Ron Carter Esperanza Spalding - Downbeat

RON CARTER
ferent concepts, 16 different events. My feature is to be playing every
chorus of every song. It’s about my desire to let the soloists play something
different every night, making the backgrounds feel different by
my notes and rhythms. I’d much rather be known as the bass player who
made the band sound great, but different, every night.”
In a DownBeat Blindfold Test a few years ago, bassist Stanley Clarke
commented on Carter’s duo performance of “Stardust” with pianist
Roland Hanna (the title track of a well-wrought 2001 homage to
Oscar Pettiford): “Ron is an innovator and, as this solo bore out, a great
storyteller. Probably 99.9 percent of the bass players out here play stuff
from Ron. There’s Paul Chambers, and you can go back to Pettiford,
Blanton and Israel Crosby, and a few people after Chambers—but a lot
of it culminated in Ron, and then after Ron it’s all of us. Ron to me is
the most important bass player of the last 50 years. He defined the role
of the bass player.”
This remark summarizes the general consensus among Clarke’s
peers. On other Blindfold Tests, John Patitucci praised the “the architecture
of [Carter’s] lines,” his “blended sound” and “great sense of
humor when he plays”; William Parker mentioned Carter’s penchant
for “not playing a lot of notes” and “keeping a bass sound on his bass”;
Andy Gonzalez noted his “shameless quotes of tiny pieces of melody
from all kinds of obscure songs, which you have to know a lot of music
to do”; and Eric Revis said, “He’s gotten to the place where there’s
Ronisms that you expect, and only he can do them.”
Generations of musicians have closely analyzed Carter’s ingenious
walking bass lines on the studio albums and live recordings he made
between 1963 and 1968 with Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Herbie
Hancock and Tony Williams, who considered it their mandate to relax
the rules of the 32-bar song form as far as possible while still maintaining
the integrity of the tune in question (as heard on the 2011 Columbia/
Legacy box set Live In Europe 1967: The Bootleg Series Vol. 1, which
won Historical Album of the Year in the DownBeat Readers Poll).
They’ve paid equivalent attention to the several dozen iconic Blue
Note and CTI dates on which the bassist accompanied the likes of
Shorter, Joe Henderson, McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard, Stanley
Turrentine, Milt Jackson and Antônio Carlos Jobim. They’re on intimate
terms with Carter’s creative, definitive playing with a host of
trios—grounding Bobby Timmons’ soul unit in the early ’60s; performing
the equilateral triangle function with Williams and Hancock
or Hank Jones, and with Billy Higgins and Cedar Walton; or navigating
the wide-open spaces with Bill Frisell and Paul Motian—on which
he incorporates a host of extended techniques into the flow with a tone
that has been described as “glowing in the dark.” They’re cognizant of
Carter’s uncanny ability to shape-shift between soloistic and complementary
functions with such rarefied duo partners as Walton, Jim Hall,
Kenny Barron and, more recently, Richard Galliano, Rosa Passos and
Houston Person. They respect his extraordinarily focused contributions
to hundreds of commercial studio dates on which, as Carter puts it, “I
maintain my musical curiosity about the best notes while being able to
deliver up the product for this music as they expected to hear it in the
30 seconds I have to make this part work.”
Not least, Carter’s admirers know his work as a leader, with an
oeuvre of more than 30 recordings in a host of configurations, including
a half-dozen between 1975 and 1990 by a two-bass quartet in which
either Buster Williams or Leon Maleson took on the double bass duties,
allowing Carter to function as a front-line horn with the piccolo bass,
tuned in the cello register.
Carter first deployed this concept in 1961 on his debut recording,
Where, with a quintet including Eric Dolphy, Mal Waldron and Charlie
Persip in which he played cello next to bassist George Duvivier. A son
of Detroit, Carter played cello exclusively from ages 10 to 17, exhibiting
sufficient talent to be “the first black kid” in the orchestra at Interlochen
Center for the Arts’ music camp (in Interlochen, Mich.), and then burnishing
his skills at Cass Tech, the elite arts-oriented high school that
produced so many of the Motor City’s most distinguished musicians.
“Jazz was always in the air at school, but it wasn’t my primary listening,”
Carter said. “I had other responsibilities—the concert band,
the marching band, the orchestra, my chores at home and maintaining
a straight-A average. We were playing huge orchestrations of Strauss,
Beethoven and Brahms, and the Bach cantatas with all these voices
moving in and out.” Midway through Carter’s senior year, it became
clear to him that more employment would accrue if he learned to play
the bass—a decision reinforced when he heard “Blue Haze,” a blues in
F on which Miles Davis’ solo unfolds over a suave Percy Heath bass
line and Art Blakey’s elemental beat on the hi-hat, ride cymbal and
bass drum. “I was fascinated to hear them making their choices sound
superb with the bare essentials,” Carter said. “These three people were
generating as much musical logic in six to eight choruses as a 25-minute
symphony with 102 players.”
Carter (left) with Miles Davis in the 1960s
During the summer after high school, he became a gigging bassist
in Detroit, where the local players were so highly accomplished that
Carter joked, “If they had all come to New York, New York would have
sunk.” That fall, he studied at the University of Rochester’s Eastman
School of Music on a scholarship. For the next four years, he fulfilled
academic responsibilities during the day, worked as a waiter and
attended “jazz school from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m.” in local clubs. He had the
opportunity to support artists like Sonny Stitt and Slim Gaillard, and
to be heard, he recalls, by “Dizzy Gillespie’s band with Sam Jones,
or Carmen McRae’s band with Ike Isaacs, or Horace Silver’s band
with Teddy Kotick and Art Farmer.” He also earned a position with
the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra (“I was again the only African-
American in this group”), which performed in New York toward the
end of his senior year for Leopold Stokowski, who, after rehearsal,
bob cato, columbia/legacy
26 DOWNBEAT DECEMBER 2012