Ron Carter Esperanza Spalding - Downbeat

RON CARTER
Steven sussman
Carter, finding the best notes
told him, “I’d like to have you in my orchestra in Houston, but I’m
afraid that the board of directors are not prepared to accept an African-
American musician.”
“I thought, ‘Shit, man, when are you going to be ready?’” Carter
recalled. “The jazz community who came through Rochester said,
‘Look, in New York everyone likes a good bass player.’ They had no
idea about my classical background, that I’d been turned away. They
thought, Here’s this tall kid from Detroit who has the potential to be a
good bass player, and he could only do that if he comes to New York.”
A few days after arriving in August 1959, Carter went to the club
Birdland, where he encountered Chico Hamilton, who had auditioned
him the previous fall in Rochester and needed a new cellist who could
play his difficult book. After a three-month tour, Carter settled into a
Harlem apartment and enrolled at Manhattan School of Music for a
master’s degree. Before long, he’d earned respect from a community of
bassists whose focus was less on “soloing or playing unaccompanied—
although they could do it” and more on “Can we make the band swing?”
He admired Gene Taylor’s commitment to play Horace Silver’s written
bass lines, Doug Watkins’ “fabulous tonal quality” and the versatility of
Milt Hinton and Joe Benjamin. He reveled in the challenge of analyzing
“why Sam Jones’ sound was physically different than George Duvivier’s,
or Scott LaFaro’s, or Richard Davis’.” Part of the craft was to use any
bandstand performance—most consequentially during his half-decade
with Miles Davis—as a laboratory in which to experiment and research
alternate changes, “to think through the possibilities” in his ongoing
quest “to find the right notes” for any situation he might encounter.
“I tried to find changes—not from the original chord progression—
that would fit if the bandleader or the soloist decided to put the melody
over what I was playing,” Carter said. “If the changes worked, that
meant there must be another sub-set that would make the melody sound
the same, but feel different because of the harmonic underpinnings.
When I play these notes that seem pretty far removed from the melody,
they aren’t random choices. I’m still playing the melody in my head.
They don’t always work, but I’m OK with that. That’s one choice I don’t
worry about tomorrow night. That’s off my list. We’ve got five more
tunes; maybe we’ll work with them.”
28 DOWNBEAT DECEMBER 2012