Regina Carter (b. August 6, 1966): Outstanding, highly versatile, and innovative violinist, composer, arranger, ensemble leader, and teacher

SOUND PROJECTIONS

AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE

EDITOR:  KOFI NATAMBU

SPRING/SUMMER, 2015

VOLUME ONE              NUMBER THREE

CHARLIE PARKER

Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:

DUKE ELLINGTON
April 25-May 1

ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO
May 2-May 8

ELLA FITZGERALD
May 9-15

DEE DEE BRIDGEWATER
May 16-May 22

MILES DAVIS
May 23-29

JILL SCOTT
May 30-June 5

REGINA CARTER
June 6-June 12

BETTY DAVIS
June 13-19

ERYKAH BADU
June 20-June 26

AL GREEN
June 27-July 3

CHUCK BERRY
July 4-July 10

SLY STONE
July 11-July 17

 

Primary Instrument: Violin

Born: August 6, 1966

Regina Carter combines exciting technical proficiency and improvisation with an aggressive approach to her instrument, adding multicultural influence. Her playing is melodic, yet percussive. “People are only used to hearing violin in European classical music or country music,” says Carter, “and so we get stuck in this idea that this is what a violin is supposed to do. And it's such a precious instrument and such a delicate instrument... That's what people think: it's such a small, delicate little thing. Even sometimes I play with classical players in a quartet and part of the piece might call to use the back of the bow, the wood, to hit on the string to get a percussive effect or to get a different sound, and they'll say, 'I'm not going to bang on my instrument like that. This violin cost way too much money.'They don't think of it as another way of playing the instrument. They don't really want to go beyond what we think of; so even the musicians themselves sometimes are stuck into those old ways of thinking.”

*”I think a lot of people look at the violin and they get a little nervous,” Carter notes. “They have a stereotype of what the violin is - very high, kind of shrill-sounding with long notes, and a lot of vibrato. It doesn't have to be that at all, it can be a very fiery persuasive instrument and that's how I like to use it. I don't think of the music trying to fit the violin,” she continues, “or how to make the violin work in this music. For me, it just does. I'm not playing it as a violin. Instead of being so melodic, which I can be, I tend to use the instrument in more of a rhythmic way, using vamp rhythms or a lot of syncopated rhythms, approaching it more like a horn player does. So, I don't feel that I have a lot of limitations - I feel like I can do anything.”

“I followed a more non-traditional route. I initially learned by ear, then later learned to read, then learned theory. I think that kind of experience has freed my playing up a lot more, so I'm not stuck on the page. A lot of people are afraid not to have a piece of music in front of them. “I knew I wanted to play improvised music after I heard a record by violinist Jean-Luc Ponty. Ever since then, I've been dreaming of my first solo project.”

“My goal is to continue to write and play music that's true to me, and if I remember that always, no one can take that away from me.” 

http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-03-16/music/regina-carter-wandering-genius/full/

Regina Carter, Wandering Genius

Detroit's finest jazz violinist can find the soul in anything

by Phil Freeman 

Tuesday, Mar 16 2010

Village Voice 

It's been almost four years, but Regina Carter still remembers the phone call. It's not the kind of thing you forget.

"I get this call, it's probably nine in the morning, before I'd had coffee—I thought it was a prank call, and I wasn't too amused," she recalls with a laugh. "The person said, 'Obviously, you don't know about the MacArthur Foundation.' I said, 'I do know about the MacArthur Foundation—what's your name and number? I'll call you back.' I made my coffee and I called the number back and I said, 'Does this person work in your office?' and they said, 'Yes, we'll put you right through.' Then I was stunned. I can't even tell you. It was like everything froze."

The so-called genius grant, which Carter received in September 2006, allowed the Detroit-born violinist to go back to school, but perhaps more importantly, it helped alleviate some personal sorrows. "I'd had such a dark year the year before—gone through a huge lawsuit and lost my mother—so at that point, I needed some sunshine," she says. "I felt like that was the universe and my mother saying, 'Here.' "

Courtesy Lip Service Media

Do not prank call this woman.

Carter began studying classical violin at age four; she didn't even know there was such a thing as jazz violin until high school, when a friend introduced her to the music of Noel Pointer, Jean-Luc Ponty, and Stéphane Grappelli. A live Grappelli performance convinced her jazz was her destiny. "There was so much camaraderie between the musicians. This light went on, and I was like, 'That's what I want when I play' . . . not knowing the journey I was about to be faced with."

That journey has taken Regina Carter from the all-female jazz-pop quintet Straight Ahead to a solo career that's encompassed funky smooth jazz, old-style swing, classical, and now African music. She has played an 18th-century violin that once belonged to Niccolò Paganini, and done session work for Faith Evans, Mary J. Blige, and Detroit techno pioneer Carl Craig. On 2006's I'll Be Seeing You: A Sentimental Journey, she paid tribute to her late mother through interpretations of popular songs like "Sentimental Journey," "This Can't Be Love," and "A-Tisket, A-Tasket."

Her forthcoming disc, Reverse Thread, due out May 18, takes her music down a very different path. Her band includes longtime drummer Alvester Garnett, bassist Chris Lightcap, accordionist Will Holshouser, and kora player Yacouba Sissoko, who learned the instrument from his grandfather. ("You know when you hear that name or a rendition of that name, 'Oh, they play kora.' ") With MacArthur money behind her, she disappeared into New York's World Music Institute and re-emerged inspired by field recordings, particularly some tapes of the Ugandan Jews, a community that practices Judaism despite being neither genetically nor historically Jewish. Reverse Thread reinterprets melodies based on the Ugandan songs "Hiwumbe Awumba" and "Mwana Talitambula"; the former opens the disc, while the latter comes two tracks from its end, finding Carter's ultra-clean violin lines shadowed by Lightcap's bowed bass.

"Every culture of music on the planet involved a violin-like instrument, so my ear would always be drawn to that," recalls Carter of the decades of listening, studying, and playing that led her to this record, where folkish melodies combine with a gentle swing that occasionally erupts into full-on hillbilly fiddlin', the kora and accordion providing countermelodies. "Every music has its own groove or its own soul." Her own contribution isn't jazz, or folk, or "world"—it's all those things and more, pure human joy filtered through technical virtuosity.

Regina Carter plays Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola March 23-28

http://artsfuse.org/116284/fuse-concert-review-violinist-regina-carters-ancestral-magic/

Fuse Concert Review: Violinist Regina Carter’s Ancestral Magic

Featured Jazz Music Review  Add comments

 

October 19, 2014

 

Violinist Regina Carter and her band drew the audience in with a sustained mood of intimacy, warmth, and unfailingly beautiful playing.

Regina Carter at Sanders Theater — she played a surprising blend of Appalachian fiddle tunes, church hymns, and game-songs, what Carter has called a “cultural hodgepodge.” Photo: Robert Torres.

By Jon Garelick

Regina Carter is a virtuoso who favors form over firepower. In their Celebrity Series of Boston show at Sanders Theatre in Cambridge on Friday night, the violinist and her band showed off plenty of nimble chops, but they weren’t looking to burn the Sanders crowd with groove-heavy jams; instead, their patient, carefully calibrated arrangements drew the audience in with a sustained mood of intimacy, warmth, and unfailingly beautiful playing. 

Carter, 48, is a MacArthur Fellow (the popularly known “genius grant”), and she’s used some of that money to pursue a musical investigation of her own heritage. Beginning with I’ll Be Seeing You: A Sentimental Journey (2006), she looked at the popular music, blues, and jazz, her mother grew up with in Detroit. She followed that with an exploration of her West African roots in 2010’s Reverse Thread (a DNA revealed she’s 73 percent West African, Carter told the crowd). Her newest disc, Southern Comfort, which came out in March, looks at music from her father’s side of the family — particularly, her paternal grandfather, Dan John Carter, who was born in 1893 and worked for most of his life as an Alabama coal miner. 

The bulk of the show at Sanders was drawn from Southern Comfort, most of which in turn was drawn from field recordings by Alan Lomax and John Work III, and arranged by Carter and various musician friends, including guitarist Marvin Sewell and accordionist Will Holshouser, from her band. Carter introduced a few of the pieces with the original field recordings, which she played on her cell phone (not without a few self-deprecating laughs, as she struggled with the device). And she talked a bit about her family, and summer trips from Detroit to her grandmother’s house in Bradford, Alabama (she never met her grandfather, who died before she was born).

The musical mix is a surprising blend of Appalachian fiddle tunes, church hymns, and game-songs, what Carter has called a “cultural hodgepodge.” When Carter introduced “See See Rider,” she pointed out that it wasn’t “the blues See See Rider,” but much older: a children’s song. In fact, she said, most of the field-recordings were single-line vocal melodies (with the exception on the CD of a Gram Parsons track and Hank Williams’s “Hickory Wind”).

It was Carter and her band’s fidelity to the vocal nature of the pieces that most distinguished Friday’s show. It began with the traditional “Miner’s Child,” which featured an elaborate acoustic slide guitar intro from Sewell, before Carter entered to join the band from back stage — it was the most theatrical, “star” turn of the evening, but in keeping with the evening’s casual formality. As the band joined in and hit an easy groove, Carter took over the melody, and it was startling to hear (especially after some of Sewell’s elaborate solo ornamentation) her bring out the vocal quality of the lines, her simple conversational phrasing, with its rests and repetitions and siding blue notes. Carter has spoken about her love of the original recordings and her need to clear her head and scale back her improvisations when she was recording Southern Comfort, and remember that it was those original vocal performances that drew her to the songs in the first place.

Sewell’s arrangement of “Miner’s Child,” he told me in an interview, required everyone to simply work off the melody, entering with it at any point as part of the “accompaniment.” Here, lines from Sewell, Holshouser, and Jesse’s Murphy’s bass snaked around under Carter’s solo, creating a loose groove. Sometimes Carter’s improvisation was simply a matter of shifting from upper register to lower register, a loud-to-soft dynamic, or a different key, creating another “voice.”
That kind of simple melodic paraphrase was the foundation for much of the evening. It wasn’t like Carter never “burned,” or pulled more of her extraordinary gifts out of her player’s toolbox. The children’s song “Shoo-Rye” started with a medium-tempo groove and plenty of long tones in the phrasing. From there, a pizzicato duet between Carter and Murphy gave way to a Carter solo that accelerated into a blur of syncopated double-stops and pinging harmonics. And then, it returned to her singing the piece — just as the lone female voice had done when Carter introduced the song with the field recording on her phone.


After I had listened to Southern Comfort a few times, I wondered why Carter hadn’t featured vocals more, as she had on I’ll Be Seeing You. But the concert made that clear: this was vocal music, but about the voice, not the words. After all, there aren’t a lot of lyrics to “Shoo-Rye,” or “See See Rider,” or the lullaby “Cornbread Crumbled in Gravy” (which the band also played). But there are those voices. And even on the slow blues waltz of “Hickory Wind,” Hank Williams’s words were unnecessary: when Sewell finished his demonstrative electric-slide guitar solo (at times conjuring the country-whine of pedal-steel), Carter followed him with a couple of short, quizzical rising phrases — like she was asking him a question. 

There were a couple of tunes outside the Southern Comfort zone — “Mandingo Street,” by the Cameroonian bassist and singer-songwriter Richard Bona, from Carter’s 1999 Rhythm of the Heart, and the Ellington standard “Just Squeeze Me” from I’ll Be Seeing You. The first began with free improvisation — all soft whistles, clicks, and clattering drum rims — wended its way to a groove, and ended with drummer Alvester Garnett coming out from behind the kit to join Carter in singing the melody while softly tapping the rhythm with a wood-brush stick on his hand. Garnett (who also happens to be Carter’s husband) was a marvel of taste and invention all night, never overplaying, always finding the right groove, the right color, for the moment, all the more forceful for his understatement. And “Just Squeeze Me” was, finally, walking-bass jazz swing, with Holshouser taking several inventive, driving choruses that would be the envy of any jazz pianist. 

Holshouser, too, was a master of color and foundational support — always with the right approach, wheezing gently like a harmonium, or blending timbres with Sewell’s slide guitar, Murphy’s bowed bass, or Carter’s violin. Those blends of color were part of this band’s special magic. Their encore of a hymn, “I’m Going Home,” was fitting: sepia-toned and unsentimental, an exploration of the past, of ancestry, but told in the here-and-now.
 

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Regina-Carter/269977394285?sk=timeline

http://www.npr.org/2014/03/05/283506847/regina-carters-jazz-genealogy

Regina Carter's Jazz Genealogy

March 05, 2014

Listen Now:

<iframe src="http://www.npr.org/player/embed/283506847/286387628" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

"The beauty was in the rawness," Regina Carter says of the field recordings that inspired her new album, Southern Comfort.  David Katzenstein/Courtesy of the artist 

Jazz violinist Regina Carter grew up in Detroit, but as a child she spent summers in Alabama, where her paternal grandmother lived. Her grandfather died before she was born, and recently she began researching his side of the family. One revelation that sparked her interest: Her dad's dad had been a coal miner.

Tiny Desk Concerts

Regina Carter: Tiny Desk Concert

"I thought it would be interesting to record some of the music that would have been popular or happening during his lifetime, growing up in Alabama and the different places he lived and worked," Carter says. "So I went to the Library of Congress, to the Lomax collection, and also John Work III. Just some amazing music that I found."

 

http://jazztimes.com/articles/14120-regina-carter-regina-s-reverie

Regina Carter:  Regina's Reverie

1

Regina Carter

By Giorgio Scola

2

A painting of violin virtuoso Niccolo Paganini

3

Regina Carter

By Giorgio Scola

1 of 3      Next

May 2003

by Andrew Lindemann Malone

Look at this painting of the most famous violin virtuoso, Niccolò Paganini, at the height of his powers in the early 19th century. Concertgoers and fellow musicians alike whispered that Paganini must have had a pact with the Devil, which would explain his ghostly appearance, the wild feats of technique he tossed off in concert, the astounding flexibility that allowed him to perform those feats, his devotion to his vices of women and gambling and the transporting passion for music that fueled it all. The painting gives a hint of this: pale, sunken-cheeked, dramatically thin, he grips his violin and bow fiercely, preparing once again to play like no one before him ever had.

Now look at jazz violinist Regina Carter. She's comfortably dressed in New York City all-black, except for thick black-and-gray striped wool socks that look extremely comfortable on a Gotham day marked by icy downpours. Sporting dreadlocks and a gold nose stud, Carter sits, legs splayed on a colorful rug in her cozy apartment. Her ready smile plays across her lips, and her frank eyes easily meet yours in a way that was probably foreign to Paganini. Carter laughs readily yet talks seriously about respect and history.

This unlikely pair is linked by a Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesu violin, called the Cannon for its dark, powerful tone. Paganini borrowed the violin from a prominent French merchant and loved it so fiercely that he never returned it to its owner; the merchant gladly gave it up to hear it used so well. The Cannon left Paganini only after he bequeathed it to the city of Genoa at his death.

About 150 years later, the violin has cast a similar spell on Carter, who fought the mundane battles of bureaucracy and the more open combat of public opinion to use the violin for two concerts and now for her new recording, Paganini: After a Dream (Verve). She, too, doesn't want to give it up forever. "We're keeping our fingers crossed because there's word that they might let the violin come here next year to do a concert," she says. "That would be"-here there is a long silence, and the next word comes out as a rapturous whisper-"great."

The bridge between Paganini and Carter, improbable as it is, has been strong enough to support one other connection: Paganini: After a Dream, with assistance from the Cannon, manages that tricky feat of embracing both jazz and classical while slighting neither and creating an atmosphere all its own.
 
Before Regina Carter, no jazz violinist had ever played the Cannon, and the idea of jazz touching Paganini's instrument was disturbing to many Genoese. Carter studied classical violin as a child growing up in Detroit, and had even attended the New England Conservatory of Music for a time, but she eventually ditched that for the all-woman jazz quartet Straight Ahead. From there, she had variously embraced pop, Latin, R&B and jazz on her instrument of choice, culminating in Motor City Moments, a celebration of Detroit's musical heritage, and Freefall, a well-received duets disc with pianist Kenny Barron.

But no matter how well-received her albums were, Carter had given up the great music of Western civilization completely in favor of contemporary trash: five records, not one classical composer! And she was even known to play her own violin like a percussion instrument on occasion!

Although Carter was the first African-American to play the Cannon, she dismisses the suggestion that race had something to do with the resistance she encountered. "No. It was just based on the [music] style," she says. "People would be staring and I'd be like, 'Why are they staring?' But there are so many Africans that live in Italy, so it's not that. It was just like, they knew: 'This is the person who is coming to contaminate the violin!'" She laughs at the memory. "I didn't feel that it had anything to do with me being an African-American. It was just about the music, which is still just as bad."

The popular resistance to jazz in Genoa was both fervent and relevant, because any violinist who wants to play the Cannon must gain approval from not only the Paganini Institute's management and violin technicians but also the communal government, the Mayor of Genoa and, finally, the Italian Cultural Ministry. To say the least, this is not an easy process, even for classical musicians; performers must gain approval for the repertoire to be played, the type of strings and chin rest that they use, and other seeming minutiae that, if treated cavalierly, could shorten the life of the instrument.

For Carter, the idea of playing Paganini's violin held an immediate fascination. From her days as a classical musician, she says, "I knew about him more because I knew that his works were extremely difficult to play. That would be the thing for violin players, to try to play one of his caprices. And they kick your butt! And I knew that he was supposedly like a crazed maniac."

When asked if she had ever tried to play Paganini's works, she shakes her head, laughs and says, "No! I just looked at them and said, 'One day, maybe.'"

Still, playing the Cannon wasn't her idea. Credit for that belongs to her pianist, Werner "Vana" Gierig, and Andrea Liberovici, an Italian electronic-music composer and friend of Gierig's, both of whom Carter thanks effusively when discussing these events: "My piano player was the force, he and his friend. They came up with this idea, and they weren't going to let it die." Even during the formidable bureaucratic trials they faced, she says, "I felt like I had no right to say I wasn't going to do it considering they were going after something for me. Part of me would get really upset and say, 'Screw them!' But Vana and Andrea are so used to me anyway that they would be like, 'Just be quiet.'

"Andrea would say, 'There's no such thing as "No." I'm going to get this.' He taught me that those roadblocks are really just speed bumps. You just keep going at it and finally you're going to get it. You just have to sometimes keep pounding away. And then sometimes people will just say, 'OK!' because they're tired of you," she says, smiling broadly. "You just wear them down. You have to be tenacious, that's for sure."

Eventually, the bureaucratic obstacles were overcome, but Carter still had to convince the public of Genoa when she arrived to make her acquaintance with the violin and give two concerts at the Teatro Carlo Felice. She came prepared.

"I had been studying Italian at the time, and my Italian teacher's husband said, 'I think you should do a speech to thank the people for letting you play this violin.' So he wrote this speech for me, and he sat with me and drilled me. I memorized it, and said this five-minute speech, which for me is really long in a language I didn't know. And that helped to win them over. You ask me now, I can't even remember it."

When pressed, Carter looks up and struggles to recall the speech's contents. "Thank you for inviting me to your beautiful city to play this great instrument. It was a realization of a dream come true and I will respect the instrument." She begins laughing again with the last line: "I know that you all took a big step in letting me do this thing!"

How big a step was apparent at the press conferences Carter held upon her arrival, at which the famously aggressive Italian press questioned her. The memory holds no terror for her at all.

The reporters, she says, "kept saying, 'Other people are saying that you shouldn't play this violin because you're going to screw up the instrument, blah blah blah.' Every question they asked me, I was just like, 'Bam!' I was just like, 'This is really stupid, ignorant. People have closed minds. You have to grow out of that. What do you think I'm going to do? You think I'm going to bash it on the floor? You say, "You disrespect this music." That's like saying you disrespect me, or my culture.'"

The press conferences aired, unedited, two days before her concerts, at which point not a single ticket had been sold. By the time of the concerts, 1,800 people had paid to see the interloper play the Cannon.

Of course, Carter still hadn't played the Cannon much herself. She first made its acquaintance as press, officials and armed guards crowded into a tiny room along with her. "What to play is the thing," she says of the occasion, "because now everyone's just there to see what does this thing sound like, and I didn't know. Obviously, everyone's expecting something huge, so what do I play? I couldn't think of anything. So then my mother just popped in my head, and I said, 'OK. One of her favorite tunes is "Amazing Grace." I'll play that, and it'll kind of soothe the savage beast.' And so that was good, 'cause it helped to calm my nerves, too, just doing that. And then I just kind of warmed up on it and checked out the instrument.

"It wasn't much time. The instrument is much bigger than mine, the body of it; the string length is much longer. So the notes, especially after third position, are nowhere near where I think they are. And a lot of my time was cut into for doing interviews and press conferences."

She laughs at the memory. "So it's like, 'OK, I have to remember all this by tomorrow night for this concert,' which was pretty scary.

"I started off the concert with a duo piece that I do with Vana, 'Don't Explain,' a Billie Holiday piece, because I figured that's the closest to classical that I could get, just violin and piano, and I do a Bach cadenza on the end of it. And then I slowly added in the rest of the band [with] 'Chattanooga,' 'Lady Be Good,' stuff like that. And they loved it! They really loved the concert."

Despite the frustrations she faced on the way there, Carter appreciated that the Genoese had given her the opportunity: "When you really think about it, when you have something so precious, I have to really commend them for really respecting this instrument, and keeping it in shape. It's not that they're really keeping people out. They do let people play it. It's in a museum, but it serves a purpose."

And she did feel a connection, over the years, between herself and the distant, towering figure who made the Cannon his own: "The first time I played it for the concert, there were times I would go to play a note, and the note wouldn't speak-we call them woof tones. And I would think [Paganini] was standing there, jabbing me, saying, 'Ha ha! See? Not gonna let you....'

"I do think those instruments like that have so much history - I think a part of you is going through that instrument, and it stays there. So I feel like, 'Wow! I'm touching this instrument!' like I'm having some kind of connection with him on another level, which was pretty heavy.

"So it was a huge success," she concludes. "For me, that was enough. I was like, 'OK, that's probably the greatest gift I could have been given.'"

It may have been enough, but it wasn't all. After the concerts, Gierig suggested that Carter should record with the violin. Having entrusted Carter with their prize possession before, the Genoese authorities were less wary of a return engagement, and the bureaucratic hoops Carter and her team had to jump through were, at least, familiar ones. They met fiercer resistance trying to pitch the project to record executives back home.

"They said that no one knows who Paganini is. Maybe if they're not in the classical world, but what's wrong with educating people to who he is?" Carter smiles at the memory. "A lot of people don't know who a lot of people are.

"And then they were like, 'Well, but still, what's the deal? You have to have a musical concept.' And so I was trying to come up with a musical concept, and at the same time when Vana and Andrea were asking the musical community in Genoa whether I could record with the violin, they were saying the music had to match the instrument. Well, right there to me, that says classical. So I said, 'OK. How can I marry those two worlds without it sounding corny?' Because it's so easy for it to sound corny. So we just really sat and listened to a bunch of pieces, just to see what we thought would work."

They settled on four works by French impressionist composers, along with the Astor Piazzolla tango "Oblivion," the themes to the films Black Orpheus and Cinema Paradiso and two original compositions by Gierig and Carter, respectively. The French impressionist works fit well into a jazz context, Carter says, "because you hear more modern chords, and it's easier to take those chords and reharmonize them so that you can solo over them."

Yet even as they are used for unfamiliar purposes, the classical works retain their own identity on Paganini: After a Dream. Carter credits Jorge Calandrelli, who arranged the music and orchestrated those tracks with strings, with essential assistance on that score. Calandrelli has, Carter says, "worked with so many different styles and musicians. He really kept the elements of classical there. He would tell us, 'No, you can't change this here, because that's how the melody was written. You have to respect that; play it that way. When you get to it the second time, if you want to swing it a little bit then you can, but the first time you have to respect it.'

Without him, Carter says, "I would have said, 'Oh, I want to do this to it here,' and that's not respecting the music, and then that's insulting."

Still, Carter knows there's nothing inherently disrespectful about improvisation-in Paganini's day, improvisation was expected of a great virtuoso. "In Italy, when people were opposed to it, I said, 'What do you think Paganini was doing?' It's really a lost art form, and it's really a shame, when you think about it."

She recalls one exchange with a classical teacher who told her that she had to hew exactly to the score. "I was like, 'Why?' And he was like, 'Because that's how Bach wrote it.' And I said, 'How do you know? Did you talk to Bach?'" As she laughs happily at the memory, you can understand why experiences like that pushed Carter toward jazz, where she could be serious about music without being "somber."

Yet even so, Carter admits with a laugh, "Violin is one of those instruments that you're gonna learn classical music first. Everything you learn from classical, it almost seems like it's the opposite from jazz." She knows the differences well, having traversed them for many years. But jazz violinists, she ways, can never break completely away from their instrument's classical origins. "It's like if you go to France and you speak French, you're still going to hear that American accent in there, no matter how long you're there. That's still going to be there."

So it is appropriate that the Cannon played as large a role in shaping Paganini: After a Dream as Carter and her fellow musicians. "Because the instrument was so difficult to play, I knew there were certain styles I couldn't do. Like I couldn't do a real Latin thing like I usually do, because it would be too aggressive for the instrument.

So when we started looking at the repertoire, I just looked at it [as] almost a ballad record. Which was OK. But I didn't realize until the recording that they all had that dreamlike feel. And that helped me with the title of the record, and also the fact that it was a dream that came true." She looks into the distance, back into her reverie. "So everything kind of came together."

You can hear her dream realized on this record: The classical accent seems to disappear, as a musical language arises that is perfectly suited to the instrument that speaks it and the person who plays it. Paganini made the Cannon his own forever playing the classical canon, but Carter has proven that it can speak with another voice and still sound as sweet.

On Paganini: After a Dream, Carter, aided by the sensitive playing of Gierig and her other bandmates-bassist Chris Lightcap, percussionist Mayra Casales and drummer Alvester Garnett-and the detailed, adept arrangements of Calandrelli, takes the originals' lush, longing melodies, gives them their full sweep once, then spins them into the jazz realm with blue harmonies and spontaneous ornaments. A string orchestra on some tracks and Borislav Strulev's solo cello on others provide another layer of lyricism; Garnett's cymbal brushes and Casales' rainsticks and soft-struck bells sustain an unearthly atmosphere. Most of the pieces unfold at a leisurely tempo, save the one swing tune, Claude Debussy's "Rêverie" by way of Ella Fitzgerald's arrangement, which sweetly glides along to provide welcome contrast at the center of the record. (Having only known Fitzgerald's arrangement before this recording, Carter recalls her reaction when she heard Debussy's original: "'Oh! Check this out! He covered an Ella tune!'")

"It took me this many records to have one unified sound throughout the whole record," says Carter, "which is a big deal. I feel like I grew some."

Due to budget and travel constraints, Carter had to record at home with her band and her own violin and then re-record her parts with the Cannon in Genoa. Nevertheless, Carter's interaction with the ensemble is natural, even as she stands out with that instrument. She seamlessly accelerates to add a nervous edge to Gabriel Fauré's "Pavane" and swings nicely through the Debussy tune, while always following up those gorgeous thematic statements with intriguing variations. And despite her initial trepidation about making the instrument work for her, Carter always manages to fire a beautiful sound from the Cannon, whether in the plaintive lament of Gierig's "Healing in Foreign Lands," the sultry, dark-hued line of the improvisations on "Black Orpheus" or the achingly rich melody of "Cinema Paradiso."

The penultimate track is an excerpt from Carter's own composition "Alexandra," originally commissioned by the Kennedy Center. It's a striking work, with an open, questioning violin statement that comes out as an arresting cry on the Cannon and that yields to mysterious piano chords that spawn another golden theme. The music then accelerates and, quietly and without fuss, moves through graceful solos in ear-catching timbral combinations, like the gently plucked bass with snare drum and piano accompaniment and a final wordless chorus before the opening statement returns, even more poignant. Carter describes the piece as a struggle to write, and she named it after a niece of hers who was born prematurely and fought her way into the world, as tribute and analogy to her own eventual success.

Carter feels a similar sense of triumph when she speaks of Paganini: After a Dream. "A lot of people at the record company said the jazz people are going to hate [the record]; they're going to think it's too classical," she says, "and the classical people are going to think it's too jazzy. When they heard it, they changed their minds, and said, 'It's just beautiful music.' That's what it's supposed to be. It's not a classical record. It's just music."

Listening Pleasures

Carla Cook It's All About Love (MaxJazz)

Ella Fitzgerald Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie! (Verve)

Stuff Smith Jivin' at the Onyx (Affinity)

Vana Gierig A New Day (Twinz)

Parliament Chocolate City (Casablanca)

Chris Lightcap Big Mouth (Fresh Sound New Talent)

Renee Rosnes As We Are Now (Blue Note)

Gearbox

Violin: Storioni copy

Bow: Carbow by L.N.M. of Marseille, France

Strings: Thomastik-Infeld Dominant strings

Microphone: Roam 2 wireless by Applied Microphone Technology 

http://chicagomaroon.com/2014/10/28/queen-of-scandal-the-groundbreaking-style-of-regina-carter/

Arts » Music

Queen of Scandal: The groundbreaking style of Regina Carter

"Her artistry is sensational in its lack of sensationalism."

Posted Oct 28, 2014 
by Hannah Edgar

 

Photo: Courtesy of Armando L. Sanchez

In December 2001, Regina Carter was invited to Genoa, Italy to play on one of the most famous violins in existence: a 1743 Guarneri once favored by the virtuoso Niccolò Paganini. Nicknamed Il Cannone (“The Cannon”) for its explosive, robust sound, the violin is usually only played in a performance once a year by the winner of the Premio Paganini, a violin competition featuring young musicians from across the globe.

When news broke that Carter would be performing a concert in the city on Il Cannone, conservative Genoans were appalled. Not only was Carter black—the first black musician to play on the instrument—but she planned to play jazz, of all genres.

At an intimate listening session on October 23, the night before her Chicago concert, in the Logan Center for the Art’s Performance Penthouse, Carter recalled her shock when, shortly after arriving in Genoa, she saw her name printed in an Italian newspaper with the headline “Queen of Scandal.”

The epithet didn’t fit her well. With her soft, melodic voice and voracious musical curiosity—the latter of which inspired her newest album, Southern Comfort, a genre-melding delight—it’s easy to see how Carter eventually won over even the most buttoned-down skeptics. Her performance in Genoa was a hit, and she rejoined forces with the immortal Il Cannone two years later to record the classical-jazz crossover album Paganini: After a Dream.

As she told audiences during Thursday’s panel, Carter was solely a classical violinist until her late teens, when she was introduced to jazz by classmate and future jazz vocalist Carla Cook. “She would talk about Eddie Jefferson, Miles Davis and Sarah Vaughan, and I didn’t know who any of those people were,” Carter remembered, to the amusement of many in the audience.

After Cook lent her friend a handful of jazz violin records, as Carter put it, “That was it.” She redirected her creative energy to jazz, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Carter’s classical training is still evident in her coolly controlled, meticulous playing style. Technically impeccable, and possessing an otherworldly amount of musical tact, her artistry is sensational in its lack of sensationalism. Carter’s musicianship—with its effortless tonal purity and razor-sharp wit—demands to be heard, not seen. During Friday’s performance, she was joined by wildly talented partners in musical crime: Will Holshouser on accordion, Chris Lightcap on bass, and Alvester Garnett on drums, and the virtuosic and charming Columbian harpist Edmar Castañeda as a special guest.

The production of Southern Comfort, like several of Carter’s previous albums, aligned with a period of self-discovery for the artist. Using ancestry.com and other resources, Carter traced her genealogy, focusing especially on the life of her long-deceased paternal grandfather, Dan John Carter, a coal miner in Bradford, Alabama. Drawing upon the few biographical details she uncovered about his life, Carter researched folk songs men like Dan would have heard living in Bradford at the turn of the century, then recorded improvisations upon those themes in Comfort.

Friday’s opener, “Shoo-Rye,” gave listeners a taste of what defines most of Southern Comfort. A riff on an old Southern traditional, the tune was unmistakably country-infused and bursting with instrumental color; Holshouser’s accordion was a definite scene stealer. As the other instrumentalists dropped down to a low pulse halfway through the number, Carter herself provided evocative, almost distant-sounding vocals, surely intended to recall the lamenting workday melodies sung by men like Dan John Carter.

Castañeda joined the quartet for the third number, laying into an intricate and pianistic solo that elicited wild applause from the audience. A bouncy and delightful highlight was “Zerapiky,” derived from traditional Madagascan music. Carter, Holshouser, Lightcap, and Garnett covered the tune in their 2010 album Reverse Thread, and the lush addition of Castañeda’s double-handed chords and fluid runs brought an extra jolt of electricity to an already crackling number.

Though each individual musician’s chops were spotlighted at some point during Friday’s performance, perhaps most captivating was the way they worked together: the acuity of their musical sensitivity, their deference to one another whenever a solo materialized from the whirling notes of the ensemble, and, most of all, their sheer joy. Flashing cheeky grins throughout, it was apparent that this was a group that loved playing together—perhaps just as much as we would love seeing them at Logan again in the near future.

http://www.allthingsstrings.com/News/Interviews-Profiles/Jazz-Violinist-Regina-Carter-Motor-City-Maverick

Jazz Violinist Regina Carter: Motor City Maverick

As a teenager, Carter was inspired by Stephane Grappelli

By Susan M. Barbieri

February/March 2002

 

The green room at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis is filled with Suzuki strings teachers attending a master class with jazz violinist Regina Carter, who is in town with her band for a concert with former Tonight Show bandleader and jazz trumpeter Doc Severinsen and the Minnesota Orchestra. Carter hands out a bass-line melody and announces that she is going to teach the teachers how to swing. "This is Minnesota," one woman jokes. "We don't swing." When the laughter subsides, Carter sets out to prove her wrong.

Carter picks two volunteers from the audience to improvise around the bass line, which the group plays pizzicato. It's jazzy; it swings. Carter answers their questions from the teachers, who seem concerned about "wrong" notes and ask a lot of questions about showing interested students how to practice jazz and blues. "With improvisation, it's your own story, so you can't be wrong," Carter tells them. Then she adds with a laugh, "and in jazz, you're always a half-step away from where you want to be, so make that wrong note really convincing."

She urges the teachers to have their students do inside slurs on phrases (slurring the middle two notes) to get the swing. She recommends staying in one position, "because if you're shifting all the time, you miss a lot of stuff." And lose the vibrato, she instructs–a tall order for classically trained string players, but vibrato in jazz sounds too "corny," Carter says.

The (Other) Motown Sound

As a Detroit schoolgirl during the '70s and '80s, Carter grew up at a time when the Motor City was a hotbed for jazz–perhaps a natural evolution from the formulaic Motown pop and light R&B of the previous decade. Hip urban sophisticates could spend weekends cruising the jazz circuit, hearing pianist Ramsey Lewis or guitarist Earl Klugh at Baker's Keyboard Lounge, French jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli on the terrace at the Renaissance Center's jazz festival, and a parade of national and local acts at the P-Jazz shows at the old Hotel Pontchartrain.

There also were a half dozen small clubs nestled in Detroit's riverfront warehouse district, and you could walk from one to the next, catching unknown jazz and blues artists at the Rattlesnake or the Soup Kitchen Saloon: brick walls, burgers, and beer; red-and-white checked tablecloths; no cover charge. On the way from one part of town to another, you'd tune your car radio to the seminal jazz station of the time, WJZZ-FM. The city's nightlife was vibrant with jazz. Detroit really knew how to swing–and how to nurture homegrown musical talent.

"There's just so much music that came out of Detroit," Carter has acknowledged, "and it all inspired me."

Growing up in the Palmer Park neighborhood, just a stone's throw from Baker's, Carter didn't have to travel far for that inspiration. Music was a big part of her home life as well. There were piano lessons on Monday, violin lessons on Tuesday, and tap and ballet lessons on Thursday. Saturdays were spent downtown at the Detroit Community Music School with her violin, her Suzuki lesson books, and a diverse group of violin-playing friends. But by the time she was a teenager, Carter began feeling hemmed in by the classical repertoire. There had to be something else she could do with her chosen instrument beyond staid minuets and gavottes, she reasoned.

https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/71632/paganinis-violin-inspires-regina-carters-dream

Regina Carter:   Jazz Intuition

1

Regina Carter

By Alan Nahigian

1 of 1      Next

July/August 1999

by Willard Jenkins

From the mid-1980s, when she was spotted in the string section of saxophonist Donald Walden’s Detroit Jazz Orchestra, and in solo roles around her native Motor City with artists like guitarist Spencer Barefield, to her days as star soloist with the band Straight Ahead, to a stint with the String Trio of New York, to her electrifying cameo appearance in Wynton Marsalis’ Blood on the Fields tour, and more recent sightings in Steve Turre’s sextet, it’s been clear that Regina Carter is an exceptional and refreshing talent. And now on the strength of the broad rhythmic boundaries and marvelous playing on her Verve Records debut, Rhythms of the Heart, the proof is in the pudding that with the passing of Stephane Grappelli, the jazz violin torch has been passed to this remarkable spirit from Detroit.

Broad boundaries and wide vistas are common themes of Regina Carter's journey. As she spoke from her Manhattan digs, our conversation veered to her recent collaboration with the award-winning playwright Anna Deavere Smith. “She's working on a play called House Arrest.” Ms. Deavere Smith is a masterful improviser and her works are in constant evolution, much like jazz. “It deals with certain presidents and their scandals and how the press dealt with them: Jefferson, FDR, Lincoln, Clinton.... And she deals a little bit with Princess Di and how the press exploited her and how the public reacted.

“Anna usually does one-woman plays where she listens to tapes so much she is transformed and becomes [her characters]. This is her first time working with other actors and she is teaching that technique to them. Sometimes more than one person will play a certain character. I'm playing Jefferson in the beginning of the play, and I don't have to speak, but Jefferson played the violin, so I'm his violin side and I'm doing music of his day. I did some research and started writing bits of music that sound like music of that time, and after that I'm just creating a mood or going against a mood that's already set, so I'm not a character anymore,” she continued. “Some of these pieces I wrote have harmony parts and I just laid down the harmonies on DAT. Some of the scenes may be something taking place at the White House where they would have strolling violins, so I did like a music-minus-one, I put the harmonies down and then I'll play live with the DAT.”

Deavere's piece came on the heels of Regina putting the final touches on Rhythms of the Heart, which she also co-produced. “It was funny,” she chuckled, “because I hadn't had a record out in a while. But it was interesting that whole time when I didn't have any records out I was starting to get a lot of press and I was given that opportunity to play Sweet Basil leading my own group; I used Kenny Barron, Lewis Nash, Peter Washington, and Rodney Jones [each of whom contributed to the record]. Then I started to think about what kind of music I like because I had been doing the, if you will, smooth jazz thing. Some of those tunes I was actually still doing with the acoustic band. I went through a lot of tunes that I really liked and that worked well on the violin and that would convey some kind of message. “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” [sung by Cassandra Wilson on the record] came about because one day that melody just popped into my head and people responded to it in such a positive way.”

Listening to the record one experiences a gumbo of rhythms and stylistic approaches, on tunes ranging from “Our Delight,” and “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” to the African rhythms of “Mandingo Street” and the R&B of “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” very much reflective of where she's been musically. “A big part of it was growing up in Detroit,” she agrees, “just having all of those pockets of culture there: we have a Latin community, of course Motown, and then the whole jazz community there. In a way the whole record is kind of what I grew up with, journeys I've taken, and the music that has influenced me.
“A lot of times record companies want you to have a concept,” she continued, “and I'm not a straightahead player. There's not one kind of music that I can say OK, this is the kind of musician that I am. I grew up heavily steeped in European classical music. Richard [Seidel, co-producer] said 'Why don't you do something that represents different rhythms?' I just said I'm gonna find musicians whose music I really enjoy playing and ask them to contribute to this project. I asked Richard Bona to write [“Mandingo Street”] and he played all the instruments on it and sang. That was one of the toughest tunes to record because of the feel of it and the count, because where he's from [Cameroon], they don't count, they just feel it. At first I was really disappointed because it took me so long, and he said 'You shouldn't be disappointed, you should be happy that you can still be challenged,’ which I thought was a really hip way of looking at it.”

Rhythms of the Heart is an acoustic jazz album at its core, employing various ethnic colors, rhythms, and adjuncts, but a jazz album nonetheless. One of the more straightahead selections proved particularly tricky for the resourceful Regina: “I would say ‘New York attitude,’ because trying to take a solo after Kenny Barron, it’s like.... why?” she laughs. “That was difficult because I was really up tight doing the solo and thinking about what I was playing and it stopped me from being as creative as I could have been. I said don't let me have to hang the rhythm section up just because of my solo. Kenny Barron said something I'd never even thought of before, he said 'You are where you are [in terms of] level of playing; you can't judge yourself and say “I don't sound like so and so now, or I should sound like this.' “ You are where you are and you're documenting your music now, a year from now you'll be further from now, and that's the beauty of the music.’”

Acoustic jazz has not always been the atmosphere where you'd find Carter, particularly with her own band and on her Atlantic records. Asked about the transition from those days, which she referred to as in the smooth jazz vein, though the music actually fell somewhere in between smooth jazz and bonafide jazz, she replied, “When I did the Blood on the Fields tour with Wynton, then when I did the Travelin' Miles tour with Cassandra Wilson, working more in an acoustic situation, I enjoyed just being able to play the instrument natural and not have any kind of hook-up. All of a sudden because I was with these folks and it wasn't plugged in and it was acoustic, I got all this attention! I'm not opposed to that, because I've done one acoustic tune on each of the Atlantic records. With an acoustic band it’s fun to explore that feel and how to deal with those tunes with an acoustic group.”

Increasingly, her immersion in acoustic music has stirred new levels of interest in her as a bandleader. “But I don't want to give up working in other people's units,” she declares, “like Steve Turre or Kenny Barron, because I learn so much from that and I don't feel like musically I'm at a point where I can say 'Okay, I'm done learning’ and I can just be the bandleader and I can turn around and mentor someone. I'm pretty young in this music so I still feel like I need that and I don't wanna give that up anytime soon because it just keeps your music fresh. I look at some of the guys in my band that may be even newer to the scene than I am; we can all go back and play with other folks that have been out there and bring that experience back to the band.”

Asked about future directions, Carter focused more on increasing her skill level in the music and her instrumental acumen. “I've had a lot of people I really admire, like Kenny Barron and John Blake say to me 'You're gettin’ to where other people want to go, your process is just opposite.' They told me that I should be happy because a lot of people learn things theoretically and then they try and learn how to use their ear, whereas I come from a totally opposite point of view. You can explain something to me theoretically and it means nothing to me, I just have to hear it and understand it that way, so it’s more of an intuitive way that I approach the music, and I've started to accept that it’s okay however people get there as long as you get there. I did a gig with Kenny Barron and Rufus Reid and Victor Lewis about a year and a half ago and we were doing "Passion Flower," a beautiful tune with monster changes. So I’m out here playing and I’m looking at Kenny and Rufus saying, ‘Okay, help me, throw the life raft out here any day now’ [Laughs]. I remember they gave me this really pleasant look like ‘we know you’re struggling, but you’re gonna get back on your own and we’re gonna let you get back on your own.’ In one way I beat myself up more, but when people like that still continue to call me…I think it’s probably enjoyable for them--to watch me really struggle but get to where I’m trying to get each time."

Gear Box

Regina plays an old German trade violin of indeterminate age, with a Wurzberg bow and an L.R. Baggs pickup.

Listening Pleasures

Marian Anderson Bach, Brahms and Schubert (RCA Victor)
The Gentle Side of John Coltrane (Impulse!)
Cheb Mami Saida (Totem). 

http://www.clickondetroit.com/entertainment/regina-carter-pairs-with-oakland-jazz-quartet-for-jimi-hendrix-tribute/30757436

Regina Carter pairs with Oakland Jazz Quartet for 

Jimi Hendrix tribute

by Crystal Ross

ClickOnDetroit intern

cross@wdiv.com

January 16, 2015

DETROIT - Jazz violinist Regina Carter will join the Oakland Jazz Quartet for a musical tribute to legendary rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 17, 2015 at Carr Center in Detroit.

Carter, Detroit native and Oakland alum, is a Grammy nominee and 2006 recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. She often teaches master classes and performs at her Alma Mater.

The Oakland Jazz Quartet is composed of OU faculty members, Miles Brown (bass), Sean Dobbins (drums), Scott Gwinnell (piano) and Mark Stone (percussion). They have performed locally, nationally and abroad.

Carter and the quartet will perform several Hendrix songs including, “Fire,” “Manic Depression,” “Angel.”

Tickets are on sale for $20 for general admission and $10 for OU students.  Tickets may be purchased in advance on startickets.com or by phone at (800) 585-3737.

 

THE MUSIC OF REGINA CARTER: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MS. CARTER
 

Regina Carter's "Southern Comfort" @ DJF 2014:

Published on Oct 11, 2014

Regina Carter--Violin
Will Holshouser, accordion
Marvin Sewell, guitar
Chris Lightcap, bass
Alvester Garnett, drums

Violin virtuoso and MacArthur Fellow Regina Carter is considered to be the foremost Jazz violinist of her generation. Born in Detroit, Regina draws from a diverse well of influences, which include classical, Jazz, Motown, swing, funk, and world music. Her musical odyssey has been charted through a series of unforgettable recordings over the years. Carter's musical quest for beauty and history continues with her Sony Music Masterworks debut Southern Comfort, in which she investigates her family history and explores the music her grandfather, a coal miner, would have heard as he toiled in Alabama. The project serves as Carter’s interpretation of her roots through a modern lens.

"Regina Carter creates music that is wonderfully listenable and, at the same time, breathtakingly daring." — Time

“Regina Carter is a knockout violinist who leads a knockout band.” — O Magazine

Regina Carter: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert:

Regina Carter's violin has expressed moods inspired by European classical, bebop, Afro-Cuban and Southern blues music. On her new album 'Reverse Thread,' and in this recent performance at the NPR Music offices, Carter plays traditional African melodies, re-imagined through her own jazz sensibilities.

Regina Carter - "Kanou"--2010:

From the latest release of this phenomenal violinist - Regina Carter. This 2010 release, entitled Reverse Thread, also features master kora player, Yacouba Sissoko.

"Phantoms"

Kenny Barron--Piano
Regina Carter--Violin

Regina Carter - "Listen Here":

From her 1997 Masterpiece "Something for Grace" (titled in honor of her mother), this is jazz violinist Regina Carter's cover (although the word "cover" does not do this piece justice) of Eddie Harris' "Listen Here". Awesome. Enjoy.

Regina Carter "When I Hear Your Name"

Regina Carter - "Kothbiro"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiRO_G4rXNQ

LEWIS NASH QUINTET with REGINA CARTER at Bern 2000:

Lewis Nash (ld, dr), Regina Carter (v), Kenny Barron (p), Peter Washington (b), Steve Wilson (sax, fl) at International Jazz Festival Bern 2000

 
Der Schlagzeuger Lewis Nash wurde 1958 in Arizona geboren und war schon mit 21 Jahren einer der gefragtesten Drummer in Phoenix. 1988 war Lewis mit J. J. Johnson auf Tournee durch die USA und Europa. Er begeisterte auch als subtiler Schlagzeuger des Cecil Payne/Ron Carter Quintetts und war mit John Lewis/Hank Jones und der Carnegie Hall Jazz Band zu hören. 

Die Violinistin Regina Carter studierte am Konservatorium von New England Klassik und Jazz, heute kombiniert sie ihr Kompositions- und Improvisationstalent.

Kontakt sowie eigene Klavierstücke unter http://www.wladis-klavier.de
Mehr Videos (Klassik, Chanson, Jazz) unter http://www.dailymotion.com/Obwladi#vi.. 

Regina Carter - The Making of Southern Comfort:

Music video by Regina Carter performing The Making of Southern Comfort. (C) 2014 Sony Music Entertainment

Interview with violinist Regina Carter

January 8, 2015

ELBOW MUSIC

Quality quirk and geekery from all over the string music world

Regina Carter started with Dont and Galamian but she only truly found her voice when she discovered jazz. She tells Ariane Todes about the journey, and explains how the best way to learn jazz violin is to listen to horn players

‘Who says?’ exclaims Regina Carter. Perhaps my suggestion, to one of today’s finest jazz violinists, that the instrument doesn’t naturally suit the genre, is a little thoughtless. She laughs wholeheartedly, as she does throughout our conversation the day before her appearance at December’s London Jazz Festival. But she explains why it’s possible to think this: ‘There were so many violinists early on in the jazz tradition. You look at Stuff Smith, Ray Nance, Stéphane Grappelli, Eddie South, Sugercane Harris. Maybe with bebop we didn’t see so many violinists, so people don’t think of it as a jazz instrument.’

The issue is irrelevant, though, really: ‘I don’t think of violin as either a jazz instrument or not. I think of it as an extension of my voice.’ Hearing Carter live is to hear this voice in full blossom. She has a phenomenal technique, but it’s only there to serve a vivid imagination and to power the story of the music. She has magnetic charisma on stage but, as when talking to her, no starriness, and she melts into the background when her colleagues solo. It’s not surprising that she was given a MacArthur Fellows Program grant in 2006, the awarding committee citing that, 'Through artistry with an instrument that has been defined predominantly by the classical tradition, Carter is pioneering new possibilities for the violin and for jazz.'

Listening to her recent Southern Comfort CD, which focuses on the music of her paternal grandfather, a coal miner in Alabama, or her recent back catalogue, in which she explores her mother’s favourite jazz standards (I'll Be Seeing You) and the music of her West African heritage (Reverse Thread), you also get a sense of a musical imagination moving forwards constantly. Talking to her, you discover that this voice has been hard won on a ceaseless quest that began with Suzuki, Dont and Galamian, eventually led her to discovering a home in jazz, and that continues among various musical heroes and styles.

‘Jazz gave me the leeway to say, “This is how I feel.”’

Carter was trained in the Western Classical tradition (throughout the interview she’s at pains to describe it like this: ‘I always ask people – whose classical music? Everyone has a classical music!’) She went on to study at the New England Conservatory but never quite felt comfortable: ‘It was so strict and boxed in. “You have to play this way. No, you can’t do that here.” I remember working on a Bach Partita once and my teacher said, “No, it has to be played like this,” and I said, “How do you know? Did you talk to Bach?” It was a smartass thing to say, but I knew I wanted to play it my way. Jazz gave me the leeway to say, “This is how I feel.” Still respecting the music, the melody and what it’s about, but I get to have my say about how it’s going to be played.’

The orchestral experience was also confusing for her: ‘I found it really difficult. I never understood the conductor because he’d give the downbeat and everyone would come in two seconds later and I’d wonder, “Why am I coming in early? They all understand when to come in apart from me.” I find it amazing when I watch a conductor and he’s way ahead, and the orchestra is together but they’re behind him. In a jazz group the beat is right there, where you count it.'

Carter was turned on to jazz by a friend: ‘My girlfriend brought me three records – Noel Pointer, Jean-Luc Ponty and Stéphane Grappelli – and I just started learning their tunes and solos, and put together a basement band. It was easy to mimic them because what they were doing was violinistic.’ What did she learn from each of them? ‘They had three distinct voices. At the time Noel Pointer was more pop-oriented, or soul, which was the music I listened to growing up in Motown, so it was easier for me to transcribe him. I loved Jean-Luc Ponty because he had all the effects and the pedals and it was fun because you didn’t hear that on the violin. Grappelli was the most straight – there were no add-ons, it was just him playing the violin. He played more of the American songbook, so it was simpler to learn standards listening to him. Hearing how he approached them made it easier to understand from a violinist’s point of view.’

‘In jazz you want to have your own voice’

Carter transferred from NEC, which didn’t have a jazz course at that point, to Oakland University in Michigan, which did. Some of the most important advice she had was not to listen to violinists: ‘The head of the jazz department told me to stop listening to violin players because I would start sounding like one of them and I needed to have my own voice. I’m really happy he told me that because back then you could count on your hand the prominent jazz violinists and it would have been too easy to copy them. In jazz you want to have your own voice.’

‘You just have to listen and copy the sound’

So she turned to the great horn players and singers for inspiration, which offered her a whole new range of sound possibilities and forced her to challenge the limits of the violin: ‘The interesting thing about learning this music is that there are no books one, two and three saying, “This is how you bow a swing passage” or “This is how you get the sound.” You just have to listen and copy the sound. For example, as violin players we’re taught to use the whole bow, but with swing or bebop especially, you have to use less bow and be very light on the string. You have to figure out bowings for yourself because some of those lines are not what you expect them to be.’ As for vibrato: ‘I think of it as an effect. You have to figure out how you want to use it or not use it. I love Ben Webster and the big vibrato he has on his horn so I copy that by slowing it down, or sometimes I’ll use a faster vibrato to get an effect, but the regular vibrato we learnt in class doesn’t work.’

Coming out of the discipline of Western Classical music the process was not necessarily easy. ‘I didn’t understand how to learn this music because from a classical point of view you had your book for shifting or your Dont or your Galamian, you had the pieces you were learning, and you could listen to people playing them. You were always working towards a goal, learning repertoire so you could either be a soloist or get into an orchestra. It was very specific. Whereas jazz is a huge umbrella and a lot of styles get shoved underneath it. Where do you start? Back then there were no books, and I felt lost.’

'I need to hear how other people are approaching it'

One particular challenge was jazz harmonies. ‘I had studied harmony but when it came to learning jazz I had no clue. I still don’t have a clue!’ (More full-throttle laughter.) ‘I would study with people and try to learn the theory of “You can play this over these changes,” but to me it didn’t make sense. It’s the same when I learn languages. I go to class and they say, “This is the grammar: the shoes are red. I’m going to the store,” but when am I going to go somewhere and say, “The shoes are red”? I needed to hear it in context. I need to hear how other people are approaching it – to listen to four or five people playing the same tune. Then I understand, “Oh, that’s what a II-V-I progression sounds like.”’

Even now, the process of transcribing tunes helps her in this and she is systematic in this process. ‘I pick tunes – this week it’s going to be Stuff Smith, Ella Fitzgerald and Tommy Flanagan. I have a whole list. I listen to how they approach their solos and I learn them. That’s how I learn my theoretical information. At the beginning it seemed like there were a gazillion tunes so I tried to categorise them into ones that come under specific rhythm changes. And there are ones with different bridges, for example, and then those that are nothing like the rest.’

‘We take on aspects of other people – we can’t help it’

It may seem paradoxical that Carter has found her own voice by exploring the sounds of other musicians, and yet this research has given her the vast palette that is such a distinctive part of her personality. ‘When I’m listening to Ella I’m trying to transcribe her sound. Of course no one else will ever sound like her, but doing that helped shape my voice. The same with Ben Webster or Paul Gonsalves. We take on aspects of other people – we can’t help it. They’re not always violinistic, but you find a way to do it and it becomes yours. It’s like you grow up in your family and when you answer the phone you sound like your father – it’s not that you tried to, but you took it on growing up. Now it’s something you identify when you hear my voice rather than someone else’s.’

‘It’s just a piece of wood that’s got some strings on it’

Surprisingly, her imagination benefitted from the theft of her instrument early on, as she explains: ‘Years ago I had an electric violin with all the equipment – echoplex and wah-wah. It was fun, but it was stolen. When I got another it was an acoustic violin and I enjoyed trying to find the sounds I got using the wah-wah pedal. When I joined the String Trio of New York they played a lot with altered techniques, which I’d never done, and it really expanded my thinking. There are all these sounds you can get out of the instrument if you don’t place rules on it or have preconceived concepts. People have the idea that the violin belongs in Western Classical music, but not necessarily. There are so many possibilities. It’s just a piece of wood that’s got some strings on it, so depending on who’s playing, it can be anything.’

‘It’s a whole community of musicians working together’

Having struggled herself, how does she help young players now that she teaches? ‘There are different ways to teach jazz. Sometimes we’ll just get together and play, or we’ll talk about bowing and I’ll say, “Try doing this with the bowing.” But they have other professors who can talk about, “This is a II chord.” Many university students don’t do a lot of listening. They listen on their phones or tablets, but you can’t hear all the instruments and all the things that are going on, and they’re missing a lot of information. So I bring in pieces and make students transcribe them, but not just the tonality: they have to hear what the drummer, bass player and piano are doing. I want to know how they feel. Someone might want to take the line, and then they support someone else, because it’s important we help each other. That’s part of jazz, it’s a whole community of musicians working together. When you’re at school you get used to someone telling you what to do, so you don’t get that sense of community.’

Defying a lot of negativity around the future of music, Carter is optimistic for her students. ‘People can put out their own music now and not have to have a label behind them. We’re tired of radio stations or record companies or television channels saying, “This is what you’re going to listen to and this is all there is.” We can now hear so many other cultures of music we were never exposed to and it’s opening things up. People are collaborating with other musicians in a way we never thought we’d see and creating some really new and different music.’ And being a niche is an advantage: ‘I think for most of us playing jazz, folk or art music, we’re always going to be able to navigate our way. We’re never going to be the popular music.’

‘People still don’t think of it as a job'

However, she is frustrated by the attitude, increasingly common it seems, and typified by Spotify, that music should be free: ‘For musicians who don’t have exposure Spotify is a way that people can hear us or get to know us, but I don’t think there should be free streaming. There should be samples and then people should have to buy it. People still don’t understand that for artists this is our job. This is how we make money. Coming through customs I gave the gentleman my paperwork and said I was coming for the festival and that I was a musician, and he said, “You get paid to do this?” Yes. I wouldn’t just get on a plane for the fun of it. People still don’t think of it as a job.’

‘It’s our responsibility as musicians to cultivate our own audiences’

Carter puts the onus on musicians actively to seek new audiences. ‘If you don’t understand a certain style of music or how it works then you have a tendency to shy away from it. It’s important for me to do classes or demonstrations for audiences, to show them a piece we’re doing on stage so that they get it, or are more apt to go to another jazz concert. It’s the same with European Classical music. It’s our responsibility as musicians, no matter which form, to cultivate our own audiences.’

One of the keys to this communication, which comes across whether in her playing, her approach to education, or the projects she chooses, is the importance of story telling, as she explains: ‘It’s easy to take an old standard that everyone knows and play through it without any embellishments, and then talk while we’re playing – “Now I’m going to take this solo and I’m having a conversation with the band”. The audience can see how we’re working off one another and that when I’m done I might look at someone or they might jump in. It’s taking something they know and breaking it down to show them how it works. When I was younger and playing in a youth orchestra my teacher would come and tell the stories of the pieces – this is when it was written, this is what it means politically, this is when the bassoons come in, so it made sense and you felt part of the music. That’s really important for an audience with any style of music, and especially in jazz.’

‘I don’t want to bang people over the head’

Her aim on stage, she says, is to create an intimate experience for everyone: ‘I still want there to be a sense of a community, as if we’re all sitting on a porch somewhere, the audience included.’ This is one of the reasons she doesn’t use a monitor on stage and avoids searing volume levels: ‘I don’t use a monitor. I don’t like the sound of most of them and I find that hearing the sound coming out of the monitor below me and not under my ear is strange. The rest of the band uses them but very little. I like them to be quiet. If I can’t hear myself or you can’t hear me then the band is too loud so we need to turn them down. I don’t want to bang people over the head – it’s fine sometimes, but not with this music.’

A sense of story-telling is especially resonant in her latest project, Southern Comfort, which explores the songs her paternal grandfather would have known as a coal miner in Alabama. In researching it she went into the archives of the Library of Congress and the collection of field recordings that Alan Lomax made. She explains her drive: ‘I wanted to dig into my father’s side of the family. I found out that often when they had great tragedies they didn’t talk about it and burnt the paperwork, so unfortunately it’s difficult for African-Americans to get to their history. Knowing my grandfather was a coal miner and the areas he lived, and going on Ancestry.com, I hooked up with other family members who had information. I was interested in the music that was happening during his lifetime and I thought that might give me a better understanding of him and what he had to go through.’

‘I don’t categorise it – it’s music'

The album is full of different folk and jazz influences and Carter refuses to define the style: ‘I don’t categorise it – it’s music. It’s my search, my journey, and I just hope people enjoy it.’ Indeed it comes from an area that itself was a hotchpotch of musical styles, as she describes: ‘It was interesting to see all the cultures that were living in the Appalachia area: Scots, Irish, Native Americans, African-Americans. Their music and art mixed and informed this unique and beautiful music that we call Appalachian.’ How does she reconcile all these different styles with her own jazz vision? ‘I spent so much time trying to listen to it and to be true to it while moving it forward and putting my own take on it. You become a chameleon. I had in mind the sound but I wasn’t trying to force it or be phoney with it.’

Audiences have responded to this powerful history and story-telling: ‘With Southern Comfort I find it makes people think about their own families and how they grew up, and it brings up memories that they forgot about. They start to think, “My grandfather was a coal miner,” or “My grandmother listened to this.” It stirs up memories and that’s beautiful.’ She’s also aware of narratives as she performs: ‘Each tune is a story and I try to have an idea of what that is. If it’s Miner’s Child I try to think of these coal miners working and what they were going through, the songs they would sing and the hidden messages. Or if it’s New for Orleans, which the drummer wrote after Hurricane Katrina, I try to understand the healing process that had to go on.’

‘We all need to be exposed to our own traditions’

Carter sees that many young people have lost touch with their traditions, but she is optimistic that this is changing: ‘For young people popular music is usually what they see and hear on television. They’re not being exposed to their own traditions. Some people don’t want to hear Old Time music but I think if they listen they might hear the beauty and connect to it. Even if they don’t like it, we all need to be exposed to our own traditions. It’s important that people are playing this music. I think there’s a resurgence, with musicians going back to their roots. Everyone’s looking for something, even if it’s not presenting the music in its original form but collaborating with others and coming up with a new flavour. As long as we can attract young people to know there’s more out there than what we see in music videos, to inspire them to be curious.’

Ultimately, getting in touch with traditions like this is part of the original search to find her own voice: ‘What makes me me? What all went into that pot?’ As part of her research, Carter took a DNA genealogy test that revealed that she was 70 per cent West African and 30 per cent Finnish. She jokes, ‘I’ll call my next album “I’m Finnished”. I suspect that she’s not actually joking, but it will be exciting to see where her quest next leads her.

Read Regina Carter's advice for improving your jazz playing.

We have four copies of Southern Comfort, released by Sony Music Masterworks, to give away. To win one, sign up to the Elbow Music newsletter, like our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter. Closing date 31 January.  

http://www.jazzitalia.net/articoli/int_reginacarter_eng.asp#.VXK_HueXF7N

Regina Carter interview   Milano, 7th  July 2004 by Claudia Bernath and Marco Losavio photo by Alberto Gottardelli

Regina Carter was born in Detroit, a cosmopolitan city, which gave her the opportunity to be surrounded by several different cultures. This influenced her cultural growth allowing her to be interested to all kinds of music in a opened way, from the classical one, the origin of her educational path, until to jazz music without giving up folk and pop music where she still gets ideas for her repertory. She has recorded several albums. Among them we underline Rhythm of the Heart (1999) where she performes with Cassandra Wilson and Kenny Barron together with she has also recorded Freefall (2001). Her carreer, as a violinist, has broght her until the Genoa town's invitation of playing the famous Niccolò Paganini's violin. It is called "Il cannone" (The Cannon) and it was made in 1742 by Giuseppe Guarneri. In 1840 it was donated to Genoa at the death of who is probably up till now the greatest violinist of all time. Obviously, such an invitation heated controvery until the remarkable Regina Carter's performance at Carlo Felice theatre on 30th December 2001 in front of an audience that gave her a standing ovation. That also became the album Paganini: After a dream.
We met Regina Carter in Milan, at the Blue Note, between the first and the second set.

 

JI: I know you adopted the Suzuki Method, could you tell something about it?

 
RC: It's a Japanese method of teaching music to children learners from the age of about two and what it is, is taught the same way that children basically learn how to speak at home by imitating and so you hear and it's a lot of ear training and what you hear you have to sing back and play back and you learn your instrument that way. Everyone that studies in the year around the world they play, they're...if you are on the book 1 or the book 2 you're playing the same music so...once a year all the teachers from all over the world come together for a big meeting or congress.But it's a great method because even though you don't know how to read, right away you can play music pretty fast and I think you keep children very interested in music because at first you have to learn all of those technical aspects and that's very boring.

JI: So you started using your heart very soon...
RC: (smile...)...and you get it, thank you...

JI: What is your approach to music, because I know you like a lot of different kinds of music...

 
RC: If I hear a piece that I like then I try and play it but first I have to see if it works on the instrument and if it works for me, because everything doesn't; but I like so many different styles and I think that's because of growing up in the city that I grew up was a very effectively diverse city. So I was around many cultures of people without having to leave in the United States and being introduced into their music, into their culture, into their food and so, all was very attractive for me. When I was a child everyone else's culture was horn; they seemed like they had a culture for me; you know, I didn't feel like I had one and so I think that's why I caught around culture outside of the United States.

JI: I read that you also have had some interests with indian music

 
RC: Yes...almost every music that exist in the world have some string instrument whether is a violin or something of very similar to violin

JI: What kind of special effects do you use palying violin?

 
RC: Well, I don't use any outside effects, I use the violin itself. So like I use harmonic, false harmonic, fingers harmonic and I do things with the bow to get a sound like feedback sometimes, like a guitar. It's all just natural things that you can do on your instrument. When I was younger I had all of those effects in the pedal but I find that A) I don't wanna carry all the stuff around B) it's much more exciting to try and get those sounds out of the natural instrument itself.

JI: What kind of violin do you use?
RC: It's an old acoustic German violin...

JI: Does it have a nickname?
RC: No it doesn't... :-))

JI: What about the duet with Mr. Kenny Barron?
RC: That was an amazing experience. The first time we played together there was a connection, a musical connection or… We were just…We could not look at each other we just played things not having played together before being in the same place at the same time and so…It took us five years to get out a schedule together to make that record and for me it was very special because it was a record totally about art, about music; it had nothing to do with sales and nothing to do with record companies, none of that. We just went into the studio we both brought a list of tunes that we liked, and we played them. If it worked we recorded it, if it didn't we didn't. For me it caught me. It was like a gift, because I didn't have to worry about all the outside...fear, you know, just about music.

JI: Would you like to repeat this kind of experience, may be with another artist?

 
RC: Yes, I had the pleasure of … I played a concert with Christian Mc Bride's band just a couple of weeks ago and Geoff Keezer played piano and we did a completely improvised piece together and I had never played with Geoff and I thought like we had a connection as well, so I'd like to work with Geoff, something like that, maybe in the future.

Thanks Regina for your time and...enjoy your music forever... ;-)

http://www.elbowmusic.org/#!Interview-with-violinist-Regina-Carter/c1k6t/DA0E7762-A7ED-42B0-B53D-B1A8FD32ABFD

Interview with violinist Regina Carter

January 8, 2015

ELBOW MUSIC

Regina Carter started with Dont and Galamian but she only truly found her voice when she discovered jazz. She tells Ariane Todes about the journey, and explains how the best way to learn jazz violin is to listen to horn players

‘Who says?’ exclaims Regina Carter. Perhaps my suggestion, to one of today’s finest jazz violinists, that the instrument doesn’t naturally suit the genre, is a little thoughtless. She laughs wholeheartedly, as she does throughout our conversation the day before her appearance at December’s London Jazz Festival. But she explains why it’s possible to think this: ‘There were so many violinists early on in the jazz tradition. You look at Stuff Smith, Ray Nance, Stéphane Grappelli, Eddie South, Sugercane Harris. Maybe with bebop we didn’t see so many violinists, so people don’t think of it as a jazz instrument.’

The issue is irrelevant, though, really: ‘I don’t think of violin as either a jazz instrument or not. I think of it as an extension of my voice.’ Hearing Carter live is to hear this voice in full blossom. She has a phenomenal technique, but it’s only there to serve a vivid imagination and to power the story of the music. She has magnetic charisma on stage but, as when talking to her, no starriness, and she melts into the background when her colleagues solo. It’s not surprising that she was given a MacArthur Fellows Program grant in 2006, the awarding committee citing that, 'Through artistry with an instrument that has been defined predominantly by the classical tradition, Carter is pioneering new possibilities for the violin and for jazz.'

Listening to her recent Southern Comfort CD, which focuses on the music of her paternal grandfather, a coal miner in Alabama, or her recent back catalogue, in which she explores her mother’s favourite jazz standards (I'll Be Seeing You) and the music of her West African heritage (Reverse Thread), you also get a sense of a musical imagination moving forwards constantly. Talking to her, you discover that this voice has been hard won on a ceaseless quest that began with Suzuki, Dont and Galamian, eventually led her to discovering a home in jazz, and that continues among various musical heroes and styles.

‘Jazz gave me the leeway to say, “This is how I feel.”’

Carter was trained in the Western Classical tradition (throughout the interview she’s at pains to describe it like this: ‘I always ask people – whose classical music? Everyone has a classical music!’) She went on to study at the New England Conservatory but never quite felt comfortable: ‘It was so strict and boxed in. “You have to play this way. No, you can’t do that here.” I remember working on a Bach Partita once and my teacher said, “No, it has to be played like this,” and I said, “How do you know? Did you talk to Bach?” It was a smartass thing to say, but I knew I wanted to play it my way. Jazz gave me the leeway to say, “This is how I feel.” Still respecting the music, the melody and what it’s about, but I get to have my say about how it’s going to be played.’

The orchestral experience was also confusing for her: ‘I found it really difficult. I never understood the conductor because he’d give the downbeat and everyone would come in two seconds later and I’d wonder, “Why am I coming in early? They all understand when to come in apart from me.” I find it amazing when I watch a conductor and he’s way ahead, and the orchestra is together but they’re behind him. In a jazz group the beat is right there, where you count it.'

Carter was turned on to jazz by a friend: ‘My girlfriend brought me three records – Noel Pointer, Jean-Luc Ponty and Stéphane Grappelli – and I just started learning their tunes and solos, and put together a basement band. It was easy to mimic them because what they were doing was violinistic.’ What did she learn from each of them? ‘They had three distinct voices. At the time Noel Pointer was more pop-oriented, or soul, which was the music I listened to growing up in Motown, so it was easier for me to transcribe him. I loved Jean-Luc Ponty because he had all the effects and the pedals and it was fun because you didn’t hear that on the violin. Grappelli was the most straight – there were no add-ons, it was just him playing the violin. He played more of the American songbook, so it was simpler to learn standards listening to him. Hearing how he approached them made it easier to understand from a violinist’s point of view.’

‘In jazz you want to have your own voice’

Carter transferred from NEC, which didn’t have a jazz course at that point, to Oakland University in Michigan, which did. Some of the most important advice she had was not to listen to violinists: ‘The head of the jazz department told me to stop listening to violin players because I would start sounding like one of them and I needed to have my own voice. I’m really happy he told me that because back then you could count on your hand the prominent jazz violinists and it would have been too easy to copy them. In jazz you want to have your own voice.’

‘You just have to listen and copy the sound’

So she turned to the great horn players and singers for inspiration, which offered her a whole new range of sound possibilities and forced her to challenge the limits of the violin: ‘The interesting thing about learning this music is that there are no books one, two and three saying, “This is how you bow a swing passage” or “This is how you get the sound.” You just have to listen and copy the sound. For example, as violin players we’re taught to use the whole bow, but with swing or bebop especially, you have to use less bow and be very light on the string. You have to figure out bowings for yourself because some of those lines are not what you expect them to be.’ As for vibrato: ‘I think of it as an effect. You have to figure out how you want to use it or not use it. I love Ben Webster and the big vibrato he has on his horn so I copy that by slowing it down, or sometimes I’ll use a faster vibrato to get an effect, but the regular vibrato we learnt in class doesn’t work.’

Coming out of the discipline of Western Classical music the process was not necessarily easy. ‘I didn’t understand how to learn this music because from a classical point of view you had your book for shifting or your Dont or your Galamian, you had the pieces you were learning, and you could listen to people playing them. You were always working towards a goal, learning repertoire so you could either be a soloist or get into an orchestra. It was very specific. Whereas jazz is a huge umbrella and a lot of styles get shoved underneath it. Where do you start? Back then there were no books, and I felt lost.’

'I need to hear how other people are approaching it'

One particular challenge was jazz harmonies. ‘I had studied harmony but when it came to learning jazz I had no clue. I still don’t have a clue!’ (More full-throttle laughter.) ‘I would study with people and try to learn the theory of “You can play this over these changes,” but to me it didn’t make sense. It’s the same when I learn languages. I go to class and they say, “This is the grammar: the shoes are red. I’m going to the store,” but when am I going to go somewhere and say, “The shoes are red”? I needed to hear it in context. I need to hear how other people are approaching it – to listen to four or five people playing the same tune. Then I understand, “Oh, that’s what a II-V-I progression sounds like.”’

Even now, the process of transcribing tunes helps her in this and she is systematic in this process. ‘I pick tunes – this week it’s going to be Stuff Smith, Ella Fitzgerald and Tommy Flanagan. I have a whole list. I listen to how they approach their solos and I learn them. That’s how I learn my theoretical information. At the beginning it seemed like there were a gazillion tunes so I tried to categorise them into ones that come under specific rhythm changes. And there are ones with different bridges, for example, and then those that are nothing like the rest.’

‘We take on aspects of other people – we can’t help it’

It may seem paradoxical that Carter has found her own voice by exploring the sounds of other musicians, and yet this research has given her the vast palette that is such a distinctive part of her personality. ‘When I’m listening to Ella I’m trying to transcribe her sound. Of course no one else will ever sound like her, but doing that helped shape my voice. The same with Ben Webster or Paul Gonsalves. We take on aspects of other people – we can’t help it. They’re not always violinistic, but you find a way to do it and it becomes yours. It’s like you grow up in your family and when you answer the phone you sound like your father – it’s not that you tried to, but you took it on growing up. Now it’s something you identify when you hear my voice rather than someone else’s.’

‘It’s just a piece of wood that’s got some strings on it’

Surprisingly, her imagination benefitted from the theft of her instrument early on, as she explains: ‘Years ago I had an electric violin with all the equipment – echoplex and wah-wah. It was fun, but it was stolen. When I got another it was an acoustic violin and I enjoyed trying to find the sounds I got using the wah-wah pedal. When I joined the String Trio of New York they played a lot with altered techniques, which I’d never done, and it really expanded my thinking. There are all these sounds you can get out of the instrument if you don’t place rules on it or have preconceived concepts. People have the idea that the violin belongs in Western Classical music, but not necessarily. There are so many possibilities. It’s just a piece of wood that’s got some strings on it, so depending on who’s playing, it can be anything.’

‘It’s a whole community of musicians working together’

Having struggled herself, how does she help young players now that she teaches? ‘There are different ways to teach jazz. Sometimes we’ll just get together and play, or we’ll talk about bowing and I’ll say, “Try doing this with the bowing.” But they have other professors who can talk about, “This is a II chord.” Many university students don’t do a lot of listening. They listen on their phones or tablets, but you can’t hear all the instruments and all the things that are going on, and they’re missing a lot of information. So I bring in pieces and make students transcribe them, but not just the tonality: they have to hear what the drummer, bass player and piano are doing. I want to know how they feel. Someone might want to take the line, and then they support someone else, because it’s important we help each other. That’s part of jazz, it’s a whole community of musicians working together. When you’re at school you get used to someone telling you what to do, so you don’t get that sense of community.’

Defying a lot of negativity around the future of music, Carter is optimistic for her students. ‘People can put out their own music now and not have to have a label behind them. We’re tired of radio stations or record companies or television channels saying, “This is what you’re going to listen to and this is all there is.” We can now hear so many other cultures of music we were never exposed to and it’s opening things up. People are collaborating with other musicians in a way we never thought we’d see and creating some really new and different music.’ And being a niche is an advantage: ‘I think for most of us playing jazz, folk or art music, we’re always going to be able to navigate our way. We’re never going to be the popular music.’

‘People still don’t think of it as a job'

However, she is frustrated by the attitude, increasingly common it seems, and typified by Spotify, that music should be free: ‘For musicians who don’t have exposure Spotify is a way that people can hear us or get to know us, but I don’t think there should be free streaming. There should be samples and then people should have to buy it. People still don’t understand that for artists this is our job. This is how we make money. Coming through customs I gave the gentleman my paperwork and said I was coming for the festival and that I was a musician, and he said, “You get paid to do this?” Yes. I wouldn’t just get on a plane for the fun of it. People still don’t think of it as a job.’

‘It’s our responsibility as musicians to cultivate our own audiences’

Carter puts the onus on musicians actively to seek new audiences. ‘If you don’t understand a certain style of music or how it works then you have a tendency to shy away from it. It’s important for me to do classes or demonstrations for audiences, to show them a piece we’re doing on stage so that they get it, or are more apt to go to another jazz concert. It’s the same with European Classical music. It’s our responsibility as musicians, no matter which form, to cultivate our own audiences.’

One of the keys to this communication, which comes across whether in her playing, her approach to education, or the projects she chooses, is the importance of story telling, as she explains: ‘It’s easy to take an old standard that everyone knows and play through it without any embellishments, and then talk while we’re playing – “Now I’m going to take this solo and I’m having a conversation with the band”. The audience can see how we’re working off one another and that when I’m done I might look at someone or they might jump in. It’s taking something they know and breaking it down to show them how it works. When I was younger and playing in a youth orchestra my teacher would come and tell the stories of the pieces – this is when it was written, this is what it means politically, this is when the bassoons come in, so it made sense and you felt part of the music. That’s really important for an audience with any style of music, and especially in jazz.’

‘I don’t want to bang people over the head’

Her aim on stage, she says, is to create an intimate experience for everyone: ‘I still want there to be a sense of a community, as if we’re all sitting on a porch somewhere, the audience included.’ This is one of the reasons she doesn’t use a monitor on stage and avoids searing volume levels: ‘I don’t use a monitor. I don’t like the sound of most of them and I find that hearing the sound coming out of the monitor below me and not under my ear is strange. The rest of the band uses them but very little. I like them to be quiet. If I can’t hear myself or you can’t hear me then the band is too loud so we need to turn them down. I don’t want to bang people over the head – it’s fine sometimes, but not with this music.’

A sense of story-telling is especially resonant in her latest project, Southern Comfort, which explores the songs her paternal grandfather would have known as a coal miner in Alabama. In researching it she went into the archives of the Library of Congress and the collection of field recordings that Alan Lomax made. She explains her drive: ‘I wanted to dig into my father’s side of the family. I found out that often when they had great tragedies they didn’t talk about it and burnt the paperwork, so unfortunately it’s difficult for African-Americans to get to their history. Knowing my grandfather was a coal miner and the areas he lived, and going on Ancestry.com, I hooked up with other family members who had information. I was interested in the music that was happening during his lifetime and I thought that might give me a better understanding of him and what he had to go through.’

‘I don’t categorise it – it’s music'

The album is full of different folk and jazz influences and Carter refuses to define the style: ‘I don’t categorise it – it’s music. It’s my search, my journey, and I just hope people enjoy it.’ Indeed it comes from an area that itself was a hotchpotch of musical styles, as she describes: ‘It was interesting to see all the cultures that were living in the Appalachia area: Scots, Irish, Native Americans, African-Americans. Their music and art mixed and informed this unique and beautiful music that we call Appalachian.’ How does she reconcile all these different styles with her own jazz vision? ‘I spent so much time trying to listen to it and to be true to it while moving it forward and putting my own take on it. You become a chameleon. I had in mind the sound but I wasn’t trying to force it or be phoney with it.’

Audiences have responded to this powerful history and story-telling: ‘With Southern Comfort I find it makes people think about their own families and how they grew up, and it brings up memories that they forgot about. They start to think, “My grandfather was a coal miner,” or “My grandmother listened to this.” It stirs up memories and that’s beautiful.’ She’s also aware of narratives as she performs: ‘Each tune is a story and I try to have an idea of what that is. If it’s Miner’s Child I try to think of these coal miners working and what they were going through, the songs they would sing and the hidden messages. Or if it’s New for Orleans, which the drummer wrote after Hurricane Katrina, I try to understand the healing process that had to go on.’

‘We all need to be exposed to our own traditions’

Carter sees that many young people have lost touch with their traditions, but she is optimistic that this is changing: ‘For young people popular music is usually what they see and hear on television. They’re not being exposed to their own traditions. Some people don’t want to hear Old Time music but I think if they listen they might hear the beauty and connect to it. Even if they don’t like it, we all need to be exposed to our own traditions. It’s important that people are playing this music. I think there’s a resurgence, with musicians going back to their roots. Everyone’s looking for something, even if it’s not presenting the music in its original form but collaborating with others and coming up with a new flavour. As long as we can attract young people to know there’s more out there than what we see in music videos, to inspire them to be curious.’

Ultimately, getting in touch with traditions like this is part of the original search to find her own voice: ‘What makes me me? What all went into that pot?’ As part of her research, Carter took a DNA genealogy test that revealed that she was 70 per cent West African and 30 per cent Finnish. She jokes, ‘I’ll call my next album “I’m Finnished”. I suspect that she’s not actually joking, but it will be exciting to see where her quest next leads her.

Read Regina Carter's advice for improving your jazz playing.

We have four copies of Southern Comfort, released by Sony Music Masterworks, to give away. To win one, sign up to the Elbow Music newsletter, like our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter. Closing date 31 January. 

 

Photo: Barbara Barefield

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regina_Carter

Regina Carter

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Regina Carter
Background information
Born	August 6, 1966 (age 48) Detroit, Michigan, United States
Genres	Jazz, classical
Occupation(s)	Musician, educator
Instruments	Violin
Labels	Atlantic Jazz, Verve Records
Website	Official website

Regina Carter (born August 6, 1966) is an American jazz violinist. She is the cousin of jazz saxophonist James Carter.

Contents

• 1 Early life
• 2 Career
• 3 Discography
• 4 References
• 5 Notes
• 6 External links

Early life

Carter was born in Detroit and was one of three children in her family.^[1]


She began piano lessons at the age of two after playing a melody by ear for her brother's piano teacher. After she deliberately played the wrong ending note at a concert, the piano teacher suggested she take up the violin. She suggested that the Suzuki Method was more conducive to her creativity. Carter's mother enrolled her at the Detroit Community Music School when she was four years old and she began studying the violin.^[2] She still studied the piano, as well as tap and ballet.^[3]
 
As a teenager, she played in the youth division of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. While at school, she was able to take master classes from Itzhak Perlman and Yehudi Menuhin.^[3]
 
Carter attended Cass Technical High School with a close friend, jazz singer Carla Cook, who introduced her to Ella Fitzgerald. In high school, Carter performed with the Detroit Civic Orchestra and played in a pop-funk group named Brainstorm. In addition to taking violin lessons, she also took viola, oboe, and choir lessons.^[3]
 
Carter was studying classical violin at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston when she decided to switch to jazz, but the school did not have that as a program. She transferred to Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Here she studied jazz with Marcus Belgrave. Through Belgrave Carter was able to meet a lot of people active in the Detroit jazz scene, including Lyman Woodard. She graduated in 1985. After graduating, she taught strings in Detroit public schools. Needing a change of scene, she moved to Europe and spent two years in Germany. While making connections, she worked as a nanny for a German family and taught violin on a U.S. military base.^[4]

Career

Carter in 2006

 
Carter returned to the U.S. and first came into the spotlight as the violinist for the all female pop-jazz quintet Straight Ahead in 1987,^[5] with Cynthia Dewberry, Gailyn Mckinney, Eileen Orr, and Marion Hayden. In the early to mid-1990s, Branford Marsalis was quoted as saying, "They truly swing." They released a trio of albums on the Atlantic Jazz label including their self-titled debut, Body and Soul, and Look Straight Ahead. Carter went solo before the release of their third album, Dance of the Forest Rain, and established herself as a force in the jazz world on the violin. In 1991 she left the band and moved to New York City.^[5]
While in New York she was a relative unknown and undertook work accompanying performers such as Aretha Franklin, Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Billy Joel, and Dolly Parton. She also played with Max Roach and Oliver Lake, as well as being in the String Trio of New York. Carter worked on the albums Intermobility (1993), Octagon (1994), and Blues...? (1996) with the group.^[6]





While with the trio, she released her first solo CD, Regina Carter (1995). 1997 saw the release of her second solo album dedicated to her mother, entitled Something For Grace. She toured with Wynton Marsalis for the 1997 production Blood on the Fields. She then changed record companies, from Atlantic Records to Verve Music Group, which allowed her more artistic freedom and she released Rhythms of the Heart (1999).^[6]
 
She released Motor City Moments in 2000, paying homage to her hometown.^[7]
 
In December 2001, she played a concert in Genoa on Il Cannone Guarnerius, once owned and favoured by Niccolò Paganini, a violin that was made in 1743.^[8] The violin was bequeathed to Genoa after Paganini's death in 1840. The name of instrument is given because an "explosive" sound can be achieved. Carter was invited to play after the incidents of the September 11 attacks as a gesture of solidarity. She was both the first jazz musician and African American to play the instrument.^[9] She later recorded Paganini: After a Dream for Verve Records.^[8] The album featured classical works by Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy, and Cinema Paradiso by Ennio Morricone.^[9]
 
I'll Be Seeing You: A Sentimental Journey, Carter's sixth CD and was conceived as a tribute album to her late mother, which included some of her favorites as well as American standards from the 1920s-1940s. Some songs include "Blue Rose" (Duke Ellington), "Sentimental Journey" (Les Brown), "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" (Ella Fitzgerald), as well as "I'll Be Seeing You".^[10]
 
Active as an educator, mentor, and proponent of the Suzuki method, Carter has taught at numerous institutions, including at Berklee College of Music, and two appearances at Stanford Jazz Workshop.^[11][12]
She currently^[when?] performs at the head of a quintet. In May 2006, she was touring with Mark Krose (clarinet), Xavier Davis (piano), Alvester Garnett (drums)(still with her in 2011), and Matt Parish (Upright bass).
 
Carter was awarded a MacArthur Fellows Program grant, also known as a "genius grant", in September 2006. The award includes a grant of $500,000 over five years, and the committee stated this about Carter:

Regina Carter is a master of improvisational jazz violin. Though her work draws upon a wide range of musical influences – including Motown, Afro-Cuban, Swing, Bebop, Folk, and World – she has crafted a signature voice and style....Carter's performances highlight the often overlooked potential of the jazz violin for its lyric, melodic, and percussive potential. Her early training as a classical musician is reflected in the fluidity, grace, and balance of her performance. Carter's repertoire retains a firm connection with the familiar while venturing in new, unexpected directions....Through artistry with an instrument that has been defined predominantly by the classical tradition, Carter is pioneering new possibilities for the violin and for jazz.^[13]

Carter married Alvester Garnett in Detroit, Michigan, on September 5, 2004. They knew each other because Garnett plays drums in her band.^[14]

Discography

As leader

• 1995 Regina Carter (Atlantic)
• 1997 Something for Grace (Atlantic)
• 1999 Rhythms of the Heart (Verve)
• 2000 Motor City Moments (Verve)
• 2001 with Kenny Barron: Freefall (Verve)
• 2003 Paganini: After a Dream (Verve)
• 2006 I’ll Be Seeing You: A Sentimental Journey (Verve)
• 2010 Reverse Thread (E1 Entertainment)
• 2014 Southern Comfort (Masterworks)

With the String Trio of New York

• Intermobility (Arabesque, 1992)
• Octagon (Black Saint, 1992)
• Blues...? (Black Saint, 1993)
• An Outside Job (AA, 1994)
• With Anthony Davis: Ellington / Monk / Mingus / Davis (Music & Arts, 1997)

With Mark Helias

• Loopin' the Cool (Enja, 1995)

With Elliott Sharp

• Xenocodex (Tzadik, 1996)

With Cassandra Wilson

• Traveling Miles (Blue Note, 1999) on two tracks

With Steve Turre

• Lotus Flower (Verve, 1999)

With James Carter

• Chasin' the Gypsy (Atlantic, 2000)

With Sir Simon Rattle, Luther Henderson, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Lena Horne

• Classic Ellington (EMI Classics, 2000)

With Carmen Lundy

• Something to Believe In (Justin Time, 2003) on three tracks

With Joe Jackson

• The Duke (Razor & Tie, 2012) on three tracks

References

1. 
   

"Regina Carter 1963?". Biography Today (Omnigraphics, Inc.) 16 (3): 29. 2007. ISSN 1058-2347.

Biography Today, p. 30.

Biography Today, p. 31.

Biography Today, pp. 32-33.

Biography Today, p. 33.

Biography Today, p. 34.

Biography Today, p. 35.

"Regina Carter". Verve Records. Archived from the original on 2006-12-30. Retrieved 2007-04-17.

Biography Today, p. 36.

Biography Today, p. 37.

Susan M. Barbieri (February–March 2002). "Motor City Maverick". Strings magazine, No. 100. Retrieved 2007-04-17.

Rob Hochschild (13 February 2001). "String Master". Berklee News. Retrieved 2007-04-17.

Biography Today, pp. 37-38.

14. Biography Today, p. 40.

Notes

• W. Enstice, J. Stockhouse Jazzwomen. Conversations with 21 Musicians. Bloomington 2004. ISBN 0-253-34436-0, p. 65ff. (bio & interview)

External links

• Official website
• "Regina Carter's Encounter with a 'Cannon'", from National Public Radio Morning Edition program, May 14, 2003
• Regina Carter: Improvising a Life in Jazz, AllAboutJazz, February 18, 2006
• womeninjazz.org
• Regina Carter: Translating African Folk To The Jazz Violin, from National Public Radio Studio Sessions, May 21, 2010
• metrotimes.com
• Audio Interview with Joe Zupan