Benny Carter

Immaculate jazz player and composer

Bennett Lester Carter, alto saxophonist, trumpeter, arranger, composer and bandleader: born New York 8 August 1907, married (one daughter); died Los Angeles 12 July 2003.

"Everyone ought to listen to Benny," said Miles Davis. "He's a whole musical education." Davis was not exaggerating, for Benny Carter was involved in almost every new development in jazz throughout the last century. He died a couple of weeks short of his 96th birthday. It is just a year since he passed a driving test that enabled him to continue driving his two beloved Rolls-Royces around Los Angeles.

Ranked amongst the best half-dozen alto saxophonists, Carter was also a better trumpet player than most. The combination of a reed and a brass instrument is unusual and difficult because of the embouchure problems that arise. It presented no difficulties for Carter.

But it was as a composer and arranger that he pulled jazz into shape. It is hard to know who first developed the art of writing arrangements for big bands. But certainly Carter, Don Redman and Fletcher Henderson were the great innovating individualists of the 1920s. Carter remained at the forefront of modern jazz throughout the Thirties and absorbed and reflected the radical changes that came with Bebop in the Forties. His writing was always beautifully tailored and continued to develop throughout his career. While Duke Ellington's orchestrating was idiosyncratic and uncopyable, Carter first set the standards for others to follow and forged ahead of them before they had a chance to catch up.

Everything that he did was skilled, honed and immaculate. Perhaps this resulted in the only criticism of him - that his otherwise gifted alto playing was sometimes urbane and lacked the passion of Charlie Parker, Willie Smith and Johnny Hodges.

Carter never stopped working from his first professional job with June Clark's band in 1924 until his last blowing gig in Los Angeles in 1998. In between, he was never still, scoring, composing music and putting together bands that included such embryo jazz stars as the young Dickie Wells, Teddy Wilson, Sid Catlett, Chu Berry, Jay Jay Johnson, Freddie Webster and Snooky Young.

Piano lessons from his mother fired his interest in music and as a boy he aspired to the trumpet, encouraged by his cousin Cuba Bennett, a legendary jazz trumpeter and a neighbour, Bubber Miley, who played trumpet in the earliest Duke Ellington orchestras.

By saving his pocket money Carter was able eventually to buy a trumpet but, disillusioned because he couldn't play it at once, he exchanged it for a saxophone. In 1924 he began working as a sideman in some of the best New York bands, including that led by the pianist Earl Hines. He made his first records with Charlie Johnson's band in 1928 and had already taught himself to write as the band recorded two of his arrangements that day.

Later in the year he joined Fletcher Henderson's band, replacing Don Redman as the band's alto saxophonist and arranger. By now he had moved easily into the forefront of jazz arranging and, via Henderson's recordings, his influence spread out through the music world.

In 1931 Carter, now a member of McKinney's Cotton Pickers in Detroit, took up the trumpet again and swiftly mastered it. He formed his own band in 1932 but sadly his high musical standards didn't register with the public and he broke up the band as the Depression bit in 1934.

Known worldwide through his records, Carter was invited to Paris in 1935 to join the Willie Lewis band. This was a significant move, for, had it not been for the presence of Carter, European jazz would not have developed in the way that it did over the next three years. The BBC invited him to write the library for its dance orchestra and by 1936 he was recording in London under his own name with sidemen like Ted Heath, Tommy McQuater, George Chisholm and Freddie Gardner.

He travelled Europe, recording in Scandinavia and France recording with local musicians as well as with other touring Americans such as Coleman Hawkins. The session he recorded in Paris with Hawkins and Django Reinhart in 1937 produced outstanding classics of jazz. That year in the Netherlands he formed one of the first interracial big bands.

Returning to New York in 1938 Carter put together yet another big band and for the next two years worked with it at the Savoy Ballroom. It's difficult to see how he found time also to write arrangements for Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and the other bandleaders who beat a path to his door, but he did.

In 1941 he cut down the band to a sextet that included the embryo Beboppers Dizzy Gillespie and Kenny Clarke. In 1942 he reformed the big band and took it to work in Los Angeles. He was to stay there until his death.

Again the young musicians flocked to him to learn, and his bands of the time included Miles Davis, Art Pepper and Max Roach. He was in demand for film scores and, beginning with Stormy Weather (1943), he wrote the soundtrack for a multitude of films and later television productions. He created arrangements for most of the popular singers from Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald to Sarah Vaughan, Mel Tormé and Lou Rawls. His compositions, such as "When Lights are Low" and "Blues in My Heart", became jazz standards.

During the second half of the Forties Carter began playing in touring jam-session units such as Just Jazz and Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic. Granz took him round the world, recorded him with the various stars of his stable and made him hugely popular, notably in Japan, where Carter returned often to play and record. He visited Europe and Britain again during the Seventies and in 1975 played across the Middle East in a tour arranged by the US State Department.

He changed direction in the Seventies to become involved in music education, holding workshops at many universities, and worked in residence at Princeton, where he was awarded an honorary degree in 1974. Awards flooded in and he played at the White House for Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and, in 1989, for the first President George Bush.

Among the awards was a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1987), a Grammy nomination for his suite "Central City Sketches" (1988) and in 1990 "Jazz Artist of the Year" in the Jazz Times and Down Beat international critics' polls. He was given two Grammy awards and received seven nominations. In 1996 he was presented with the Kennedy Center Honor at a concert of his music conducted by Wynton Marsalis at the Lincoln Center. Carter flew to Oslo to play in celebration of his 90th birthday. He caught bronchitis during the trip and this was to recur, impair and finally prevent his playing after March 1998.

As if all that wasn't enough Carter recorded skilful solos on piano, trombone, and soprano and tenor saxophones.

One of the most bizarre tributes to him came when he was 75 in 1982 and a New York radio station played his recordings continuously for 177 hours.

Steve Voce

It was a pity that Steve Voce's obituary of Benny Carter neglected to mention his pioneering work in combating racial discrimination in California, writes Richard Carter. This was a serious issue for blacks even into the early 1950s.

Carter fought successfully against covenants restricting property ownership: white neighbours tried to have him evicted from his house in 1944 on the ground that a covenant among property-owners forbade sales to Afro-Americans. He refused to move, and a court ruling eventually vindicated his stance.

And he took a leading part in desegregating the separate musicians' union branches ("locals") in Los Angeles: blacks were not allowed to join the white union Local 47 but were confined to their own Local 767. Benny Carter was elected chairman of the negotiating committee responsible for resolving the issue, and this was achieved in 1953. Marl Young, a local activist in Los Angeles, said:

I've never seen a more compassionate man . . . In the amalgamation fight, he didn't need it [because he was well enough off to be able to ignore it], but he was sticking his neck out to fight for those who did need it . . . We needed someone of stature who was respected by both black and white musicians.