Benny Carter

At 95 years old, Benny Carter has this physical status:

Bennett Lester Carter (August 8, 1907 – July 12, 2003) was an American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, trumpeter, composer, arranger, and bandleader.

With Johnny Hodges, he was a pioneer on the alto saxophone.

From the beginning of his career in the 1920s he was a popular arranger, having written charts for Fletcher Henderson's big band that shaped the swing style.

He had an unusually long career that lasted into the 1990s.

During the 1980s and '90s, he was nominated for eight Grammy Awards, which included receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Career

Carter was born in 1907 in New York City. His mother and others in the neighborhood taught him piano lessons. He played trumpet and played briefly with C-melody saxophone before settling on alto saxophones. He appeared with June Clark, Billy Paige, and Earl Hines in the 1920s, before being toured as a member of the Wilberforce Collegians led by Horace Henderson. He appeared on television for the first time in 1927 as a member of the Paradise Tenny led by Charlie Johnson. He returned to the Collegians and became their bandleader through 1929, including a appearance at the Savoy Ballroom in New York City.

Carter served as arranger for Fletcher Henderson in the early 20s until Don Redman vacated the position. He had no formal training in organizing, learning by trial and error, getting on his knees and checking out the latest charts, "writing the lead trumpet first and lead saxophone first," which, of course, is the difficult way. It was quite a long time that I did that before I knew what a score was."

He left Henderson to work as the head of McKinney's Cotton Pickers in Detroit, where he was born in Henderson. Chu Berry, Sid Catlett, Cozy Cole, Bill Coleman, Benjamin Webster, Dicky Wells, and Teddy Wilson formed a band in New York City in 1932. Carter's arrangements were complicated. "Keep a Song in Your Soul," written by Henderson in 1930, "Lonesome Nights" and "Symphony in Riffs" from 1933, both of which show Carter's writing for saxophones.

Carter and Johnny Hodges were considered the top alto saxophonists by the 1930s. Carter also became a well-known trumpet soloist, having rediscovered the instrument. In the 1930s, he specialized on trumpets. Carter's short-lived Orchestra appeared at the Harlem Club in New York but made only a few headlines for Columbia, OKeh, and Vocalion. The Chocolate Dandies were available on the OKeh sides.

Carter appeared in sessions with British composer/musician Spike Hughes, who toured New York City to compile recordings with well-known African American musicians in 1933. These 14 sides plus four by Carter's big band, dubbed Spike Hughes and His Negro Orchestra at the time, were first released in England. Red Allen, Dicky Wells, Wayman Carver, Coleman Hawkins, J. C. Higginbotham, and Chu Berry were among Carter's band members.

Carter went to London and spent two years as an arranger for the BBC Big Band. He performed with local musicians in England, France, and Scandinavia, and then took his band to the Netherlands. Carter performed trumpet, clarinet, piano, alto, and tenor saxophone, as well as occasional vocals in these settings. He returned to America in 1938. He began playing with his band at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem from 1941 to 1941. Shad Collins, Sidney De Paris, Vic Dickenson, and Freddie Webster were among the group's members. Eddie Barefield, Kenny Clarke, and Dizzy Gillespie performed with a seven-piece band after this performance.

He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1940s, creating another big band that featured J. J. Johnson, Max Roach, and Miles Davis. However, these will be his last big bands. With the exception of occasional concerts, performing with Jazz at the Philharmonic, and recording, he has stopped playing as a touring big band leader. During the decades, Los Angeles gave him many chances for film work, and these dominated his time in Hollywood. In 1943, he composed music and arrangements for films, including Stormy Weather. He wrote arrangements for singers such as Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, Pembrace Lee, and Sarah Vaughan during the 1950s and 1960s. Carter returned to playing saxophone again and toured the Middle East courtesy of the US State Department on something of a comeback in the 1970s. He began going back and forth to Europe and Japan on a regular basis.

Carter was invited to spend a weekend at Princeton University by Morroe Berger, a Princeton sociology professor who wrote about jazz. Carter's gift, teaching, was a result of this. He returned to Princeton five times in the last nine years, most of which were brief stays, with one exception in 1973, when he was a visiting professor. Princeton gave him an honorary doctorate in 1974. He taught at workshops and seminars at several other universities, as well as being a visiting lecturer at Harvard for a week in 1987. Morroe Berger wrote Benny Carter – A Life in American Music (1982), a two-volume study of Carter's career.

Carter's capabilities were not harmed by time. He wrote the long composition Central City Sketches, which was performed by the American Jazz Orchestra in Cooper Union in the 1980s. In Scotland, Glasgow Suite, a long composition, was performed. In 1990, the Lincoln Center hired him to write "Good Vibes." Tales of the Rising Sun Suite and Harlem Renaissance Suite were given to him by the National Endowment for the Arts. This music was performed in 1992, when he was 85 years old.

Carter had an unusually long career. He was possibly the only musician to have recorded in eight separate decades. Another feature of his work was his versatility as a guitarist, bandleader, arranger, and composer. He helped with the sound of alto saxophone, but he also appeared and recorded on soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone, trumpet, trombone, clarinet, and piano. He was instrumental in the establishment of a foundation for arranging as early as 1930, when he arranged "Keep a Song in Your Soul" for Fletcher Henderson's big band. Ella Mae Morse's novelty hit "Cow-Cow Boogie" and the sprawling Central City Sketches were written when he was 80 years old and performed with the American Jazz Orchestra.

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