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As originally published in The Atlantic
Monthly
September 1991
Better With Age
At eighty-four, Benny Carter is
at the height of his musical powers.
by Francis Davis
Jazz is enduring what appears to be a mid-life crisis. As in people, the
telltale symptom is a drooling infatuation with youth. It all began with the
success of Wynton Marsalis, who was just twenty when he released his first
album, in 1982. Overlooking the fact that musicians as talented as Marsalis are
rare at any age, the major record labels have been signing untested young
instrumentalists in the hope that lightning will strike twice. Not
surprisingly, given the promotional effort of which these labels are capable,
those young musicians are virtually the only jazz performers now receiving any
notice. They are being treated as such a novelty that it's becoming difficult
to remember that jazz was once assumed to require the vigor of youth.
For a reminder of the way things used to be, I recently reread an essay called
"Why Do They Age So Badly?," by the late French critic and composer Andre
Hodeir. (Written sometime in the 1950s, it was included in Hodeir's 1962
collection Toward Jazz, translated by Noel Burch.) Lamenting that what lay
ahead for any jazz musician who reached middle age having achieved some degree
of recognition was "an unremitting decline, an inevitable subsidence into
complacency," Hodeir argued that "jazz has one thing in common with sports: it
requires its performers . . . to be in first-rate physical condition." But
whereas "the aging athlete is obliged to retire" (Hodeir's italics), jazz
audiences permit older musicians to go on suiting up, as it were, until they
drop. Hodeir cited as an example of fans reluctant to "repudiate their
traditional idols" a Parisian audience that responded worshipfully to the
trumpeter Roy Eldridge in 1950, "when he was already well on the decline."
In 1950 Eldridge was all of thirty-nine, with at least twenty-five more years
of crackling solos ahead of him. What has aged badly is Hodeir's arguments,
although in fairness it should be acknowledged that he was one of the first to
write about jazz with such candor and that his essay dates from a period when
bebop--then considered the ultimate in modernity--must have made the mature
accomplishments of swing-era veterans like Eldridge seem a little passe.
Reading "Why Do They Age So Badly?" in 1991, I find myself wondering what
Hodeir would make of the alto saxophonist Benny Carter, who turned eighty-four
last month, and whose powers as an improviser remain miraculously unimpaired.
The perseverance of elderly musicians is an open invitation to sentimentality,
and Carter long ago reached the age at which an instrumentalist elicits
admiration merely for playing, no matter how shakily. But I really do believe
that Carter, who aside from Lionel Hampton is the last surviving major figure
of the 1930s, is still making vibrant contributions to jazz six decades later.
In so doing, he offers present-day audiences a singular thrill--the chance to
look back on history as it continues to unfold.
CARTER has been around practically forever. Although the standard discographies
show him to have made his recording debut with Charlie Johnson's Paradise
Orchestra, in 1928, Carter himself remembers participating in a session with
the blues singer Clara Smith four years earlier. His first recorded arrangement
(of "P.D.Q. Blues," for Fletcher Henderson) was written in 1927, the same year
he published his first composition ("Nobody Knows," co-written with Fats
Waller). After working as a sideman with Henderson and Chick Webb, and serving
as music director of McKinney's Cotton Pickers and leader of the Wilburforce
Collegians, Carter formed the first of his own big bands in 1932.
These are dates that I have selected almost at random from the detailed
chronology included in Morroe Berger, Edward Berget, and James Patrick's
exhaustive two-volume Benny Carter: A Life in American Music (1982).
Another piece of information might give a better sense of just how long
Carter has been active in music. The album usually cited as his best is
Further Definitions (MCA Impulse MCA5651), from 1961. It reunited him with
his fellow saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, whose path had regularly crossed
his over the decades, most notably with Henderson in the twenties and on
the four titles they recorded together with the guitarist Django Reinhardt,
in Paris in 1937. Two numbers were reprised from that 1937 session, with
Phil Woods and Charlie Rouse taking the places of the French saxophonists
Andre Ekyan and Alix Combelle. For the album Carter, whose trademark as an
arranger is his rich saxophone voicings, also orchestrated Hawkins's
emblematic 1939 solo on "Body and Soul" for four horns, and paid homage to
Duke Ellington and Ben Webster by including the famous sax-section chorus
from their 1940 recording of "Cotton Tail." Further Definitions was hailed
as a latter-day triumph for Carter upon its release, almost thirty years
ago.
Carter has long inspired something approaching awe in his fellow musicians. He
surpassed even Johnny Hodges as the primary influence on the alto saxophone
before the arrival of Charlie Parker, in the 1940s. But he also plays credible
trumpet (Dizzy Gillespie, who was in his brass section as a young musician,
once said of him that "he was always the best trumpet player in his band"), and
he might have become one of the greatest of jazz clarinetists had he not
abandoned the clarinet in 1946.
Although he is one of only a handful of musicians to have left a mark on jazz
as both an improviser and an orchestrator (Cab Callowa, Benny Goodman, and
Artie Shaw were among the rival bandleaders who played his arrangements in the
thirties and forties), Carter never succeeded in keeping an orchestra together
for very long, and finally disbanded for good in 1946. What makes this so
surprising is that Carter's first band enjoyed the services of Sid Catlett,
perhaps the greatest of big-band drummers, and that Gillespie, Teddy Wilson,
Chu Berry, Ben Webster, and Miles Davis were Carter band members at one time or
another. It probably also hindered Carter that he was in Europe from 1935 to
1938, when America was catching swing fever, and in Hollywood, writing music
for movies and TV, for much of three decades, after playing on the soundtrack
of and helping to orchestrate the music for Stormy Weather in 1943.
Carter was underutilized and perhaps racially typecast by the studios:
although he worked on more than two dozen theatrical films, including An
American in Paris, The Sun Also Rises, The Guns of
Navarone, and Red Sky at Morning, his only complete scores were
those for A Man Called Adam, a 1966 jazz movie starring Sammy Davis,
Jr., and Buck and the Preacher, a 1972 western with Sidney Poitier
and Harry Belafonte. Carter's best work for TV was his music for some
thirty-five episodes of the crime series M Squad in the late 1950s.
The four selections from M Squad included on All of Me
(Bluebird 3000-2-RB), a recent reissue, demonstrate Carter's ability to
produce idiomatically convincing jazz within the framework of TV-genre
conventions.
Carter again became a full-time jazz musician around 1976. His stepped-up
pace since then, in both playing and composing, has created the happy
illusion that he is playing better than ever, and we have had more
opportunities to hear him. Everyone I know who writes about jazz seems to
have his own favorite Carter solo recorded since that time. Mine is his
virtuoso turn on the standard "Lover Man," from his otherwise uneventful
1985 album A Gentleman and His Music (Concord Jazz CCD4285). In
addition to being the recent solo that best demonstrates Carter's
undiminished instrumental command, it is also the one that best illustrates
his confident embrace of contemporary rhythmic values. Hearing "Lover
Man," you know at once you're listening to Benny Carter, thanks to that
enviably urbane intonation of his (which Hodeir, ever the nay-sayer, once
characterized as "effeminate") and to that rococo approach to harmony he
once shared with Coleman Hawkins. Still, this isn't a solo you could
imagine Carter playing fifty or even twenty years ago, because his
asymmetrical double-time phrasing is so modern in conception--it's just
short of abstract, despite his fealty to the melody.
LATE last summer Carter shared a bill with the vibraphonists Milt Jackson and
Bobby Hutcherson at Lincoln Center, just up the block from where the apartment
house he lived in as a child once stood; the area was called San Juan Hill in
those days, and it was known as a rough neighborhood. Jackson and Hutcherson
each played a set accompanied by just a rhythm section; then they joined Carter
and a big band for the premiere of a suite called "Good Vibes," which Lincoln
Center had commissioned from Carter for this occasion. Although both the
featured soloists interpreted Carter's new music with relish, neither paid him
the courtesy of performing even one of his tunes during the first half.
In a way, the evening was typical. The only Carter tune you're ever likely to
hear during a jam session is "When Lights Are Low," which musicians usually
know not from Carter's recordings of it (the first was with the singer
Elisabeth Welch, in 1936, and the most famous was with Lionel Hampton on
vibraphone, three years later) but from the version Miles Davis recorded in
1953, without Carter's elegant bridge. For that matter, Carter himself is
frequently guilty of not featuring enough of his own tunes when he plays
nightclubs and festivals.
I asked about this when I spoke with him by telephone in his home in southern
California late last year. "That's been because I've always felt that when
people come to hear me, they want to hear me play songs with which they're
already familiar," he told me in a tone intended to communicate that this
policy was the result of practicality not undue modesty. "But you know,
somebody else once asked me the same question, and I told him that I don't play
many of my own tunes because the audience wouldn't know them. He pointed out
that they never will get to know them if I don't play them. But I have started
traveling with lead sheets of my tunes for the musicians I might play with who
don't know them."
The proof of Carter's genius as a composer can be found on Central City
Sketches (Musicmasters CIJD 60126X), featuring Carter with the American Jazz
Orchestra, a New York repertory ensemble directed by the pianist John Lewis.
This includes flawless performances of Carter compositions ranging in vintage
from "Blues in My Heart" (1931), which would have been a perfect vehicle for
Jackson at Lincoln Center, to the title suite, which Carter completed just in
time for a concert he played with the AJO at Cooper Union a week or so before
the recording session, in 1987. In addition to reviving interest in Carter, the
Cooper Union concert, which was talked about for months afterward, supplied a
rationale for the emerging jazz-repertory movement: it called attention to
still timely masterpieces that weren't likely to be heard in concert unless
someone made a special effort to perform them.
Marian McPartland Plays the Benny Carter Songbook (Concord Jazz
CCD4412), with Carter augmenting the pianist McPartland's trio on six of
eleven tracks, nicely complements Central City Sketches, featuring
as it does informal interpretations of such outstanding Carter tunes as
"When Lights Are Low" (as on the disc with the AJO, the bridge is
restored); "Lonely Woman," sung by Peggy Lee in 1947 and not to be confused
with pieces of the same name by Ornette Coleman and Horace Silver; "Only
Trust Your Heart," a bossa nova introduced by Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto
in the 1964 TV film The Hanged Man; and "Doozy," a sinuous blues that lives
up to its name, first recorded on Further Definitions and performed twice
on Central City Sketches.
CARTER now records so regularly that it has become possible to pick and choose
among his albums. All That Jazz Live at Princeton (Musicmasters j059-2C), his
latest, recorded in concert last year at Princeton University, where he
frequently conducts master classes, suffers from a humdrum selection of
tunes--nothing new by Carter, who seems unfamiliar with the chord changes to
Thelonious Monk's "Hackensack" and Clifford Brown's "Blues Walk"--and
unrewarding vocals by Carter, the trumpeter Clark Terry, and a glib singer
named Billy Hill. (Hill was once a member of the pop group the Essex, whose
delightful "Easier Said Than Done" reached No. 1 in 1963.) Carter is the only
reason for hearing The Return of Mel Powell (Chiaroscuro CR[D] 301), which was
recorded aboard the S.S. Norway in 1987. Powell, who once played piano in Benny
Goodman's big band and who last year won a Pulitzer for "serious" composition,
sounds as though he's slumming here, or as though he thinks it's still 1938.
His choppy, foursquare rhythm inhibits Carter, who seems more in his element
when surrounded by relative modernists than he does in the company of musicians
from his own era.
Along with Central City Sketches, the plums in Carter's recent discography are
My Man Benny--My Man Phil (Musicmasters :036-2C), from 1989, on which he piques
the alto saxophonist Phil Woods into some beautifully animated playing, and
Over the Rainbow (Musicmasters 5015-2C), from 1988, which rivals even Further
Definitions in demonstrating Carter's unparalleled skill at writing for
saxophones. The most irresistible of the eight performances on Over the Rainbow
is the standard "Out of Nowhere." After individual choruses by Carter and
fellow saxophonists Frank Wess, Herb Geller, Jimmy Heath, and Joe Temperley
(plus a brief spot by the pianist Richard Wyands), Carter leads the saxophones
through a speedy series of harmonic variations so full of swagger that at first
I assumed I was hearing an orchestration of the solo Coleman Hawkins played on
this tune with Carter and Django Reinhardt in 1937.
Carter recorded for a variety of labels, large and small, in the 1930s, and
this might explain why--with the exception of a no-longer available boxed set
in the Time-Life Giants of Jazz series--no comprehensive survey of his early
recordings has ever been issued by an American company. Before berating
American companies for not giving us seminal Benny Carter in chronological
order, it's good to remember that these performances are still protected by
copyright in the United States, though they no longer are in Europe.
Classics--a French label that is distributed here by Qualiton Imports (24-02
40th Avenue, Long Island City, MY 11101)--has come to the rescue with five
volumes (so far) of Benny Carter and His Orchestra (Classics 522, 530, 541,
552, and 579).
In addition to all of Carter's big-band sides through 1940, these splendidly
remastered compact discs include his work with the Chocolate Dandies, a small,
studio-only group drawn from the ranks of the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra and
other big bands, and the twelve ahead-of-their-time-and-then-some performances
recorded in 1933 by the Ellington-smitten Irish composer Spike Hughes and "His
Negro Orchestra," which was actually Carter's big band augmented by such star
soloists as Coleman Hawkins and Red Allen. Carter isn't extensively featured on
the material by Hughes, but his band distinguishes itself in interpreting
Hughes's ambitious scores, and both "Noctourne" and "Music at Midnight" offer
striking examples of Carter's abilities as a clarinetist.
Reissues like these usually put elder musicians in the hopeless position of
competing with their past accomplishments. Carter actually seems to be gaining
on himself as the years roll by. In baseball it's possible to chart the
progress of a Darryl Strawberry or a Roger Clemens by measuring his record
against that of a Willie Mays or a Sandy Koufax at a similar stage in his
career. In jazz, too, we can measure the accomplishments of Wynton Marsalis as
he nears thirty by comparing them with the accomplishments of Louis Armstrong,
Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, or Miles Davis at the same point. We can compare
Sonny Rollins at sixty with Coleman Hawkins at that age. But against what other
jazz octogenarian can we measure Benny Carter? There has never been anyone like
him.
Copyright © 1991 by Francis Davis. All rights
reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; September 1991; "Better With Age";
Volume 268, No. 4; pages 106-109.
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