Creed Taylor Produced

For Maestro Carter’s birthday this year, I have an April 1964 article written by Don Heckman and published in Down Beat magazine’s April 9th, 1964 issue. Heckman was a longtime Down Beat contributor and Los Angeles Times jazz critic.

Mr. Carter is more than generous with his time; he regularly holds Zoom calls that Reddit users would know as AMAs or Ask Me Anything sessions, and it is well worth subscribing to his newsletter to get the invitations ^[1]https://roncarterjazz.com/pages/join-us-get-exclusive-access-to-ron-discounts-and-more.

As a researcher, I know from long experience, the stories people tell about themselves definitely change over time. Things that were important 20 years earlier become unimportant; choices that were insignificant at the time, become critical decision points a decade later.

In this interview, Ron, then 27 – today, 88-years old, talks about racism in the music business, which loomed large 60-years ago; he also talks about fitness, Ellington and Armstrong – who were still performing regularly in their sixties. Carter himself has worked as much or more in his eighties, Carter has always taken his fitness seriously.

I’m not suggesting Mr Carter has changed anything, it’s just really interesting to hear his perspective in 1964.It’s a long read but well worth the time. Enjoy!

The remainder of this post is a 12-15-minute read. While no one has ever complained about my longer articles, I’m aware that fewer people complete them. For this post, I’m trying something different. You can listen to the entire article in the car, on the train or at home, where ever you like.

Also, after the article is a brief bio’ of Den Heckman the journalist who interviewed Ron Carter. The bio was written by Doug Payne for ctproduced.com and ads some interesting context.

Courtesy of Down Beat magazine, the article is reproduced here in as close to possible to the original. No other changes have been made except layout.

If you listened to the audio version of this post, please leave a comment below, like it or not. The music was written and performed by Ron Carter for the “Dark Fables of Aseop” and “More Dark Tales of Aesop”, the music used here is the end credit music from “The Dark Tales Of Aesop”. See “from The Magazine Rack” for more details.

ONE OF THE MORE solid achievements of the tumultuous late 1950s and early ’60s has been the emergence of a new generation of bass players. Scott LaFaro, Charlie Haden, Gary Peacock, Steve Swallow . . . that such a wave of unexpected talent could suddenly appear, all playing the same instrument, is little short of amazing.

Less heralded than LaFaro, Peacock, et al., but bearing credentials that suggest he may be the best of the lot, is former Detroiter Ron Carter. He is not, in any real sense of the word, a newcomer. In the nearly five years since his arrival in New York, he has played for most of the regular and irregular leaders in town.

“I came to New York in ’59,” Carter said, “and went with Chico Hamilton the next day. Eric Dolphy was on the band then, along with Dennis Budimir on guitar. We made a record for Warner Bros. that was so far out that they never released it.

“I had come to town on a Wednesday from Rochester, and Chico and Miles Davis were working the same week at Birdland. . . . Chico had been auditioning bass players for about two weeks. I knew Paul Chambers, because we had gone to school together, and he told me about the gig. I went up and played the book on the stand, and Chico told me I could have the gig if I wanted it. He offered me a good salary, and since I had gotten into debt in Rochester — where there was a limited financial opportunity—I sold my car and went on the road for five months.

“Then in January of ’60 I enrolled in the Manhattan School of Music to work on a master’s degree in bass. I worked with about 20 bands on and off—with Randy Weston for about a year and a half, Bobby Timmons for about nine months, and then just about everybody else—up until March of last year when I joined Miles.”

Picture: Herb Snitzer

Having managed the difficult feat of keeping himself and his family alive through the practice of music, Carter also gained an unusually inclusive view of the current scene. Playing for leaders whose abilities and interests were as disparate as those of Bobby Timmons and Jaki Byard, for example, was a demanding musical exposure for a young performer ( Carter is now 27). In his student years, Carter had already experienced the other side of the coin the frustration and rejection that await the Negro in the world of the professional symphonic musician.

“I played in the Rochester Philharmonic for two years under Pierre Monteux, Stokowski, Martenot, and Leinsdorf,” he said, ” under big-name conductors with big-name soloists, so I know what’s involved in playing like that. And I feel that if I can’t get a job with one of the top five symphonies, I don’t want a job with any of them, at least not until they’re ready to hire Negro musicians as a rule rather than an exception. Unfortunately, the patrons of the arts are not ready to have their money go to an organization that has a Negro musician in it.

“When I was in the orchestra in Rochester I had a beard, and I got the word that some of the patrons of the orchestra didn’t dig that colored guy in the orchestra with a beard. So when this all got back to me, I told my teacher, ‘ Well, they’ve got a choice: either they can look at me and shut up or fire me and get sued. It’s as simple as that.’ I guess the word got back to whoever it was, because I didn’t hear any more about it. If a guy’s qualified, what difference does it make what color he is— if he’s orange, striped, or whatever— as long as he can play the stuff?”

Carter said he believes, as do many observers, that a quota system rigidly controls the number of Negroes who receive symphony positions, but he is not a soap-box proselytizer about such problems. His awareness of the brutal realities of the situation is usually reflected in extremely subtle, but direct, terms— a touch of irony in a word, a note of sarcasm in the description of individuals who are alleged to be “friendly” to Negro talent. Nor does Carter hesitate to express an opinion about the state of bass playing today. ” Some guys,” he pointed out, “are playing up and down the G string all night now. That’s not bass technique. And they don’t articulate cleanly—there’s always a slide from one note to another. They’re just not using the instrument to its fullest potential. The F scale, starting with the first finger on the low E string, is always going to be there, whether they play it or not. Of course, it sounds as though they’re playing a lot of stuff, and I notice that many of the critics have been taken in by this.

“Mingus has been using that technique properly for years and years but it has always been overlooked. Maybe it’s because his political beliefs or his acts of violence on the bandstand make him inappropriate to the public image of a bassist. Other guys, who don’t have the same reputation he does and who are clean livers, play high, and make the rosin move off the bass, are right up on top. I don’t understand it.”

When asked to list some players who had the greatest influence on the development of his style, Carter answered, ” I could name four or five guys who play the way I enjoy listening to them play, but out of these same guys I could find four or five things that each does that I disagree with. So I can’t say No. 1, No. 2, and so forth. Because one guy who plays well with the bow doesn’t play in tune, the guy who plays well in tune doesn’t swing, another guy who swings plays some notes that aren’t too cool, a guy who plays good notes has a bad sound—and it goes on and on. I would go out of my way to hear four or five guys play, but as far as patterning my playing from the way they play, I don’t hear enough validity in whatever it is they’re doing to make it worth my while to copy them.”

He was quick to point out the qualities he admires in some bassists, however—Percy Heath: “He has a nice feeling to his playing;” Paul Chambers: “He plays some nice lines.” Carter said he also likes Ray Brown and Charlie Mingus: “Mingus plays some eye-openers.”

Carter then went on to describe in ironic terms the .” big name” bass player who played 15 minutes of F-minor blues using an A natural in the first bar of every chorus. ” It’s pretty hard,” he said, “to pattern yourself after a player who could do a thing like that.”

AS A GRADUATE of the Eastman School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music and a serious student of both cello and bass, it almost physically disturbs him to hear the instrument played in a haphazard fashion. He feels that few bass players in jazz know how to use the bow.

“Now, I’m not saying,” he explained, ” that you should take the bass back to the caveman style and just double the cello as in baroque music or just play sustaining notes under a violin obligato, but a bass player should be able to play at least one decent solo with the bow that shows some facility.

“George Duvivier is an ideal bass player. He can read, swing pretty good, plays not the most modern style; but he’s an excellent section man, arcos very well, has almost faultless intonation and a beautiful big sound. Israel Crosby was a good bass player too. I liked the way he played. He had no special technique, but he played such crazy notes, and they were always in tune, and his lines were like little child melodies—they always knocked me out.”

Carter is bothered even more by the trend toward the adoption of cello as a second instrument for many bassists. He is especially disturbed by the widespread practice of tuning the cello to the bass pitch of fourths rather than to the conventional cello tuning in fifths.

“I have to give this the award as the most nonsensical thing for established bass players to do,” he said. “If they were nobodys trying to attain a name, I might close one ear, but being a former cellist for about nine years and knowing how it should sound and after switching to bass and playing bass like it should be played, I can’t understand why they can’t make a similar effort. They use their own bass techniques, which are very poor; their pitch is very poor; the sound is even worse—and they become established cello players. I call it treble bass, because that’s about all it amounts to. All of the major names who have played cello play it strung like a bass, so they’re really not playing cello at all, they’re playing treble bass. I’d rather hear Scotty LaFaro play up high.”

When he was asked about the grinding wear of working week after week with leaders who play the same tunes over and over again in the same keys and about the depressingly long road trips away from his family, he replied, “It depends on how strong a person is—period. It’s a very rigorous schedule physically. It drives you to juicing and getting your habits together, but I think it can be done. I think I can do it, if it came down to working 50 weeks a year under, say, the pressures of the Miles Davis band or the Sonny Rollins band. Because I try to be together off the bandstand as well as on. I think that’s the secret; if you’re a weak person two weeks of the year, it’s enough to get you off on the wrong track.

“Take Duke Ellington as an example. He doesn’t work just two weeks of the year. He works pretty often for a guy who is 65 years old. Even Louis Armstrong works all the time. And he still plays with the consistency he played with in 1927. Whether you dig his style or not is unimportant, because he’s still playing very well, playing high notes loud and clear, still making trumpet shakes.

“The trouble is that most of the guys who are taking care of business aren’t working. And there are a lot of guys who scuffled as sidemen for years, but then when they make it they don’t even have the common courtesy to treat their sidemen better than they were treated. The only good business men working regularly are playing such corny music that it wouldn’t be worth while to join the gig.”

GRANTED THE DIFFICULTIES of earning a living in the labyrinth of contemporary jazz, Carter appears to have the personal stability and out- standing musicianship to bring it off. Failing that, he is well-qualified to teach.

“I have 210 hours of practice teaching in at Eastman, which qualifies me to teach in any state so far as the hours are concerned,” he said. “But I’m afraid the public-school system is not geared to my attitude. I really don’t feel like making $10,000 a year teaching and have to spend $ 9,000 on medical bills — which is what’s going to happen if you get stuck in something like that. If you’re willing to be what I call snoopervized all the time and have no one accept your suggestions as valid, then that’s your shot. And I don’t know any school system that isn’t like that, no matter how permissive they’re supposed to be. They always have reservations when they find out that you play jazz, and then make you wait that much longer. And I’m not ready to wait that long. I’m waiting long enough as it is playing be-bop.

“What I would like to do is have a bass school—just have 30 or 40 students a month. That would be ideal. A lot of the guys who are teaching now aren’t really professionals, and it’s hard to teach right if you yourself haven’t studied. I’ve seen some instruction books by jazz players that were expensive and disappointing, but I wasn’t surprised. Little things like the way notes were fingered in the book—they actually could have been fingered a lot easier.

“I feel that part of this problem is that most jazz players never studied with any one cat more than a week, if that long. They stop in a town and take a lesson with the local symphony player or the fourth-chair player who happens to stop in the club one night. Then they leave town and study with somebody different the next month.”

These qualifications obviously do not apply to Ron Carter, who is as well schooled in his instrument as any player in jazz. Adaptable to almost any situation, a veteran of symphony orchestras, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Randy Weston, and practically every type of jazz style known, he is the very model of the modern jazz bassist.

Don Heckman – Bard with a musician’s ear

Don Heckman (1930-2020) was best known as a critic and jazz historian. Since the late fifties, he wrote for DownBeat, Metronome, The Village Voice, JazzTimes and, until 2008, was Leonard Feather’s successor at the Los Angeles Times.

Heckman also contributed liner notes to several discs Ron Carter is present on, including Sam Rivers’s Fuchsia Swing Song (1965) and Contours (1967), Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil (1966) and Charles Lloyd’s Manhattan Stories – featuring a concert Heckman himself organized in 1965, but not issued on LP or CD until 2014.

As a musician, Heckman (on alto sax) collaborated with Carter on the Don Heckman-Ed Summerlin Improvisational Jazz Workshop record Untitled (1967 – reissued the following year as Jax or Bettor). Both Heckman and Carter would also contribute to Summerlin’s Ring of Joy (1968) as well.

As a composer, Heckman went on to provide scores of his own to a series of spoken-word records for children, including stories about Winnie the Pooh, Babar and Paddington Bear.

In an obituary published by the Jazz Journalists Association, Heckman’s daughter, Allegra, said, shortly after his death, that her father was working on a collection of his favorite interviews over the years, adding some fresh thoughts and new perspectives. While she expressed hope to make this “happen for him,” it is a good guess that this interview was among those he was considering.