Ron Carter
A long walk with the bass...
"I'm just a country boy, man. A very comfortable country boy. That's all I am.”
- Ron Carter
Round about 1976, I was watch the movie Play Misty For Me on TV. I was intrigued by the music and cool scenes from the 1970 Monterey Jazz Festival, as at that time I really did not know what jazz was. However, it wasn’t Johnny Otis or Cannonball Adderley that caught my ear. It was a different sounding song that played during this love scene. For the longest time, I wondered who sang it. Then one day, many months later, I asked my older sister-in-law if she had ever heard of the song, and she told me, “Oh yeah, that’s Roberta Flack. It’s on her album First Take.”
I had a lead! Off I went to the used record stores searching it. I couldn’t drive at that time and the used record stores were too far to ride my bike, so I asked my older brother if he’d drive me. I would buy him an album as payment. We had a deal. After some hunting, I finally found it down in Dinkytown by the University of Minnesota campus.
First Take was recorded and released in 1969, but didn’t make the big time until Play Misty For Me came out in late 1971. The song, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, ended up winning the 1972 Grammy for Record of the Year. As the story is told by Carter: “Her working trio came to New York and they spent a couple of days trying to make this record. For whatever reasons, it didn't work out, so I got a call to come by and do this record with a young singer named Roberta Flack playing with this New York band. Ray Lucas on drums — an incredible drummer — Bucky Pizzarelli on guitar and some wonderful arrangements. That record put her on the map.”
Side two of First Take is etched in my mind. It’s was the perfect side for a young romantic. The first time I played it, I connected with the bass player. That’s when my long walk with Ron Carter began. Tryin’ Times is still my favorite song on side two. However, it’s also probably the one I heard the least.
When I’d go to bed at night, I’d put on side two. Lying in bed, with big headphones like these ones so popular in those days,
somewhere in the middle of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, the track before Tryin’ Times, riding on Ron Carter’s soulful bass, I’d drift off to sleep….
Throughout high school, Ron Carter’s name didn’t come up on the radio station I listened to nor on the records I found in used record stores. But fast-forward some years to the Fall of 1980. While I was thumbing through the jazz records at Ground Zero (long time readers will know where that is, but for new readers go here), I ran into this one:
I immediately thought, “Hey, I know Ron Carter. He played on Roberta Flack’s record” So I put it on. Once again, Ron Carter’s soulful bass grabbed hold of me. I particularly liked the last cut on side one, Carter’s composition 177 Special, with Joe Henderson on tenor and Billy Cobham on drums. At the 3:00 minute mark, Carter picks up his piccolo bass and solos over his own bass playing - it doesn’t get much better than that.
It would be three more years before I would run into Ron Cater again, after a chance meeting with Gil Scott Heron’s band in the streets of Georgetown. Before we head there, let’s step back and follow Ron Carter’s journey from humble beginnings in Detroit through his apprenticeship to becoming a leader and prized session man in New York City’s jazz scene.
Apprenticeship
Ron Carter grew up in the rural “black” part of Ferndale, Michigan. He was the fifth of Lutheran and Willie Carter’s eight children. The course of his life was set in 1947 when his mother learned that the local school received an array of musical instruments. She told her children to each pick one. Ron grabbed a cello and his sister a bass (they would for a time play cello/bass duos around town.) As he explains, it was the aggressive sound of that aluminum cello that gave him a “voice” to counter his innate shyness.
While in junior high school, he had a 300-customer newspaper route that enabled him to pay for his own music lessons. Even though money was tight in such a large family, his parents encouraged his pursuit of musical excellence. By ninth grade, he earned first chair cello at Lincoln High School.
When he was ten, his parents packed up the kids and headed for Detroit. In 1952, Cater entered Cass Technical High School, the highly-regarded Detroit public prep school.
According to Carter:
You had to audition to get in, pass an exam and maintain a certain grade level to stay there. It was like a junior college. Music students had to be in everything: I played alto clarinet in the band; tenor saxophone in the marching band; sang in the choir, man, it was a complete music program. At the time I was at Cass Tech, I was not a jazz player — I was a classical cellist. I knew those people because they were classmates, but not as fellow jazz performers. There was Ira Jackson, a wonderful alto player who ended up playing with Barry Harris’ group later on, and I knew Paul Chambers, but again, we were not playing friends nor in the same social circles, because I was not into the jazz scene by any means. I was a classical player who went to all the rehearsals with quartets and quintets, those kinds of ensembles, but [I was] not a jazz player at all until I came back to Detroit after my first year away at school in 1957 ... I played two jazz gigs then, but I was not a jazz player at Cass Tech.
When Paul Chambers left Cass Tech early to launch his career in New York City in 1955, Carter saw an opportunity. As the only bassist, he filled that chair and dreamed of an orchestral career.
After high school, he successfully auditioned for the prestigious Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where he received a four-year scholarship for classical bass.
That Fall, the school established The Eastman Philharmonia and Carter was named first chair double bass. The scholarship helped with his finances, but it didn’t cover everything – “You gotta buy clothes; you gotta buy strings; you gotta eat.” To help ends meet, he started gigging around at local jazz spots like the Ridgecrest Inn and Pythodd Club.
According to Carter, “I worked with a local trio as the backup band for touring artists like Sonny Stitt or opening for big acts like Horace Silver Quintet, Dizzy Gillespie’s band, Carmen McRae and Oscar Peterson. They assured me that New York welcomes guys who can play,” especially a good bass player, Sonny Stitt told him. He followed their advice and after Eastman School of Music moved to New York City.
In 1959, drummer and West Coast bandleader Chico Hamilton saw potential in Carter’s playing and hired him. Of that first road experience, he recalls, “It was free school for me just by playing every night. It was an education on taking taxes out of my pay, per diem, publishing rights, rehearsals, how bass drum works, ins and outs, do’s and don’ts. It was a great time; eight months.” Soon after, Carter entered the Master’s program at the Manhattan School of Music. “They didn’t have jazz at the time but had a great theory department, and a great orchestra. It was an opportunity for me to maintain my classical skills and learn another view of composition.”
In 1961, at the age of 24 and just getting started in New York City, Cater was hired by Riverside Records producer Orrin Keepnews for a recording date with the great guitarist Wes Montgomery. And the rest is history.
Leader and session man
It’s difficult to pick highlights from Ron Cater’s huge arsenal of great tracks, but here are three of my favorites. Starting with Ron Carter’s first record as a leader Where?, recorded with Eric Dolphy and released by the New Jazz label in 1961. I like the title track, recorded in the Ellington - Pettiford quartet tradition.
Of course, Carter joined the Miles Davis group in 1963, appearing on many albums as part of his legendary rhythm section with drummer Tony Williams and Herbie Hancock. But I prefer Carter’s playing on Hancock’s 1964 Blue Note release Empyrean Isles, which found its way into a hybrid hip-hop/jazz dance track in the early 1990s.
Finally, with a nod to Sun Ra, I like how Pat Patrick’s baritone matches Carter’s bass on Andrew Hill’s 1970 Blue Note recording Diddy Wah:
I would discover all these great Ron Carter sessions later in my jazz journey. I was lucky enough to be in Chicago in the late 1990s, when the jazz music scene was red hot and used record stores even hotter! Now, getting back to the next time I stumbled onto Ron Carter….
In the summer of 1983, while living in New York, I drove down to Georgetown for a show at Blues Alley. As I was walking to the show, I heard music playing. I had time to kill, so I went up the street and there was Gil Scott Heron behind his organ with a few guys playing along. I had never heard of him. It seems as though I remember them playing his song The Bottle for like 10 minutes - just jamming. I loved it. The next day, I went down to the record store and bought Pieces of a Man, his 1971 Flying Dutchman Records release. After I played it, I was blown away by the bass player - it was Ron Carter, of course.
I have to list two songs from that great album to highlight Carter’s incredible bass playing. This is the first cut on side one, and the bass comes right at you:
However, Save The Children is actually my favorite song on the album:
In the late 1980s, during my time overseas in the service and later after I returned to the states and settled back in California, Jazz was making a comeback. I reconnected with Ron Carter again.
In 1986, Warner Bros. released Round Midnight, an American-French musical drama film directed by Bertrand Tavernier starring an old Blue Note stalwart, Dexter Gordon. In the movie, Ron Carter played in the band for some songs.
Also in 1986, Blue Note recorded a fantastic Joe Henderson trio album called The State of the Tenor, with Ron Carter on bass and Al Foster on drums. This album remains one of my favorites. His bass work on his own composition Loose Change is stunning.
I think the genius and magic of Ron Carter is his ability to work within so many different musical genres. For example, he is equally at home on Verses From the Abstract from A Tribe Called Quest’s 1991 The Low End Theory, perhaps the first record to pair hip-hop with the atmosphere of jazz, as he is on Paul Simon’s folk rock Run That Body Down from his 1971 album Paul Simon.
After all these years, what I have come to realize is that Ron Carter was everywhere! Well, At lease in my world he is everywhere, as I continue my long walk with the bass of Ron Carter….
Here’s one more for the road, with Ron Carter playing with Alice Coltrane on her 1970 Impulse! album Ptah, the El Daoud:
Next week, we’ll follow the sounds of deep cuts from the much maligned Jazz-Fusion world as we continue to paddle down that Big River Called Jazz.…
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Feel free to contact me at any time to talk shop. I welcome and encourage that….
Until then, keep on walking….
My record player was across the room and they had a plug-in cord that was like 10 feet long - that was probably the coolest.
Those headphones must have been so cool back in the day!