannon
Jackson, the Charles Mingus Big Band, soprano Kathleen Battle, Aretha
Franklin, David Murray, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Ginger Baker, Sonny
Rollins, and many others. He appeared in the 1994 PBS telecast of "Live
At Lincoln Center" and portrayed saxophonist Ben Webster in Robert
Altman's 1996 film, "Kansas City." James Carter recently topped
Downbeat's annual Critics Poll in the Baritone Saxophone category for
the third year in a row.
http://www.jazzhistoryonline.com/James_Carter_Interview.html
James Carter -- Concerto for Saxophones:
http://jamescarterlive.com/
James Carter Official Site, Fan Sites, Photos, Pictures:
www.alwaysontherun.net
http://www.jazzonthetube.com/page/7189.html
BOMB Magazine
James Carter. Photo by Cheung Ching-Ming. Courtesy of Atlantic Records.
About saxophonist James Carter, they say a “prodigious talent,”
exciting, exceptional. I find him bodacious, but also smooth as his
awesome long notes. It’s obvious after a listen, he’s got technique
stacked to the rafters. No exaggeration. James Carter picked up a
saxophone to play jazz 11 years after his birth in Detroit on January
3rd, 1969. The same year, he went backstage summoning Count Basie’s
counsel. He never willingly missed a Saturday lesson with Donald
Washington, whose wisdom dealt with life, staying open to all idioms of
music and developing chops—“James, you’re suckin’ in, you got to play
out." Carter toured Scandanavia in a student band, but before graduation
ended up in the Blue Lake Monster Ensemble with Harold McKinney and
Marcus Belgrave. With flying colors Carter passed an impromptu oral exam
conducted by Wynton Marsalis, and while in high school accepted
Wynton’s invitation to join his road band that featured
Hot House Flowers
(Columbia, 1986) at symphony gigs in New Orleans, Chicago, and Denver.
After hearing Carter play in 1988, Lester Bowie gave him his debut gig
in the Big Apple. This led to Carter adding to the groove on two DIW
recordings of the New York Organ Ensemble with Lester Bowie—
Funky T, Cool T
and
The Organizer
. Bowie can pinpoint Carter’s forté: “He’s a real continuation of the
tenor tradition. We call most of the other guys of his generation
’Fraidy Cats because they have been scared into being safe, by looking
backward and then, really not contributing anything to the language. I
think James is making a genuine contribution.” Determined to be among
the heroic virtuosos of jazz, James Carter puts into practice Donald
Washington axioms: “You don’t own the music. Somebody wants it, give it
to ’em. Tell ’em where you got it from.” Carter does this on CD and in
the following interview. But it’s at a live gig where audiences get a
sense of how Carter’s bravura is tempered by DWU wisdom he’s made his
own. “You’re not bigger than the art because everybody’s playing the
same notes. It’s really what you make out of them. The art will be here
when you go, you just got to make your mark.” For James Carter, those
words translate into the Mercury of his mission.
http://www.jazzhistoryonline.com/James_Carter_Interview.html
The James Carter Interview
by Marissa Dodge
by Marissa Dodge
Saxophonist
James Carter has been part of the New York jazz scene for over 20
years. His imaginative, risk-taking style has brought both fans and
detractors, but the
energetic spirit of his playing has brought some of those detractors
over to his side. Carter discusses that and tells about the creation and
recording of a new saxophone concerto with Jazz History Online's
Marissa Dodge.
Marissa Dodge: Considering that Caribbean Rhapsody is both a departure from your other
recordings and a new composition, what was your approach to this project?
James Carter: I think the process was easier because I was there
since the inception of the piece, and I had some say every step of the way on
what was going to be written and on what was going to be executed. So that took
a whole lot of pain out of it, as opposed to a previous situation that happened
in 2000 where a Dutch composer came to me and already
had the composition
written out with me in mind, but I didn’t have any musical or intellectual
input prior to rehearsal. I wasn’t able to deal with that at that particular
time anyway because I was dealing with two albums simultaneously; “Layin’ in the
Cut,” and “Chasin' the Gypsy.” When Roberto Sierra pitched the concerto to me, he
said, “I’ve been listening to a good portion of your discography to date, and
I’d like to write a concerto for you.” My heart immediately sank, and I was
thinking about my experience with the Dutch composer. But Roberto said that
we’d get together and discuss certain excerpts and things like that. So I had
some involvement in what the final ink was going to be, so that took some of
the angst out of it. At the same time it also fueled me to a point where I had
some liberties. The main thing at the world premiere was making sure that the
time factor was as tight as possible, as far as reading the music and the
improv sections. The written sections were pretty much a synergy—one and the
same, and as a result, we were able to get through it. As time progressed, I
was able to relax on certain things and I was able to hear different nuances,
to hear the tenor and the soprano with more of a human quality as opposed to,
“OK, this section is assigned to tenor, this piece is assigned to soprano,”
it’s more like, “This is the male and this is the female role now,” and as a
result, this opened up a lot more possibilities.
had the composition
written out with me in mind, but I didn’t have any musical or intellectual
input prior to rehearsal. I wasn’t able to deal with that at that particular
time anyway because I was dealing with two albums simultaneously; “Layin’ in the
Cut,” and “Chasin' the Gypsy.” When Roberto Sierra pitched the concerto to me, he
said, “I’ve been listening to a good portion of your discography to date, and
I’d like to write a concerto for you.” My heart immediately sank, and I was
thinking about my experience with the Dutch composer. But Roberto said that
we’d get together and discuss certain excerpts and things like that. So I had
some involvement in what the final ink was going to be, so that took some of
the angst out of it. At the same time it also fueled me to a point where I had
some liberties. The main thing at the world premiere was making sure that the
time factor was as tight as possible, as far as reading the music and the
improv sections. The written sections were pretty much a synergy—one and the
same, and as a result, we were able to get through it. As time progressed, I
was able to relax on certain things and I was able to hear different nuances,
to hear the tenor and the soprano with more of a human quality as opposed to,
“OK, this section is assigned to tenor, this piece is assigned to soprano,”
it’s more like, “This is the male and this is the female role now,” and as a
result, this opened up a lot more possibilities.
MD: Were there certain compositions,
in any genre, that you drew inspiration from as you contemplated recording this
concerto? Or was there anything you compared it to stylistically?
JC:
No. Like I said earlier, it was literally a babe in and of itself. We were
there during the conception, the finessing, and all that other good stuff all
the way up to the world premiere in 2002.
MD: Can you share some insight into
how you achieve your balance of technical execution and emotional
expressiveness, and how you blend the two so seamlessly?
JC:
The main thing is that if you have ideas of how you’re supposed to sound and
execute on any given instrument, it’s the ability to have that thought in mind.
To be able to put it in my head and say, “I want to do this and I need the
technical facility to be able to do this particular thing,” but don’t get
involved to the point where it winds up being a crutch, so to speak. It’s more
or less a facilitator, the technical ends aren’t the ends in and of itself.
MD: What are the internal differences
between classical and jazz for you? Are you using different skills or different
parts of your mind for each?
JC: I knew there are a particular set of parameters
that had to be used in order to play any particular genre, but I never said to
myself, “I’m going to play like Sigurd Rascher or Frederick Hemke or Marcel
Mule”. Once again, with the inception of this piece, the operative thing is
that it was written with me in mind and the particular talents that I’m able
I’m able to bestow. The same thing goes with cats who write certain pieces for
Ornette Coleman. There was a piece that he was supposed to play but Ornette was
having health troubles and couldn’t play it at the time. The composer had
Ornette in mind when he composed the piece. That was the same with Roberto
Sierra when he wrote for me. He didn’t have Marcel Mule in mind with an assist
by me to do that. As a result, it was a piece that I could say, I don’t have to
separate myself or put on the “classical hat” in order to get through it. It
was me superimposed with a symphony orchestra. And there was always the further
coaxing of Roberto saying, “Man, let it hang out, let it fly, let it happen,
just be you.”
MD: So there was a jazz spirit at the
sessions?
JC:
Not only that, but I think this also might also answer a question that you
posed earlier about my influences and inspiration when I prepared for this
concerto. I love vocalists and in the
classical genre, I dig Caruso. He certainly influenced a good portion of what’s
happening not only within the classical genre but within music as a whole.
MD: You do have a singer’s vibe on
the recording, there’s an operatic dynamic about it.
JC:
I don’t know if it was a conscious thing, but if you listen to Chu Berry—particularly his things
from the mid to late 30s—he definitely had an operatic delivery in his approach
to tenor. That’s one thing I definitely dug about him. Listen to his “Body and
Soul” of 1938, it sounds like Caruso to me. But directly from a saxophone
standpoint, Chu Berry
embodied the Caruso influence, and I took that and kind of ran with that from
there and just dealt with voices. As the piece became a bit more familiar to me
and I was able to let go of certain constraints, I was able to concentrate on
the gender preferences that I mentioned between tenor and soprano and actually
imply them in the piece.
MD: When you’re playing in different
styles are there specific musicians or pieces that you think of when you’re
capturing each style?
JC:
I believe that jazz or music basically is an art of the moment. There are
several mitigating factors from one live performance or one recording to the
next, so I can’t say that there’s a consistent stream of things that influence
across the board. I can’t say that it’s the drummer or the mouthpiece I’m using
or anything else that’s going to influence it. It’s whatever the vibe is at the
time. I think if you keep yourself open, the choice and the applications and
the executions are infinite.
MD: A musician’s development includes
the process of imitating other musicians before they find their own style. Do
you remember when you felt you’d found your true voice?
JC:
You always have to pay a toll musically and give homage and all. But I think
one of the ultimate compliments that I received early was, I was doing
“Conversin' With The Elders” and I met up with Harry “Sweets” Edison and Buddy Tate.
These guys could say that they’ve have heard it all, and a lot of the older
guard have always said that everybody sounds the same. Here’s two guys that
were staples in the Basie band and they’re telling me, “I hear this, but at the
same time I hear you coming through it, and that‘s what‘s really hip about it.”
More recently, this happened at a jam session in Harlem.
Lou Donaldson came over to me and said, “You got a sound, man, you got a
sound.” Before that, I had heard that Lou had joked that if the club owners
wanted to make their money on me, they would have to charge for them to get out. He went from that standpoint to, “You got a
sound, man. I hear you.” So it was gratifying in that sense.
MD: What are the most important
things you’ve learned about live performance and recording?
JC:
The main thing is to stay open. You have to recognize when inspiration comes
up, and you never know how it’ll manifest at that given time. By being open,
there’s always a combination of factors that occur in a great performance. You
also have to recognize somebody else’s contribution and make the best of it. You
never get a second chance to make a first impression, particularly in music. So
listening, and being in the moment, and being able to react honestly.
MD: What are you thinking about doing
next?
JC:
The Festival of San Juan last year inspired me to bring back my old gypsy
ensemble. I still have yet to fully manifest my gospel roots. But the main
thing is always continuing to ‘shed as much as possible so I can be open for
those instant moments and make the most of them.
MD: Do you meet many young people
coming up who are promising?
JC:
I just met one yesterday. I think in a whole lot of situations it’s about the
equipment that they have. Once they have a good instrument, a whole lot of
things will be able to come out. You have to look at your equipment as another
appendage and the moment that you do that, it instills a different care as to
how you take care of it. It won’t be like finding an instrument for a
particular situation, but one that mirrors a musical personality with a set up
that helps that come through. All that’s essential.
James Carter demonstrates his musical versatility
on his next CD, The James Carter Organ Trio at the Crossroads. JC
and counterparts, Gerard Gibbs, and Leonard King Jr. blend a potent brew
of blues-built, high groove tracks, and sensory ballads. The project features
compositions by jazz and blues royalty including Duke Ellington, Jack McDuff,
Julius Hemphill, Matthew Gee, Maybelle Smith, and Sarah McLawler. The CD will
be released on October 4.
Content copyright 2015. Jazz History Online.com. All rights reserved.
James Carter -- Concerto for Saxophones:
http://jamescarterlive.com/
James Carter Official Site, Fan Sites, Photos, Pictures:
www.alwaysontherun.net
http://www.jazzonthetube.com/page/7189.html
James Carter clinic in Mariachi Sax Boutique, Moscow, Russia: https://vimeo.com/37845911
James Carter, one of the most renowned
contemporary saxophone players, gave a master class at Mariachi sax
boutique, Moscow Russia.
BOMB Magazine
Artists in conversation
BOMB 50
Winter 1995
James Carter. Photo by Cheung Ching-Ming. Courtesy of Atlantic Records.
Zoë Anglesey What were your first encounters with music?
James Carter I was
born the youngest of five, all musically inclined. So that basically
explains the diversity of the music that was in the household. I mean,
throughout the course of the day I could go and hear Sly and the Family
Stone to the Beatles and Barry Manilow, Parliament Funkadelic and Jimi
Hendrix. We had the whole spectrum of music in the house. I started
listening in particular to my mother, who would play various jazz tunes,
Duke Ellington, Billie Eckstine and Count Basie. And she would also
sing if the feeling got to her. She used to play violin and piano in her
day. That’s basically where my music came from.
ZA Didn’t your brother Kevin play with Parliament Funkadelic?
JC Yeah, that was for a short
stint. He also played with the Floaters, the Platters—these were all
the groups from the disco era. And he played with Martha and the
Vandellas, Martha Reeves.
ZA Early on, you were attracted to the jazz records?
JC Yeah. I started listening
to them. My mother took me to see Count Basie in 1980, this was when he
first started performing in a wheelchair. And Billy Eckstine was also on
the bill with him. I ran away to meet both of them backstage. I’m so
glad I did because four years later the Count had passed. By this time I
already had a real desire to play saxophone. We had a boarder by the
name of Charles Green in the house who currently plays with WAR. He had
saxophones and clarinets. When the folks would be out doing various
errands, I would look at my man’s horns—their beauty. He had a
gold-plated Selmer Mark VI alto which was in mint condition.
ZA: How old were you?
JC Maybe nine or ten or
something like that because I received my first playable horn on May the
8th, in 1980. In fact, he picked it out—an old King from the mid-’20s.
ZA Your mother arranged for lessons?
JC Actually, it was my
brother who knew my teacher through a couple of gigs they had played
together. I was frustrated, wanting to play jazz but being in the fifth
grade. Certain teachers didn’t know what to say about that. Their minds
were just geared to teaching contemporary rudiments like the scales.
That was as close to a tutorial as I could get learning how to play jazz
at that particular age, until Donald Washington came along.
ZA How did that happen?
JC Kevin knew about the
frustration I was having in terms of aspiring to play jazz and wanting
to know more about it. Besides turning me on to Donald Washington, he
gave me a couple of Charlie Parker albums. Somehow he hooked it up so I
could go over and have this evaluation lesson. I stayed over there for
four hours, at the time the lessons were five dollars. Who’s going to do
that nowadays? There weren’t too many people doing that back then. And
the lessons, sometimes we wouldn’t even look at the clock. We would just
have fun in terms of his sharing the wealth of the knowledge he had. I
also learned about the harmonious relationship between music and life
and how an individual in music or in any of the arts is supposed to be
an interpreter of his environment. So in that sense, artists express
themselves about their observations through whatever means of
communication they have, be it a horn or a paintbrush or whatever. I
really got that from him. I was able to apply a whole lot of lessons
from music to life and I think that really got me by. Fortunately for me
now, I learned about the tradition and heritage of jazz at the same
time. Donald Washington consistently egged me on. He said, "Always keep
your ears and your eyes open for different things to interpret to bring
out your individuality."
Donald Washington was the first person to mention Lester
Bowie or The World Saxophone Quartet. He took me to see these
individuals when they were performing in town. I was flabbergasted,
especially with The World Saxophone Quartet, particularly because that
solidified the validity of the saxophone. I could see myself in a
situation such as that one. At the time, I wanted to do that.
ZA And you’ve done it.
JC I started playing with the
individuals of the saxophone quartet one by one. First with Hamiet
Bluiett, who told me I shouldn’t fall into the pitfalls of being
relegated to a clone of somebody who’s just regurgitating music from the
past, note for note. From all these musicians I learned about the
importance of keeping the continuum going as well as the evolution of
one’s own individual music.
ZA: Sounds like people saw your potential and invested their hopes in you.
JC It came from all fronts.
When I was young, there were those cats who thought, “Oh, he’s nice and
cute” and all that stuff, but as soon as we started getting older and
looking for jobs (laughter) this little vanity fear started
turning into, "Oh god, they’re after my gig." As long as we were these
young cats who were really not stepping on their toes, meaning their
jobs and reputations, it was all well and good.
ZA Detroit had been abandoned by the car industry, so people were in great need of work. It’s understandable.
JC Especially considering the
scarcity of venues for jazz musicians out there. It’s a sad situation. I
caught the tail end, I think, of the heyday of Detroit. There were
always individuals who came to town to play, and possibly recruit. It
started going downhill in ’84. Pops, as I call Donald Washington, got
the hell out of Detroit. He put the idea in my head that it might be
good to relocate. He could see it getting progressively worse. He could
also see somebody who was just getting started wind up in this little
niche. I go back and see cats that I grew up listening to, and they’re
playing the same licks on the same tunes. There’s no musical growth
happening because there is no incentive.
ZA Now that you’re in New
York—you’re playing, you’re recording—do you feel like you have
something to offer to some young kid in Detroit, or is it enough to have
your music out on CD?
JC Actually, I look forward
to bringing individuals out of Detroit, at least until the situation
gets better. As soon as they get away, they can see what jazz is
about—not only upholding, but expounding on the tradition.
ZA When you say you have had the opportunity to get people out of Detroit, are you referring to your own band members?
JC Yes. I told my pianist
Craig Taborn as soon as the situation comes up. I’m going to get you out
of there because this isn’t the place for a cat to be with your talent.
You’ve got a hell of a gift, and it should be someplace where it can be
amplified in a positive light. So we got Craig out; he’s done two
albums with me and he’s recorded his own trio album.
ZA How did you first meet Julius Hemphill?
JC Well, I met him and all
the rest of them with The World Saxophone Quartet in 1982 when they were
playing in Detroit for a one-nighter. Donald Washington introduced me.
It was more or less a “very nice to meet you” type of thing. You know,
keep on keepin’ on. Six years later I meet Hamiett Bluitt. These were
some of my heroes.
ZA Who are some others?
JC Musicians who really
stress their individualism, who don’t conform—anybody who’s going for
their own sound instead of just looking at a book and learning this or
that solo. By learning somebody else’s solo, you’re basically learning a
finished product that another musician accomplished. So my heroes are
the ones who go against those traditions. And of course my teacher
Donald Washington who’s to me like Elijah Muhammed was to Malcolm X. I’m
forever in his debt because if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be playing
saxophone or even thinking about music. I’d probably be a Poindexter
because I was interested in computers, chemistry and biology. As soon as
a saxophone came into my hands, all that took a back seat.
ZA You pay homage to Sun Ra on JC on the Set. Did you ever meet him?
JC One of my colleagues in
Detroit, Anthony Holland, gave me a cassette of Sun Song and Sun Ra
recordings from the late ’50s. They were swinging. He still doesn’t get
his just due as far as being a band leader.
ZA But you’re going to give him his due?
JC Definitely. I’m just
expounding on what has been basically forgotten from this early period.
He certainly didn’t want to remember because he was moving on. Jaribu
and Tani would have a 12-hour rehearsal and then they wouldn’t even play
anything that they’d rehearsed before. So I heard jazz in Silhouette and the reissues on Evidence
of old Sun Ra compositions from the late ’50s to the ’70s. One of the
CDs had this song, “The Hour of Parting” with Hobart Potson playing the
trumpet and just the arrangement on it made me think hey, I’ve gotta
record this. There’s a wellspring of knowledge in Sun Ra’s material.
It’s kind of sad that it’s being swept under the rug for something
that’s more superficial. He will be documented in my work.
ZA How do you choose your
colleagues? You have leader status now and you could choose anyone who’s
available. What’s your standard?
JC Well, everyone in my
quartet but Craig, we’ve played together for ten years. Jaribu Shahid
and Tani Tabbal and I were part of the Creative Arts Collective that
performed at the Detroit Institute of Arts Recital Hall every year.
That’s how we basically got the rapport happening in terms of knowing
what each member was capable of. When I met Craig in ’89 he added to our
flexibility.
ZA What do you mean by flexibility?
JC Going from one musical expression to another.
ZA Do you mean styles that correspond to periods of music?
JC Well, we’ve played in
ragtime situations together, we’ve played in traditional jazz situations
and we’ve also played “out,” which we will continue to do. We continue
to bring these styles of music up to date via our thoughts, feelings and
how we express them.
ZA Would you comment about the labeling in jazz? There seems to be a covert war going on because of it.
JC I feel labeling is a bunch
of bull. Usually a group of individuals label something to feel that
they’ve conquered it in one form or another. For example, someone might
say, “Oh yeah, that’s avant-garde,” and feel confident about this
pronouncement, but to the artist, it might not be the case. Labeling is
just a convenient way of saying, “I don’t understand what’s going on.”
It’s just a cop-out.
ZA Amiri Baraka wrote,
"Swing, the verb, meant a simple reaction to the music, and as it
developed in verb usage, a way of reacting to anything in life. As it
was formalized and the term and the music taken further out of context,
swing became a noun that meant a commercial popular music in cheap
imitation of a kind of Afro-American music. From verb to noun means the
erasure of black inventiveness by white appropriation." He’s saying
something similar.
JC Yeah, like bebop, which
was uptown before it made its way downtown, but going downtown is how it
legitimized itself. I mean it was legitimized from downbeat one. If
it’s music and it’s vibration, then it has already legitimized itself
regardless of its origins.
ZA How did you meet Wynton Marsalis?
JC It was in March of ’85,
our high school was the focal point for a citywide workshop, meaning
that people even from the suburbs came down to see and hear him talk.
ZA Did he play with you guys?
JC Yeah. He played “Night In
Tunisia” with us. Afterwards I talked with him and what started out to
be a small talk turned out to be an extra hour—just he and I hanging at
the piano. He started playing notes and from there he went into the
chords. I had my back turned and he’d say, “what’s this,” and I’d say,
"That’s a D minor eleventh," and then he’d ask, “what’s this,” and I’d
say, “that’s a B flat with a raised ninth.” Then he started playing a
little something in D minor and asked me to play along with him. I
started playing along with him and he was like, “Yeah, yeah.” So we
exchanged addresses and all of that good stuff. That was the last time I
saw him up until I got this call in November of 1985. This was after
the Blue Lake tours of Europe and all and our first hit was at Blues
Alley in D.C. in the middle of December of ’85. Because I was a
sophomore at that time, I was out with him like a week tops. We also
played “Caravan of Dreams” in Texas, which was my last hit with him in
’87.
ZA How’d you keep from getting a big head?
JC I was basically taking it
in moderation. I knew what I was dealing with and my teacher always kept
me anchored by saying keep your eyes on the prize, and I went on ahead
and just played. But at the same time I had a certain sense of pride
that out of all the individuals in Detroit, I got picked to do these
hits. I could have gotten egotistical because I’d been picked, rather
than living up to it in terms of playing. I guess I survived.
ZA And since then you’ve played with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra?
JC That’s when Wynton and I got back into a real rapport. So it was cool.
ZA As a collector who restores vintage horns, how many do you have?
JC I own 11 tenors, eight or
nine altos, and the whole clarinet family. A whole lot of the
acquisitions have come about through pawn shops or something of that
nature.
ZA What is it about collecting that’s important to you?
JC I was real fascinated with
taking my first instrument apart. That’s how it initially got started,
just taking it apart and putting it back together. The first time, it
took me like seven hours to take it apart and put it back together and
now I can do it within an hour. I just got a few to learn how to repair
them.
ZA These vintage instruments, after you work on them do you sell them?
JC Not really. In certain
cases I’ve gotten rid of some just to get something that’s better. I
received this message from a pawn shop I do business with that they had a
really hip vintage Conn in mint condition. I called them up and said,
"Hold that horn for me and I can bring down this other horn for a
trade." In fact, it’s the Conn that I’m playing on my album. The lacquer
was untouched since 1941 which was the year it was made. I have a
certain enthusiasm for doing this because after World War II, they
started making cheaper instruments. And they started adding alloys to
what used to be pure brass to stretch the metal.
ZA What’s happening with Jurassic Classics?
JC It will be out in the spring.
ZA How do you feel about bringing rap and jazz together?
JC It’s like what happened
with Afro-Cuban jazz, the marriage of urban mambo and jazz, through
Dizzy Gillespie and others. In fact, Vernon Reid of Living Color and I
exchanged ideas. It was smoking! What the DJs added in vocabulary like
from James Brown grooves, was all about the rhythm and keeping the pulse
happening. It’s like a hip version of Hooked on Phonics with a whole
other swing in the back. It’s definitely a different flavor, which I
guess for some people is an acquired taste.
ZA What do you listen to that we might not expect?
JC To this day I listen to
Caruso because I get a whole lot from what he was doing voice-wise. I
notice the integrity he had when he was singing and I try to transfer
that integrity, conviction and intensity that he had in his voice, to
what I express through the saxophone. You’re really supposed to be
getting at the majesty of the individual, rather than the finished
product. The majesty consists of what it took to get to that finished
product. Even though I do all the solos on Coltrane’s Giant Steps,
I keep in mind what it took for him to get there. It’s a whole lot more
comprehensive than just learning a solo. It’s definitely rewarding
because you get your own individuality out of his spirituality, rather
than just getting his notes, which is the finished product of his search
rather than your search. His spirituality gives me the incentive to
continue my search.
ZA Anyone who hears you play notices your range of techniques, but how do you work on your sound?
JC Well, listening to and
playing long tones, which is what Donald Washington brought me up on.
That was how we would start off every lesson. I would play the whole
compass of my instrument in long tones. You take each note,
chromatically start from the bottom of the instrument and hold that note
as long as you can, making it as straight as you can. Go to the next
note and on up. The exercise might last 15 minutes to a half hour. Just
constantly working on that, getting used to your setup, choosing the
reed, the horn and all. Just getting a rapport going with your
instrument and realizing that it’s just an extension of you. The sound
actually becomes a manifestation of the player. Practicing diminishes
the gap between what you can’t do and what you can.
ZA What do you want to project through your music?
JC Ultimately, there’s a
history that needs to be tapped more like the soul vibe. Peers in my
particular age group need to continue this music on all levels and all
fronts. There’s an education to be had from this music, this heritage;
as my teacher says, "Keep your eyes on the prize, study the music."
ZA You can hear the music, but can you hear the history?
JC Donald Washington showed
me how through music and history, you’re supposed to be interpreting
your environment and how they’re harmonious.
ZA I love that Nathaniel Mackey quotes Henry DeMotte at the end of Discrepant Engagement.
“The wing praises the root by taking to the limbs,” and there are many
branches from this one root. People are free to take to any branch they
want.
JC There’s also a parallel of
birds leaving the nest and starting their own thing. I can perceive
that it has more to do with individualism than clonism. When I first
went to the Blue Note for a jam session, there were six tenor players.
This particular night I brought my baritone down. The jam just sounded
like one long tenor solo. In essence, one cat finished his solo and left
the stand and then the next cat picked up where he left off and
basically stayed with the idea of the previous instrumentalist, only in a
different way and with different chords. I went up with a baritone and
just demolished the whole thing.
ZA So when you take a solo, you want to make a statement?
JC You’re always going to be
doing that. You’re not making a Bird statement, because Bird is dead.
You’re not making a Herschel Evans statement, because Herschel Evans is
dead. You’re not even making another person’s statement because you’re
not that other person.
ZA How are you the same or different from your peers, especially as to how you choose to express yourself?
JC Music as a whole gives a person a third eye, like a sixth sense, so to speak. I make music the center of my everyday life.
ZA How do you facilitate this close relationship between your art, having to work, and life?
JC You’re dealing with the
discipline that playing this music requires, and then you’re exercising
the discipline that it takes to deal with the music. Music is not
separate from the rest of my life’s necessities. Discipline also means
in the context of jazz, that I should be able to speak about whatever is
going on in the environment with some authority and hopefully offer a
viable solution for a problem. Certainly, it’s the obligation to extol
or exalt something that’s great and to bring it to somebody else’s
attention, like I’ll continue to do with Sun Ra.
ZA James, what do you aspire for in composing?
JC I have found the life of
Dorothy Dandridge intriguing. I definitely have a title, it’s called
“Case 20813.” That’s the case number associated with her whole demise.
Maybe the movements will correspond to her history—there are so many
different tones I can think of in dealing with this individual. She
represents a challenge because it requires coming up with something as
raw as some of her experiences and at the same time explaining the
grandiose dimensions of this particular individual. I’m paying homage to
where I come from. At the same time I’m also making other people aware
that this is a heritage that’s well worth delving into.
ZA When will the Atlantic recording be released?
JC Well, we went into the
studio in October, so early in ’95. It’s slow ballads and tunes that
just stroll or swing. People think that my age group doesn’t want to
deal with ballads, which is to say that we can’t make statements that
take a certain amount of time to develop. Like solos at a slow tempo are
rare. I want to articulate some ballads, especially some that aren’t
sung. I’m always having to sing about the unsung.
—Zoë Anglesey’s Stone on Stone, a bi-lingual
book of poetry by 16 American women, is just out from Open Hand Books.
She writes and translates poetry from the Spanish, and sidelines as a
jazz critic.
Multi-instrumentalist James Carter has always had eclectic tastes. That was evident on his debut, JC on the Set (Columbia, 1994), where the squeaks and blips linked him to the avant camp of Eric Dolphy and the tenor swoons nestled him comfortably within the traditional velvet of Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster.
Subsequent releases found him venturing further along each of those paths individually, splitting the new and the traditional like Proust taking Swann's Way (1913) and The Guermantes Way/ (1921) separately so as to conquer and know the full character of each. Soon entire James Carter projects were devoted to exploring the work of a single artist—Django Reinhardt on Chasin' the Gypsy (Atlantic, 2000), Billie Holiday with Gardenias for Lady Day (Columbia/Sony, 2003) and rock band Pavement for Gold Sounds(Brown Brothers, 2005).
Carter's Present Tense (Emarcy, 2008) shows him bringing it all back home. There's a Reinhardt cover ("Pour Que Ma Vie Memeure"), an ode to Dolphy ("Bro. Dolphy") and a tune purportedly delivered to Carter in a dream by Lady Day herself ("Sussa Nita"). The Motown jump of his early records also makes a strong comeback.
Yet amidst any return-to-form talk, Carter has also made much of the increased lyricism in his playing. Does that mean the record serves both as a summation of his career to this point and a launching off into something new?
"Yeah, I would definitely say that, on both ends," Carter acknowledges via phone from his home in Detroit. But the spark of the new, he says, has always been part of his game.
"[I'm] not only willing to deal with other areas, but other people and personnel as well. It seems I have a ten-year itch regarding that, because back in '98 ... with In Carterian Fashion (Atlantic), that was the first signal that I had personnel changes. It's a good thing. The nuances, the different energies, and just being able to play with [new] people."
"At the same time ... you got to deal with the [music's] nucleus," he says. "I've always been a fan of people like Duke Ellington and [Count] Basie—those nucleuses that have been together for years, and the longevity and how you can [communicate] telepathically. It's just really hip."
As an example, Carter points to his seven-year musical relationship with drummer Leonard King and organist Gerard Gibbs, a partnership kicked off by the 2001 date recorded for Live at Baker's Keyboard Lounge (Warner Bros, 2004).
"As far as I'm concerned the organ group's MJQ [Modern Jazz Quartet] for me. That's a fixed personnel. And anything that gets added—special guests and whatever—[fits] on top of that. There's no way I could see getting another organist or something like that. No. Forget it."
Yet neither King nor Gibbs is present on Present Tense (though both are part of Carter's current road team) and the extended jams of Baker's and 2005's Out of Nowhere (Halfnote Records) have been replaced on the new record by more truncated numbers. Still, Carter insists he's not trying to move away from anything. Rather, he means to expose the different paths he's constantly traveling within himself.
"I feel anything that comes up. There's always avenues of expression for whatever the vibes are that I'm feeling at the time. And the company that I'm in ... helps evoke that."
Carter says there was a conscious effort to limit the latest set to "miniature performances" in the hopes that the music would be more radio-friendly. He feels stations currently dominated by smooth jazz might be incited to expand their playlists if the time obstacle were removed.
"I'm not tired of NPR being our best friend or nothing like that, but other stations could be too if they see something that's under six or seven minutes," Carter reasons. "You hear dribs and drabs of [more classically-tinged jazzed] on some stations like CD 101.9 in New York or all the smooth jazz stations—I don't really hear it [in Detroit] on V98.7—but there are certain smooth jazz stations, particularly out on the East Coast, that give it up to the classics, every hour on the hour. They just got to give props to what their predecessors played. And I think that if people are a bit more exposed to what the traditional stance is [they'd see] it's just as viable as anything else. It's certainly viable to us—the practitioners of it. It's still relevant."View All1234Next
While Carter would likely stop short of labeling his efforts a "mission"—an attempt to restore jazz to radio for the masses—it's clear there's been a shift in his personal stance.
"I didn't get hung up with—oh my God, we're over such-and-such amount of time," he says of the Present Tense sessions. "More or less, if [a tune] felt complete there was nothing else I needed to do. 'What was the time on that?' 'Oh, it was like four minutes and twenty-three seconds.' 'Cool.'"
James Carter: Big Hat’s Odyssey
December 2003
To witness James Carter at work sometime over the past 10 years
was to feel the tug of contradictory forces. Statesmanlike yet roguish,
the saxophonist seemed coiled with enormous energies. Under his care, a
menagerie of instruments roared, shrieked and clucked-and also purred
and cooed. He played in ways both traditional and experimental, giving
the lie to an overhyped divide. At time his performances teetered on the
razor's edge of spectacle: Horn in mouth, he could appear either
quietly composed or dervishlike and unhinged. He took the stand with
brazen self-assurance, but also dignified ease-whether decked in porkpie
and pinstripes, an African dashiki or a nylon tracksuit. His music
making, although clearly devised with a public in mind, showed a
seriousness of purpose so pure as to seem impervious and self-contained.
In many ways, he was the perfect man for the age. Jazz at century's end had evolved into an incredibly complex animal, shaped by cultural affirmation and commercial irrelevance. Carter, both a throwback and a genuine original, cut a sharp-enough figure to appeal to image-makers and standard-bearers alike. On the occasion of a new millennium, and with the dual and disparate releases Chasin' the Gypsy and Layin' in the Cut, he expressed his aim in a press release "to have one foot in the past, in a musical sense, and another moving forward in time." It was a reasonable impulse for an outrageous pairing of releases, respectively harnessing the power of prewar swing and postmodern free-funk. Now, three years later, the saxophonist is poised to carry the dichotomy even deeper, and without shifting gears or taking sides. With one new album on shelves and another, very different one slated for release early next year, Carter has his bases covered.
Inspired by an old haunt and an old muse, Carter has distilled his myriad influences into an essence.
James Carter was born in Detroit on the third day of 1969. The last of five siblings, he entered a world brimming with song. His older brothers and sisters were all musically inclined, and his mother was a jazz fan with a particular ear for singers. On the airwaves at the time, Jim Gallert's Jazz Yesterday featured prewar fare from as early as the teens and '20s, while other programs on WDET-FM, Detroit's excellent public radio station, mined the explorations of the AACM.
So Carter had heard plenty of saxophone by the time he acquired his first horn, a King alto, at age 11. He wasted no time before learning to play along to records; one early favorite was a Columbia double LP called The Billie Holiday Story, Vol. III, which featured Lester Young.
In junior high, Carter found a place under the wing of Donald Washington, a Detroit saxophonist and one-man educational institution. The older musician became a paternal presence for Carter, whose own father had passed when he was two years old. "Pops," as the younger player has called him, imparted not only his devotion to saxophone technique but also to a free and open mind. Carter would later muse to All About Jazz that, partly thanks to Washington, his formative influences came from opposite poles: "[Albert] Ayler on one side and [Johnny] Hodges on the other. Bird and Trane came later, in retrospect." This late embrace of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane was unorthodox then, as now: Carter's playing is still partly distinguishable by the absence of those titans' turns of phrase. It's a small irony that his first ensemble experience took place in a Washington-led student group christened Bird-Trane-Sco-Now. Of the four syllables, only the last seems particularly relevant to the saxophonist's aesthetic pursuits.
There were other mentors who held powerful sway, in and around Detroit. Miche Braden, a lifelong friend of the Carters and one of the city's top vocalists in those years, recalls connecting with the saxophonist when he was all of 16. "I'm a bit older than he is. I was part of the crowd that he was trying to be around. Now he's surpassed most of us." Carter, in turn, is quick to credit the jazz microcosm of his youth. He still attributes much of his accomplishment to the influence of "the D-Town cats."
Yet it was a pair of out-of-towners who catalyzed the most dramatic impact on his career. Both were trumpeters, and both were figureheads, if not icons. And the outcome of Carter's interaction with each of them is telling.
The first of these was Wynton Marsalis, sharp-suited steward of the neoclassical age, who heard Carter during a high school clinic in 1985. By the end of that year, the trumpeter had invited Carter to join his quintet for an engagement at Blues Alley in Washington, D.C. At the time, Carter was just shy of 17; over the next year and a half, he would work regularly with the band. But as Carter later described it, the gig was an imperfect fit, given Marsalis' disdain for his wilder improvisational outbursts. Years later he would join Marsalis again-but strictly in the context of large ensembles like the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and the Pulitzer-winning opera Blood on the Fields, where Carter's role was clearly prescribed.
The second powerful figure to enter Carter's world around this time was Lester Bowie, agent provocateur of the post-'60s jazz avant-garde. With his white lab coat, madcap antics and arsenal of unconventional sounds, Bowie was the antithesis of Marsalis-style conservatism. Yet his work was no less serious: Whether in the Art Ensemble of Chicago or at the helm of solo projects, Bowie expressed a deep musical intent. He and Carter met while sharing a Detroit concert stage in 1988; soon afterward Bowie invited Carter to join his New York Organ Ensemble. Within two years the younger musician had moved to the Big Apple, crashing for a spell in Bowie's Brooklyn apartment.
Carter wholeheartedly embraced Bowie's aesthetics, including the dream of a progressive music with proletariat appeal. Yet Marsalis, for his part, had not receded totally into shadow: Carter continued to share the trumpeter's dedication to dazzling technical prowess, his devotion to the prebop canon and his fondness for stylish attire. So while it's tempting to cast Marsalis and Bowie as the angel and devil perched on either of Carter's shoulders (especially given Lester's Mephistophelian, two-pronged goatee), the truth is that neither artist wholly consumed his vision. And as Carter absorbed their opposing forces into his own neutral charge, an unclassifiable style emerged.
For an artist so closely associated with daredevil feats, James Carter is, by many accounts, a creature of familiar comforts. Or, perhaps more accurately, he's a creature of fastidious tastes who carefully establishes parameters and then comfortably wanders within them. Arriving five minutes early for a dinner interview, I find the saxophonist already standing at curbside, restlessly eyeing the traffic on Broadway. It's a crisp early-October evening, and Carter is dressed in a patterned pantsuit, leather jacket and spitfire newsboy cap. He nods as I approach. "I was just wondering what I should do if I had some time on my hands," he says.
Carter has selected the Tomo Sushi & Sake Bar, one of several neighborhood restaurants in his regular repertoire. For the past eight years, he has resided in the same apartment on West 106th Street, a stretch officially designated as Duke Ellington Boulevard; before that, he lived on another part of 106th, across Central Park on the East Side. As we take a table in the far corner, he muses about the delicate art of sushi-restaurant selection. "You know how it is," he says. "You can't eat just anybody's sushi."
A moment later, he spots a speck in his shoyu dish, inspects it and sets it aside-an observance he would later repeat with his bowl of miso soup. The menu goes unopened and he orders a sashimi platter, steamed edamame and two pieces of barbecue eel.
The previous night, Carter had attended a memorial service for Frank Lowe, a saxophonist of considerable repute among jazz's free-blowing ranks. "Next month was about to be the 15th anniversary of us knowing each other," he explains. "I met him under the auspices of Lester Bowie when I first came here as a musician, back in November 1988." Not long afterward, Lowe formed a group called the SaxEmble featuring Carter and several other reedists, including alto saxophonist Cassius Richmond, another Detroit alumnus of Bird-Trane-Sco-Now. Through Lowe, Carter met even more heavyweights of the progressive calling. Many of the members of this community-like Amina Claudine Myers, Billy Bang and Rashied Ali-had turned up at Lowe's memorial. "At the end," Carter says, "all the musicians who had instruments got together and we played Frank Lowe's piece 'Nothing But Love.' It was a real great way to end."
Paying tribute comes naturally to Carter. His playing is thick with sly acknowledgement and subtle homage. In 1996 he went so far as to release Conversin' With the Elders (Atlantic)-assembling a gallery of heroes with whom he joyfully locked horns. Bowie was of course among them, as was baritone saxophone legend Hamiet Bluiett, of the World Saxophone Quartet. More surprising was the presence of trumpeter Harry "Sweets" Edison and tenor Buddy Tate, best known for their work with the Count Basie Orchestra; and Larry Smith, an alto saxophonist of no reputation beyond his hometown of Detroit (where he is a local institution). An all-star project without obvious star power, the experiment was a resounding success.
Carter's last two Atlantic releases were even more effective tributes, although neither was really intended as such. Layin' in the Cut placed the saxophonist in the context of an electric groove unit consisting of guitarists Jef Lee Johnson and Marc Ribot, bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma and drummer G. Calvin Weston. Formally dedicated to no one, the album tacitly referenced free-jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman, whose Prime Time band had introduced esoteric harmolodic concepts to the realm of gutbucket funk (and had employed both Weston and Tacuma). At times, Layin' in the Cut also reeked of straight-up Detroit soul-and not just on Carter's muscular "Motown Mash."
The other album, Chasin' the Gypsy, mined the buoyant sound of 1920s and '30s swing. Conceived by accident while Carter was on tour with classical soprano Kathleen Battle, the project featured as many as eight musicians, including Romero Lubambo on guitar, Charlie Giordano on accordion and fellow Detroit export Regina Carter (no relation) on violin. Although Carter insisted that the record wasn't an outright tribute, its title, repertoire and instrumentation pointed resolutely in the direction of Django Reinhardt, gypsy guitarist and spiritual leader of the fabled Hot Club of France. Atlantic, which didn't share Carter's reservations, emblazoned copies of the album with a sticker playing up the Reinhardt angle.
Perhaps more than anything, the pair of albums illustrated the breadth of Carter's instrumental palette. On Layin' in the Cut he exclaimed, testified and cajoled, often in the extended ranges of his horns. More demonstrably, Chasin' the Gypsy featured his official debut on bass saxophone, a behemoth rarely used since the '20s. (The CD's back cover shows Carter standing formally beside the instrument, as if it were a prom date.) On another track, he played the F-mezzo, an even rarer bird. In the case of both instruments, the results were far more musical than one might reasonably expect. What may have seemed at first like a gimmick quickly revealed itself a labor of love.
I remember the whole day," Carter says between mouthfuls of miso. "I could relive the whole day if I wanted to." He's referring to a wintry Saturday some 17 years ago when he purchased his first Selmer tenor, a 1964 Mark VI. What's remarkable about the story is that Carter had first singled out the horn on a much earlier date, among other bric-a-brac in an East Harlem apartment. It was instant attraction for the aspiring 13-year-old, then playing a Mexican-assembled Conn tenor on loan from his school. The Selmer's owner, a friend of Carter's uncle, offered to sell the horn for a small fraction of its value. But it took Carter four years to save up the funds. He was a high school senior when he finally made the purchase. "February 7, 1986, was the last day that I played the school instrument," he recounts, with relish. "February 8 was when I copped that horn. Came back with it that following Monday. And, awww, man! All hell broke loose then."
Saxophones are an obsession for Carter. He has spent countless hours in Manhattan music stores, talking shop and testing horns. Whenever possible, he refurbishes his own. And the bond Carter has with his various instruments is intense. Yves Beauvais, Carter's record producer since 1995, describes a relationship that borders on the familial. "If he's recorded a tune with one of his horns and this is the only tune in which that horn appears, leaving that tune off is insulting that horn. So as a producer, I am more objective than he is in that way. I have no relationship with his horns. I don't know them. They don't have names for me, or birthdays-which they have, you know, for him."
Carter puts it just slightly differently: "There are personalities that come out of every instrument." And his own discography bears out this point. Trading fours between baritone, tenor and soprano on his 1998 album In Carterian Fashion (Atlantic), he becomes three subtly but perceptibly different musicians. This characteristic has been true of other famous multi-instrumentalists, most strikingly Rahsaan Roland Kirk, with whom Carter is often compared. In any case, Carter draws from his arsenal judiciously. And an arsenal it is, although exact figures are hard to come by. Asked to quantify his collection, Carter shrugs. "I don't do too bad," he says. Then he actually giggles.
For much of his career, Carter has fulfilled the role of l'enfant terrible: prodigiously and precociously gifted, self-styled and brazenly self-assured.
Beauvais, reflecting on a professional relationship that began when Carter was 22, marvels at the saxophonist's growth. "He's matured an enormous amount in 10 years," he says, "both musically and humanly." Partly this phenomenon can be explained in terms of Carter's home life. Along with his wife, Tevis-who graced the candlelit cover of The Real Quietstorm, Carter's Atlantic debut-the saxophonist now has two children. The day after our dinner, he flew to Detroit, where Tevis and the kids now primarily reside. "We're really celebrating the dual citizenship thing," says Carter, who joins them when he's not taking care of business in New York or on the road.
Family isn't Carter's only tie to his hometown. "I'm always going to feel that I'm a Detroit musician," he says without hesitation. He goes on to define the term: "A Detroit musician in the truest sense is an individual who has the best of the West Coast, the best of the East Coast and of course the blues shooting up from Chicago and as far down as Memphis. A Detroit musician is a soulful synthesis of everything that city has to offer. And I can't think of any other place that would have afforded such an experience. The music is 'cool,' and at the same time it can turn around and be as urgent and as intense as anything on the eastern seaboard."
Such properties were evident in June of 2001, when Carter temporarily took over Baker's Keyboard Lounge, a Motor City institution that bills itself as the "world's oldest active jazz club." The idea was that Carter, who had never released a live recording, would revisit his stomping grounds and let tape roll. During the three-day run, he invited a host of elders to join him, including tenor player Johnny Griffin, free-jazz hero David Murray, pre-swing Chicago tenor Franz Jackson and the aforementioned Larry Smith. In essence, the album was Conversin' With the Elders, Part Two. But there was an added dimension. Through the hand of Atlantic founder Ahmet Ertegun, the gig's second night featured a guest turn by Aretha Franklin.
A few months after the gig, however, Atlantic's corporate parent dissolved the label's jazz division, dropping some artists and shifting others over to Warner Bros. The change made Carter uneasy. Beauvais, his longtime producer at Atlantic, had recently decamped to Sony's Columbia Jazz division, and it seemed wise to follow suit. So Carter's manager arranged for the saxophonist's graceful exit from Atlantic-on the condition that Live at Baker's would still come to pass. That was over a year ago, and Warner seems to be finally readying the album for release, featuring all of Carter's saxophone guests. Aretha's contributions will not appear on the disc, by mutual decision. ("As a surviving document of the meeting, we weren't digging it," Carter explains. The two artists agreed to meet again in a studio, but that summit has yet to take place.) In any case, Live at Baker's-slated for February 2004-will provide the first official documentation of an adult Carter in his old hometown.
As for his transition to Columbia, Carter says, simply, "I have something from the old guard at Atlantic, in the person of [Beauvais]. And of course a place to hang my hat, which is always a blessing in itself."
His longtime producer offers another perspective: "James is someone who trusts people with difficulty. He is, at first, somewhat standoffish. But once someone is in his inner circle, he is one of the most loyal people I have seen. Several times I've suggested that maybe it was time for him to work with someone else. His response: 'No, no, this is the team, this is what works.' So on his side I know that there was an aspect of security, of working in the familiar. At this point he and I are an old team; almost family in a way."
At the same time, Carter obviously understands the legacy of a label that variously served as a home to Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk and Bessie Smith. But his talk is of the future. "To me," he says, "being over at Sony represents, hopefully, the possibilities of a company that's wide open to various visions and whatnot. I've got a whole lot of ideas."
Gardenias for Lady Day, his Columbia debut, begins with a sound previously unheard in the James Carter discography. It's the resonant sigh of a cello, alone for the briefest of instants, then subsumed by the quiet swell of a rhythm section with strings. Four bars later, Carter's tenor steps in, with the mischievous elegance of Cary Grant in a Hitchcock flick. The tune is "Gloria," and Carter, betraying just a hint of Ben Webster, imbues a lilting melody with gentle grit. It's a tender opening to this Billie Holiday salute. Never mind that Holiday never sang "Gloria," a song composed by saxophonist Don Byas.
"I could just hear her singing that melody," Carter says, explaining the song's presence on the disc. He has similar justifications for "A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing," the Billy Strayhorn tune, and "Indian Summer," a standard made famous by Coleman Hawkins. As for Cab Calloway's "Sunset," Carter proffers that "the lyrical content mirrors for me what was going on in her daily life, marking the passing of another day and bringing about, with the sun rising again, the aspirations of things unseen."
In fact, Gardenias for Lady Day includes just four songs actually associated with Holiday, including "More Than You Know" and "I'm in a Low Down Groove." Throughout the proceedings, Carter receives sensitive accompaniment from a stalwart rhythm section of pianist John Hicks, bassist Peter Washington and drummer Victor Lewis. Miche Braden-who took Carter to Lady Day's gravesite shortly after he moved to New York-sings on two tracks. The string arrangements were divided between Cassius Richmond, Carter's longtime musical compatriot, and Greg Cohen, a bassist of high and steady repute.
"I'm not totally crazy about tribute albums," muses Beauvais, who once coproduced a disc with Cohen-Madeleine Peyroux's Dreamland (Atlantic)-that much more directly harnessed Holiday's aura. (Carter played on three tracks.) "I like the fact that this one is not so literal, that the Billie Holiday connection is actually fairly tenuous. It's a very personal record from James' point of view. There are a lot of things that are way beyond Billie-where James might have been playing with her ghost on his shoulder, and that's it. But there's a deeply personal reason for each song. All of which have the Billie connection. Some of which elude me."
One such example is Carter's own composition "Little Hat's Odyssey." Named in honor of the saxophonist's newborn son, the song pays tribute to Holiday's unfulfilled desire to raise a family. But that was too tenuous even for Beauvais, and the song was pulled from the album; it will be released in Japan as a bonus track.
"Her sound to me was just a whole cornucopia of things," marvels Carter of Holiday. "It was the hybrid that, as she said, combined Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong. But at the same time, I would get this uncharted sexuality out of her voice. It was also informed by the pain and suffering that she had been through, and her hope for the future. I could get the innocence of a young girl out of her voice, too-particularly in the earlier recordings, but sometimes shining even through some of the later recordings. Whatever the phases or stages of Billie Holiday, I find them all appealing."
Holiday's more perceptive biographers have made similar claims. In Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (Da Capo), Robert O'Meally contends, "There were many Billie Holidays, more than we generally have taken into account." He goes on to suggest that "her faces were made up, invented: they were among her compositions." In this regard, at least, she was not unlike Carter-whose various faces, or voices, coexist even as they conflict. Among the more distinctive touches on Gardenias is the overdubbing of horns on several tracks. Playing tenor and F-mezzo saxophones as well as bass and contrabass clarinets, Carter turns "Sunset" into a gypsy caravan of timbres and tonalities. It's the first time his horns have been heard in chorus, and the effect is striking.
Nothing, however, is more striking than the album's centerpiece, a stark rendition of Lewis Allan's tone poem "Strange Fruit." The song, a chilling depiction of a Southern lynching, has been called the first anthem of civil rights: It was made famous by Holiday in the late '30s. Here the song opens eerily-with six cellos, Carter's contrabass clarinet and a wind machine, among other layers-and settles into an uneasy peace, over which Miche Braden sings the devastating lyric with powerfully clear articulation. Then, after two verses, the mood shifts quickly: Carter's tenor issues plaintive cries, the ensemble rises to pandemonium, bass and contrabass clarinets emit ugly, open-throttled sounds. Braden's voice punctuates the din in a series of bloodcurdling screams. It's a direct manifestation of the song's imagery-and a distillation of techniques Carter inherited from Bowie and the Art Ensemble, among others. It's also one of the longest 40-second intervals you're likely to encounter on record.
In her book If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (Ballantine), Farah Jasmine Griffin argues that Holiday's greatness is "neither only aesthetic, nor only political, but both." This would seem to jibe well with Carter, who fell in love with Lady Day the artist but also saw in her "an antecedent for songs of protest."
As an example of this legacy fulfilled, Carter cites Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite, a piece made infamous for a section in which Abbey Lincoln violently screams, a gesture now adopted by Braden. Carter, Braden and Griffin each point out that while the tragedy of "Strange Fruit" is historical, the struggle is contemporary. Comprehending Carter's interpretation of the song, Griffin suggests, "It reminds us of the utter breakdown that something like a lynching is really all about, before it just becomes a clich? of 'something bad that used to happen.' Here, it happens right in the context of our narration."
The strength of Gardenias for Lady Day, which Beauvais tags as "an extremely accessible and provocative record," lies in its seemingly effortless duality. Painstakingly but not excessively produced, it has enormous commercial potential-yet never panders or beseeches. The disc satisfies Carter's aptitude for repertory, his gift for personal interpretation, his saxophone obsession, his historical ken and even his devotion to the art of surprise. In doing so, it presents a musical vision of laserlike focus, suggesting a new threshold of maturity for Carter, whose talents and insights have always been well ahead of his years. Asked about his next project, he says, "To be continued," although with one such as Carter, you never have to wait long.
At Tomo, after sushi, he recounts the work he's recently put into practicing Roberto Sierra's Concerto for Saxophones and Orchestra, which the Puerto Rican composer wrote specifically for him. Having premiered the piece in October 2002, Carter is steeling himself for a repeat performance: He scats long, intricate passages from each of the concerto's four movements to illustrate its head-splitting difficulty.
Several days later, he will walk onto the stage of Detroit's new $60 million Max M. Fisher Music Center-which had featured Billie Holiday, among others, in its previous incarnation as Orchestra Hall. The audience will greet him with a tumultuous round of applause, as if they know him from Baker's Keyboard Lounge across town; as if his success, in some measure, echoes their own. Flanked by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and conductor Neeme JŠrvi, he will put the horn to his lips and play.
Big Hat's all grown up.
In many ways, he was the perfect man for the age. Jazz at century's end had evolved into an incredibly complex animal, shaped by cultural affirmation and commercial irrelevance. Carter, both a throwback and a genuine original, cut a sharp-enough figure to appeal to image-makers and standard-bearers alike. On the occasion of a new millennium, and with the dual and disparate releases Chasin' the Gypsy and Layin' in the Cut, he expressed his aim in a press release "to have one foot in the past, in a musical sense, and another moving forward in time." It was a reasonable impulse for an outrageous pairing of releases, respectively harnessing the power of prewar swing and postmodern free-funk. Now, three years later, the saxophonist is poised to carry the dichotomy even deeper, and without shifting gears or taking sides. With one new album on shelves and another, very different one slated for release early next year, Carter has his bases covered.
Inspired by an old haunt and an old muse, Carter has distilled his myriad influences into an essence.
James Carter was born in Detroit on the third day of 1969. The last of five siblings, he entered a world brimming with song. His older brothers and sisters were all musically inclined, and his mother was a jazz fan with a particular ear for singers. On the airwaves at the time, Jim Gallert's Jazz Yesterday featured prewar fare from as early as the teens and '20s, while other programs on WDET-FM, Detroit's excellent public radio station, mined the explorations of the AACM.
So Carter had heard plenty of saxophone by the time he acquired his first horn, a King alto, at age 11. He wasted no time before learning to play along to records; one early favorite was a Columbia double LP called The Billie Holiday Story, Vol. III, which featured Lester Young.
In junior high, Carter found a place under the wing of Donald Washington, a Detroit saxophonist and one-man educational institution. The older musician became a paternal presence for Carter, whose own father had passed when he was two years old. "Pops," as the younger player has called him, imparted not only his devotion to saxophone technique but also to a free and open mind. Carter would later muse to All About Jazz that, partly thanks to Washington, his formative influences came from opposite poles: "[Albert] Ayler on one side and [Johnny] Hodges on the other. Bird and Trane came later, in retrospect." This late embrace of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane was unorthodox then, as now: Carter's playing is still partly distinguishable by the absence of those titans' turns of phrase. It's a small irony that his first ensemble experience took place in a Washington-led student group christened Bird-Trane-Sco-Now. Of the four syllables, only the last seems particularly relevant to the saxophonist's aesthetic pursuits.
There were other mentors who held powerful sway, in and around Detroit. Miche Braden, a lifelong friend of the Carters and one of the city's top vocalists in those years, recalls connecting with the saxophonist when he was all of 16. "I'm a bit older than he is. I was part of the crowd that he was trying to be around. Now he's surpassed most of us." Carter, in turn, is quick to credit the jazz microcosm of his youth. He still attributes much of his accomplishment to the influence of "the D-Town cats."
Yet it was a pair of out-of-towners who catalyzed the most dramatic impact on his career. Both were trumpeters, and both were figureheads, if not icons. And the outcome of Carter's interaction with each of them is telling.
The first of these was Wynton Marsalis, sharp-suited steward of the neoclassical age, who heard Carter during a high school clinic in 1985. By the end of that year, the trumpeter had invited Carter to join his quintet for an engagement at Blues Alley in Washington, D.C. At the time, Carter was just shy of 17; over the next year and a half, he would work regularly with the band. But as Carter later described it, the gig was an imperfect fit, given Marsalis' disdain for his wilder improvisational outbursts. Years later he would join Marsalis again-but strictly in the context of large ensembles like the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and the Pulitzer-winning opera Blood on the Fields, where Carter's role was clearly prescribed.
The second powerful figure to enter Carter's world around this time was Lester Bowie, agent provocateur of the post-'60s jazz avant-garde. With his white lab coat, madcap antics and arsenal of unconventional sounds, Bowie was the antithesis of Marsalis-style conservatism. Yet his work was no less serious: Whether in the Art Ensemble of Chicago or at the helm of solo projects, Bowie expressed a deep musical intent. He and Carter met while sharing a Detroit concert stage in 1988; soon afterward Bowie invited Carter to join his New York Organ Ensemble. Within two years the younger musician had moved to the Big Apple, crashing for a spell in Bowie's Brooklyn apartment.
Carter wholeheartedly embraced Bowie's aesthetics, including the dream of a progressive music with proletariat appeal. Yet Marsalis, for his part, had not receded totally into shadow: Carter continued to share the trumpeter's dedication to dazzling technical prowess, his devotion to the prebop canon and his fondness for stylish attire. So while it's tempting to cast Marsalis and Bowie as the angel and devil perched on either of Carter's shoulders (especially given Lester's Mephistophelian, two-pronged goatee), the truth is that neither artist wholly consumed his vision. And as Carter absorbed their opposing forces into his own neutral charge, an unclassifiable style emerged.
For an artist so closely associated with daredevil feats, James Carter is, by many accounts, a creature of familiar comforts. Or, perhaps more accurately, he's a creature of fastidious tastes who carefully establishes parameters and then comfortably wanders within them. Arriving five minutes early for a dinner interview, I find the saxophonist already standing at curbside, restlessly eyeing the traffic on Broadway. It's a crisp early-October evening, and Carter is dressed in a patterned pantsuit, leather jacket and spitfire newsboy cap. He nods as I approach. "I was just wondering what I should do if I had some time on my hands," he says.
Carter has selected the Tomo Sushi & Sake Bar, one of several neighborhood restaurants in his regular repertoire. For the past eight years, he has resided in the same apartment on West 106th Street, a stretch officially designated as Duke Ellington Boulevard; before that, he lived on another part of 106th, across Central Park on the East Side. As we take a table in the far corner, he muses about the delicate art of sushi-restaurant selection. "You know how it is," he says. "You can't eat just anybody's sushi."
A moment later, he spots a speck in his shoyu dish, inspects it and sets it aside-an observance he would later repeat with his bowl of miso soup. The menu goes unopened and he orders a sashimi platter, steamed edamame and two pieces of barbecue eel.
The previous night, Carter had attended a memorial service for Frank Lowe, a saxophonist of considerable repute among jazz's free-blowing ranks. "Next month was about to be the 15th anniversary of us knowing each other," he explains. "I met him under the auspices of Lester Bowie when I first came here as a musician, back in November 1988." Not long afterward, Lowe formed a group called the SaxEmble featuring Carter and several other reedists, including alto saxophonist Cassius Richmond, another Detroit alumnus of Bird-Trane-Sco-Now. Through Lowe, Carter met even more heavyweights of the progressive calling. Many of the members of this community-like Amina Claudine Myers, Billy Bang and Rashied Ali-had turned up at Lowe's memorial. "At the end," Carter says, "all the musicians who had instruments got together and we played Frank Lowe's piece 'Nothing But Love.' It was a real great way to end."
Paying tribute comes naturally to Carter. His playing is thick with sly acknowledgement and subtle homage. In 1996 he went so far as to release Conversin' With the Elders (Atlantic)-assembling a gallery of heroes with whom he joyfully locked horns. Bowie was of course among them, as was baritone saxophone legend Hamiet Bluiett, of the World Saxophone Quartet. More surprising was the presence of trumpeter Harry "Sweets" Edison and tenor Buddy Tate, best known for their work with the Count Basie Orchestra; and Larry Smith, an alto saxophonist of no reputation beyond his hometown of Detroit (where he is a local institution). An all-star project without obvious star power, the experiment was a resounding success.
Carter's last two Atlantic releases were even more effective tributes, although neither was really intended as such. Layin' in the Cut placed the saxophonist in the context of an electric groove unit consisting of guitarists Jef Lee Johnson and Marc Ribot, bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma and drummer G. Calvin Weston. Formally dedicated to no one, the album tacitly referenced free-jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman, whose Prime Time band had introduced esoteric harmolodic concepts to the realm of gutbucket funk (and had employed both Weston and Tacuma). At times, Layin' in the Cut also reeked of straight-up Detroit soul-and not just on Carter's muscular "Motown Mash."
The other album, Chasin' the Gypsy, mined the buoyant sound of 1920s and '30s swing. Conceived by accident while Carter was on tour with classical soprano Kathleen Battle, the project featured as many as eight musicians, including Romero Lubambo on guitar, Charlie Giordano on accordion and fellow Detroit export Regina Carter (no relation) on violin. Although Carter insisted that the record wasn't an outright tribute, its title, repertoire and instrumentation pointed resolutely in the direction of Django Reinhardt, gypsy guitarist and spiritual leader of the fabled Hot Club of France. Atlantic, which didn't share Carter's reservations, emblazoned copies of the album with a sticker playing up the Reinhardt angle.
Perhaps more than anything, the pair of albums illustrated the breadth of Carter's instrumental palette. On Layin' in the Cut he exclaimed, testified and cajoled, often in the extended ranges of his horns. More demonstrably, Chasin' the Gypsy featured his official debut on bass saxophone, a behemoth rarely used since the '20s. (The CD's back cover shows Carter standing formally beside the instrument, as if it were a prom date.) On another track, he played the F-mezzo, an even rarer bird. In the case of both instruments, the results were far more musical than one might reasonably expect. What may have seemed at first like a gimmick quickly revealed itself a labor of love.
I remember the whole day," Carter says between mouthfuls of miso. "I could relive the whole day if I wanted to." He's referring to a wintry Saturday some 17 years ago when he purchased his first Selmer tenor, a 1964 Mark VI. What's remarkable about the story is that Carter had first singled out the horn on a much earlier date, among other bric-a-brac in an East Harlem apartment. It was instant attraction for the aspiring 13-year-old, then playing a Mexican-assembled Conn tenor on loan from his school. The Selmer's owner, a friend of Carter's uncle, offered to sell the horn for a small fraction of its value. But it took Carter four years to save up the funds. He was a high school senior when he finally made the purchase. "February 7, 1986, was the last day that I played the school instrument," he recounts, with relish. "February 8 was when I copped that horn. Came back with it that following Monday. And, awww, man! All hell broke loose then."
Saxophones are an obsession for Carter. He has spent countless hours in Manhattan music stores, talking shop and testing horns. Whenever possible, he refurbishes his own. And the bond Carter has with his various instruments is intense. Yves Beauvais, Carter's record producer since 1995, describes a relationship that borders on the familial. "If he's recorded a tune with one of his horns and this is the only tune in which that horn appears, leaving that tune off is insulting that horn. So as a producer, I am more objective than he is in that way. I have no relationship with his horns. I don't know them. They don't have names for me, or birthdays-which they have, you know, for him."
Carter puts it just slightly differently: "There are personalities that come out of every instrument." And his own discography bears out this point. Trading fours between baritone, tenor and soprano on his 1998 album In Carterian Fashion (Atlantic), he becomes three subtly but perceptibly different musicians. This characteristic has been true of other famous multi-instrumentalists, most strikingly Rahsaan Roland Kirk, with whom Carter is often compared. In any case, Carter draws from his arsenal judiciously. And an arsenal it is, although exact figures are hard to come by. Asked to quantify his collection, Carter shrugs. "I don't do too bad," he says. Then he actually giggles.
For much of his career, Carter has fulfilled the role of l'enfant terrible: prodigiously and precociously gifted, self-styled and brazenly self-assured.
Beauvais, reflecting on a professional relationship that began when Carter was 22, marvels at the saxophonist's growth. "He's matured an enormous amount in 10 years," he says, "both musically and humanly." Partly this phenomenon can be explained in terms of Carter's home life. Along with his wife, Tevis-who graced the candlelit cover of The Real Quietstorm, Carter's Atlantic debut-the saxophonist now has two children. The day after our dinner, he flew to Detroit, where Tevis and the kids now primarily reside. "We're really celebrating the dual citizenship thing," says Carter, who joins them when he's not taking care of business in New York or on the road.
Family isn't Carter's only tie to his hometown. "I'm always going to feel that I'm a Detroit musician," he says without hesitation. He goes on to define the term: "A Detroit musician in the truest sense is an individual who has the best of the West Coast, the best of the East Coast and of course the blues shooting up from Chicago and as far down as Memphis. A Detroit musician is a soulful synthesis of everything that city has to offer. And I can't think of any other place that would have afforded such an experience. The music is 'cool,' and at the same time it can turn around and be as urgent and as intense as anything on the eastern seaboard."
Such properties were evident in June of 2001, when Carter temporarily took over Baker's Keyboard Lounge, a Motor City institution that bills itself as the "world's oldest active jazz club." The idea was that Carter, who had never released a live recording, would revisit his stomping grounds and let tape roll. During the three-day run, he invited a host of elders to join him, including tenor player Johnny Griffin, free-jazz hero David Murray, pre-swing Chicago tenor Franz Jackson and the aforementioned Larry Smith. In essence, the album was Conversin' With the Elders, Part Two. But there was an added dimension. Through the hand of Atlantic founder Ahmet Ertegun, the gig's second night featured a guest turn by Aretha Franklin.
A few months after the gig, however, Atlantic's corporate parent dissolved the label's jazz division, dropping some artists and shifting others over to Warner Bros. The change made Carter uneasy. Beauvais, his longtime producer at Atlantic, had recently decamped to Sony's Columbia Jazz division, and it seemed wise to follow suit. So Carter's manager arranged for the saxophonist's graceful exit from Atlantic-on the condition that Live at Baker's would still come to pass. That was over a year ago, and Warner seems to be finally readying the album for release, featuring all of Carter's saxophone guests. Aretha's contributions will not appear on the disc, by mutual decision. ("As a surviving document of the meeting, we weren't digging it," Carter explains. The two artists agreed to meet again in a studio, but that summit has yet to take place.) In any case, Live at Baker's-slated for February 2004-will provide the first official documentation of an adult Carter in his old hometown.
As for his transition to Columbia, Carter says, simply, "I have something from the old guard at Atlantic, in the person of [Beauvais]. And of course a place to hang my hat, which is always a blessing in itself."
His longtime producer offers another perspective: "James is someone who trusts people with difficulty. He is, at first, somewhat standoffish. But once someone is in his inner circle, he is one of the most loyal people I have seen. Several times I've suggested that maybe it was time for him to work with someone else. His response: 'No, no, this is the team, this is what works.' So on his side I know that there was an aspect of security, of working in the familiar. At this point he and I are an old team; almost family in a way."
At the same time, Carter obviously understands the legacy of a label that variously served as a home to Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk and Bessie Smith. But his talk is of the future. "To me," he says, "being over at Sony represents, hopefully, the possibilities of a company that's wide open to various visions and whatnot. I've got a whole lot of ideas."
Gardenias for Lady Day, his Columbia debut, begins with a sound previously unheard in the James Carter discography. It's the resonant sigh of a cello, alone for the briefest of instants, then subsumed by the quiet swell of a rhythm section with strings. Four bars later, Carter's tenor steps in, with the mischievous elegance of Cary Grant in a Hitchcock flick. The tune is "Gloria," and Carter, betraying just a hint of Ben Webster, imbues a lilting melody with gentle grit. It's a tender opening to this Billie Holiday salute. Never mind that Holiday never sang "Gloria," a song composed by saxophonist Don Byas.
"I could just hear her singing that melody," Carter says, explaining the song's presence on the disc. He has similar justifications for "A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing," the Billy Strayhorn tune, and "Indian Summer," a standard made famous by Coleman Hawkins. As for Cab Calloway's "Sunset," Carter proffers that "the lyrical content mirrors for me what was going on in her daily life, marking the passing of another day and bringing about, with the sun rising again, the aspirations of things unseen."
In fact, Gardenias for Lady Day includes just four songs actually associated with Holiday, including "More Than You Know" and "I'm in a Low Down Groove." Throughout the proceedings, Carter receives sensitive accompaniment from a stalwart rhythm section of pianist John Hicks, bassist Peter Washington and drummer Victor Lewis. Miche Braden-who took Carter to Lady Day's gravesite shortly after he moved to New York-sings on two tracks. The string arrangements were divided between Cassius Richmond, Carter's longtime musical compatriot, and Greg Cohen, a bassist of high and steady repute.
"I'm not totally crazy about tribute albums," muses Beauvais, who once coproduced a disc with Cohen-Madeleine Peyroux's Dreamland (Atlantic)-that much more directly harnessed Holiday's aura. (Carter played on three tracks.) "I like the fact that this one is not so literal, that the Billie Holiday connection is actually fairly tenuous. It's a very personal record from James' point of view. There are a lot of things that are way beyond Billie-where James might have been playing with her ghost on his shoulder, and that's it. But there's a deeply personal reason for each song. All of which have the Billie connection. Some of which elude me."
One such example is Carter's own composition "Little Hat's Odyssey." Named in honor of the saxophonist's newborn son, the song pays tribute to Holiday's unfulfilled desire to raise a family. But that was too tenuous even for Beauvais, and the song was pulled from the album; it will be released in Japan as a bonus track.
"Her sound to me was just a whole cornucopia of things," marvels Carter of Holiday. "It was the hybrid that, as she said, combined Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong. But at the same time, I would get this uncharted sexuality out of her voice. It was also informed by the pain and suffering that she had been through, and her hope for the future. I could get the innocence of a young girl out of her voice, too-particularly in the earlier recordings, but sometimes shining even through some of the later recordings. Whatever the phases or stages of Billie Holiday, I find them all appealing."
Holiday's more perceptive biographers have made similar claims. In Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (Da Capo), Robert O'Meally contends, "There were many Billie Holidays, more than we generally have taken into account." He goes on to suggest that "her faces were made up, invented: they were among her compositions." In this regard, at least, she was not unlike Carter-whose various faces, or voices, coexist even as they conflict. Among the more distinctive touches on Gardenias is the overdubbing of horns on several tracks. Playing tenor and F-mezzo saxophones as well as bass and contrabass clarinets, Carter turns "Sunset" into a gypsy caravan of timbres and tonalities. It's the first time his horns have been heard in chorus, and the effect is striking.
Nothing, however, is more striking than the album's centerpiece, a stark rendition of Lewis Allan's tone poem "Strange Fruit." The song, a chilling depiction of a Southern lynching, has been called the first anthem of civil rights: It was made famous by Holiday in the late '30s. Here the song opens eerily-with six cellos, Carter's contrabass clarinet and a wind machine, among other layers-and settles into an uneasy peace, over which Miche Braden sings the devastating lyric with powerfully clear articulation. Then, after two verses, the mood shifts quickly: Carter's tenor issues plaintive cries, the ensemble rises to pandemonium, bass and contrabass clarinets emit ugly, open-throttled sounds. Braden's voice punctuates the din in a series of bloodcurdling screams. It's a direct manifestation of the song's imagery-and a distillation of techniques Carter inherited from Bowie and the Art Ensemble, among others. It's also one of the longest 40-second intervals you're likely to encounter on record.
In her book If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (Ballantine), Farah Jasmine Griffin argues that Holiday's greatness is "neither only aesthetic, nor only political, but both." This would seem to jibe well with Carter, who fell in love with Lady Day the artist but also saw in her "an antecedent for songs of protest."
As an example of this legacy fulfilled, Carter cites Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite, a piece made infamous for a section in which Abbey Lincoln violently screams, a gesture now adopted by Braden. Carter, Braden and Griffin each point out that while the tragedy of "Strange Fruit" is historical, the struggle is contemporary. Comprehending Carter's interpretation of the song, Griffin suggests, "It reminds us of the utter breakdown that something like a lynching is really all about, before it just becomes a clich? of 'something bad that used to happen.' Here, it happens right in the context of our narration."
The strength of Gardenias for Lady Day, which Beauvais tags as "an extremely accessible and provocative record," lies in its seemingly effortless duality. Painstakingly but not excessively produced, it has enormous commercial potential-yet never panders or beseeches. The disc satisfies Carter's aptitude for repertory, his gift for personal interpretation, his saxophone obsession, his historical ken and even his devotion to the art of surprise. In doing so, it presents a musical vision of laserlike focus, suggesting a new threshold of maturity for Carter, whose talents and insights have always been well ahead of his years. Asked about his next project, he says, "To be continued," although with one such as Carter, you never have to wait long.
At Tomo, after sushi, he recounts the work he's recently put into practicing Roberto Sierra's Concerto for Saxophones and Orchestra, which the Puerto Rican composer wrote specifically for him. Having premiered the piece in October 2002, Carter is steeling himself for a repeat performance: He scats long, intricate passages from each of the concerto's four movements to illustrate its head-splitting difficulty.
Several days later, he will walk onto the stage of Detroit's new $60 million Max M. Fisher Music Center-which had featured Billie Holiday, among others, in its previous incarnation as Orchestra Hall. The audience will greet him with a tumultuous round of applause, as if they know him from Baker's Keyboard Lounge across town; as if his success, in some measure, echoes their own. Flanked by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and conductor Neeme JŠrvi, he will put the horn to his lips and play.
Big Hat's all grown up.
Originally published in December 2003
The James Carter Organ Trio at Birdland TONIGHT!
October 4, 2011
James Carter was born in Detroit, Michigan and learned to play there before moving to New York City. He has been prominent as a performer and recording artist on the jazz scene since the mid-1990s, playing saxophones, flute, and bass clarinet. As a young man, he attended Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp and was a member of the group Bird-Trane-Sco-Now. On his album Chasin’ the Gypsy (2000), he recorded with his cousin Regina Carter, a jazz violinist. Carter has won the critics’ choice award for baritone saxophone three years in a row from Down Beat magazine. He has played on albums with Cyrus Chestnut, Wynton Marsalis and the Mingus Big Band.
The James Carter Organ Trio will play Birdland with Special Guests, starting Tuesday Oct. 4 through Oct. 8, — with Gerard Gibbs on Hammond B-3 organ and Leonard King Jr. on drums — on “At the Crossroads” (Emarcy), his new album. The guests during this engagement are veterans in the style: the vocalist Miche Braden, the trombonist Steve Turre (Tuesday through Oct. 7) and the guitarist Rodney Jones (Oct. 7 and 8). Get there!
James Carter (musician)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| James Carter | |
|---|---|
James Carter, Bad Ischl 2006
|
|
| Background information | |
| Born | January 3, 1969 |
| Origin | Detroit, Michigan, U.S. |
| Genres | Jazz |
| Occupation(s) | Musician |
| Instruments | Bass clarinet Saxophones Flutes |
| Labels | DIW Atlantic Columbia Half Note |
| Associated acts | Bird-Trane-Sco-Now! |
| Website | jamescarterlive.com |
James Carter (born January 3, 1969) is an American jazz musician.
Contents
Biography
Carter was born in Detroit, Michigan, and learned to play under the tutelage of Donald Washington, becoming a member of his youth jazz ensemble Bird-Trane-Sco-NOW!! As a young man, Carter attended Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, becoming the youngest faculty member at the camp. He first toured Europe (Scandinavia) with the International Jazz Band in 1985 at the age of 16.On May 31, 1988, at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), Carter was a last-minute addition for guest artist Lester Bowie, which turned into an invitation to play with his new quintet (forerunner of his New York Organ Ensemble) in New York that following November at the now defunct Carlos 1 jazz club. This was pivotal in Carter's career, putting him in musical contact with the world, and he moved to New York two years later. He has been prominent as a performer and recording artist on the jazz scene since the late 1980s, playing saxophones, flute, and clarinets.
On his album Chasin' the Gypsy (2000), he recorded with his cousin Regina Carter, a jazz violinist.
Carter has won Down Beat magazine's Critics and Readers Choice award for baritone saxophone several years in a row. He has performed, toured and played on albums with Lester Bowie, Julius Hemphill, Frank Lowe & the Saxemble, Kathleen Battle, the World Saxophone Quartet, Cyrus Chestnut, Wynton Marsalis, Dee Dee Bridgewater and the Mingus Big Band.[1]
Carter is an authority on vintage horns, and he owns an extensive collection of them.[2]
Discography
- 1991: Tough Young Tenors: Alone Together
- 1994: JC on the Set (DIW)
- 1995: Jurassic Classics (DIW)
- 1995: The Real Quiet Storm (Atlantic)
- 1995: Duets (with Cyrus Chestnut)
- 1996: Conversin' with the Elders (Atlantic)
- 1998: In Carterian Fashion (Atlantic)
- 2000: Layin' in the Cut
- 2000: Chasin' the Gypsy
- 2003: Gardenias for Lady Day
- 2004: Live at Baker's Keyboard Lounge (with David Murray, Franz Jackson and Johnny Griffin)[3]
- 2005: Out of Nowhere
- 2005: Gold Sounds (Tribute to Pavement with Cyrus Chestnut, Ali Jackson & Reginald Veal )
- 2008: Present Tense
- 2009: Heaven on Earth (with John Medeski, Christian McBride, Adam Rogers & Joey Baron)
- 2009: Skratyology (with De Nazaaten)
- 2011: Caribbean Rhapsody[4]
- 2011: At the Crossroads
- Fat Man and the Hard Blues (Black Saint, 1991)
- Five Chord Stud (Black Saint, 1994)
References:
External links
- Official Website
- P. Mauriat Artist Profile Page
- High kicks and belly blows – article (with photos) by Tony Gieske
- James Carter – biography from American International Artists
- MusicMatch Guide
- Concert review
- Photographed live at Jazz Alley – photos by Bruce C. Moore
- Edutain-The James Carter Discography
- James Carter Interview (with Alexander Mclean) at allaboutjazz.com
- James Carter Organ Trio review, Bimhuis Amsterdam, in Dutch, with photos by Julia Free
- Review of At the Crossroads CD
- "The James Carter Interview" by Marissa Dodge, Jazz History Online.
- Kelly Bucheger, "James Carter Ruined My Life", Harder Bop, April 12, 2011.
