[Dixielandjazz] Benny Carter

[Stephen Barbone]

Here is Benny Carter's NY Times Obit:

Steve

July 14, 2003

Benny Carter, 95, Jazz Musician and Arranger, Dies

By JOHN S. WILSON

      Benny Carter, whose combination of highly developed talents as
composer, arranger, bandleader and soloist on a variety of instruments
was unmatched in the jazz world, died Saturday at a hospital in Los
Angeles. He was 95.

A Versatile Master

Benny Carter's career was remarkable for both its length and its
consistently high musical achievement, from his first recordings in the
1920's to his
youthful-sounding improvisations in the 1990's. His pure-toned,
impeccably phrased performances made him one of the two pre-eminent alto
saxophonists in
jazz, with Johnny Hodges, from the late 1920's until the arrival of
Charlie Parker in the mid-1940's. He was also an accomplished soloist on
trumpet and
clarinet, and on occasion he played piano, trombone and both tenor and
baritone saxophones.

He helped to lay the foundation for the swing era of the late 1930's and
early 40's with arrangements he had written a decade earlier for his own
big band and
the orchestras of Fletcher Henderson and Chick Webb, as well as for
Benny Goodman before Goodman was acclaimed as the King of Swing. He
later
contributed arrangements and compositions to Glenn Miller and Count
Basie.

>From 1929 to 1946, Mr. Carter led big bands sparkling with young talent.
His band in the early 1930's included the pianist Teddy Wilson, the
saxophonist
Chu Berry, the trombonist J. C. Higginbotham and the drummer Sid
Catlett. A decade later, his contingent of future jazz stars included
the trombonists J. J.
Johnson and Al Grey, the trumpeter Miles Davis and the drummer Max
Roach.

His compositions included "Blues in My Heart," "When Lights Are Low,"
"Blue Star," "Lonesome Nights," "Doozy" and "Symphony in Riffs."
Beginning
in the early 1940's, he composed and orchestrated music for films, and
from the late 50's he also composed for television.

In 1962, when Mr. Carter was only 54, the critic Whitney Balliett wrote
in The New Yorker that "few of his contemporaries continue to play or
arrange or
compose as well as he does, and none of them plays as many instruments
and arranges and composes with such aplomb."

"Carter, indeed, belongs to that select circle of pure-jazz musicians
who tend to represent the best of their times," the piece continued.

His public fame did not always match his accomplishments, and his only
major hit of the big band era was "Cow-Cow Boogie," a novelty tune sung
by Ella
Mae Morse. However, early in his career his fellow musicians nicknamed
him simply the King, and among them he was held in universally high
regard.

The trumpeter Doc Cheatham recalled that "we broke our backs to get into
Benny's band" because musicians learned so much from performing with
him. Sy
Oliver, whose brilliant arrangements gave the Jimmie Lunceford orchestra
of the 1930's and the Tommy Dorsey band of the 1940's their distinctive
cachet,
said Mr. Carter was "the most complete professional musician I've ever
known."

And John Hammond, the record producer who nurtured the careers of Count
Basie, Billie Holiday and Benny Goodman, said Mr. Carter was "one of the

great influences in American music, one of its unsung heroes."

Mr. Carter was not widely known to the jazz public until his emergence,
in his 70's, as an acclaimed elder statesman. His lack of public
recognition was
sometimes attributed to the fact that his bearing was reserved and
dignified, that he was not a flamboyant showman. Moreover, as the
drummer J. C. Heard
suggested, "his music was a little too refined" for the 1930's and 40's,
when he was leading a big band.

Bennett Lester Carter was born on Aug. 8, 1907, the youngest of three
children and the only boy. He was reared in a neighborhood called San
Juan Hill, then
one of the roughest areas in Manhattan, near what is now Lincoln Center.

When he was a youngster, his musical idols were trumpeters — his cousin
Theodore (Cuban) Bennett, who never recorded but whose advanced musical
ideas
were attested to by many musicians, and Bubber Miley, a star of Duke
Ellington's orchestra in the late 1920's who lived around the corner.

When he was 13, he bought a trumpet at a pawnshop, but when he was
unable to play it after a weekend of effort he traded it in for a
saxophone.

By the time he was 15, he was sitting in with bands in Harlem. He got
his first full-time job when he was 19, with Charlie Johnson's band at
Smalls' Paradise
in Harlem.

When he made his first records in 1928, with the Johnson band, the
session included two of his own arrangements.

Also in 1928, he joined a band led by Fletcher Henderson's brother,
Horace, and shortly after, when the leader walked out during a tour, the
abandoned
musicians elected Mr. Carter to replace him. He was 21 years old. For
the next two decades, as his biographer, Morroe Berger, wrote, "he was
either leading a
band or regretfully disbanding one while looking forward to organizing
another one."

In 1935, Mr. Carter went to Paris to join the Willie Lewis Orchestra at
the club Chez Florence. He remained in Europe for three years, playing
mostly in
France, Denmark and the Netherlands. He also spent 10 months in England
as an arranger for the British Broadcasting Corporation dance orchestra.

On his return to the United States in 1938, Mr. Carter formed another
big band, which played at the Savoy Ballroom for two years. After that
band broke up,
Mr. Carter led a small group on 52nd Street while he wrote arrangements
for the radio show "Your Hit Parade" and prepared still another band. He
then
headed toward the West Coast on tour and settled in Hollywood.

He began his association with films in 1943 with "Stormy Weather," for
which he wrote arrangements and played on the soundtrack but received no
screen
credit.

>From 1946 until 1970, he was virtually out of the public eye. Aside from
a few tours with the all-star Jazz at the Philharmonic troupe in the
1950's, he stayed
behind the scenes as a composer, arranger and occasional instrumentalist
in films and, starting in 1959, in television.

In Hollywood, he was one of the first black arrangers to break the color
barrier, working on top television series like "M Squad." He also
arranged music for
almost every major singer of the day, including Billie Holiday, Ella
Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Lou Rawls, Ray Charles, Peggy Lee, Louis
Armstrong, Pearl
Bailey, Billy Eckstine and Mel Tormé.

In 1969, Dr. Berger, who taught sociology at Princeton University and
had written his master's thesis on jazz, persuaded Mr. Carter to join
him at Princeton
for a weekend of seminars, classes and a campus concert. Over the next
nine years, Mr. Carter made five visits to Princeton, staying briefly
each time except in
1973, when he stayed for a semester as a visiting professor. In 1974, he
received an honorary Master of Humanities degree from Princeton.

In the 1970's, Mr. Carter's new academic career revived his playing
career. In 1975, he made a tour of the Middle East under the auspices of
the State
Department, and in 1976 he appeared in a New York City nightclub for the
first time since 1942. He made dozens of new albums over the next two
decades
and saw much of his early work reissued in collections. He continued to
perform in the smallest clubs and the largest concert halls in the the
United States,
Europe and Japan through the 1990's.

Mr. Carter's arranging skills were largely self-taught, and the results
echoed his instantly recognizable sound as a soloist, especially on alto
sax. One of his
trademarks was the sound of four saxophones in intricate harmony,
playing one of his swooping, looping melodic passages as if they were a
single
instrument improvising.

His sound can be heard to good advantage in two of his most famous
recordings: the 1937 "Honeysuckle Rose," made in Europe with an
international group
including Coleman Hawkins and Django Reinhardt, and the 1961 reprise of
the same tune on the album "Further Definitions." That album seamlessly
bridged the worlds of swing and bebop by joining old masters like
Hawkins with young turks like Phil Woods and Charlie Rouse and is
considered one of
the most influential jazz recordings.

Mr. Carter recalled how he learned arranging in a 1987 interview with
Gary Giddins. Starting with all the parts of a commercial stock
arrangement, he said,
"you lay them piece by piece on the floor, and you get down on your
knees and you study each part, and then you start writing the lead
trumpet first and the
lead saxophone first — which, of course, is really the hard way." It was
quite some time before he knew what a score was, he said, "and of course
after you
know how to make a score, well, you know the score."

Carter arrangements and compositions, old and new, stayed in the books
of groups like the Count Basie Orchestra and the Lincoln Center Jazz
Orchestra into
the 1990's. By 1987 there were more than 50 recorded versions of just
one of his tunes, "Blues in My Heart." In the 1990's, the Basie band,
then led by
Grover Mitchell, was still playing excerpts from his 1960 "Kansas City
Suite" at almost every performance.

In 1996, he was one of five recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors in
Washington, and in 2000, he received the National Medal of Arts from
President Bill
Clinton.

When Mr. Carter turned 90, in 1997, the occasion was observed with a
concert tribute two days before his birthday at the Hollywood Bowl; it
could not be
held on his actual birthday because by then he was in Oslo to give a
concert.

A musician whose recording career extended from the 78 era through LP's
and well into the time of CD's, Benny Carter lived to see his own Web
site,
designed by the scholars Ed and Laurence Berger, sons of Morroe Berger,
his biographer, at www.bennycarter.com.

Mr. Carter was married five times. His first wife, whom he married in
1925 when he was 18, died of pneumonia three years later. Three of his
marriages
ended in divorce. In 1979, he married Hilma Ollila Arons, who survives
him, along with a daughter, Joyce Mills, a granddaughter and a grandson.
He met Ms.
Arons in 1940, when she and her sister went to the Savoy Ballroom in
Harlem to hear his band.