Benny Carter, R.I.P

[Clay Fink]

Absolutely one of the greats.

A long, rich and fruitful life...

[Clay Fink]

I heard this on Robert Bamberger's show just a few minutes ago. Carter passed away this morning at age 95. I couldn't find anything else about his death online.

His contributions were many and extraordinary...

[bluenoter]

Yes, another giant is gone. I'll put on Sarah Vaughan: Jazz Profile, which has a couple of cuts that feature Benny Carter and His Orchestra and the song "Key Largo," which Carter composed. (AFAIK, that's all I have.)

R.I.P.

[Captain Hate]

Dammit, I always knew this day would come. Benny was class with a capital C; he created an absolutely magical evening at Chicago's jazz festival in the 80's playing his music with a big band of the city's finest. Making it to 95 is great but I hoped he'd live forever. I miss him already. bluenoter, you're right, he was a true giant; a very humble giant.

[Lois Gilbert]

I never interviewed Benny Carter, but had the pleasure of meeting him on several occasions -- boy everything you all said before and more. I was so honored to just be in his presence.

I know he will rest in peace because despite all the adversity he must have experienced in his 95 years on earth, he never lost his spirit or grace, which will continue to shine through in his music.

[gonzo]

sorry to hear of benny's death. was it natural causes? he played pretty much right up to the end.

[moneyp]

One of my favorites.... somebody did get his memoirs down, right?

Every praise given to Benny in the above posts is still inadequate.
He wrote some nice things besides "Key Largo", too.

As recently as 1996, Bennie made a CD with Warren Vache', Chris Neville (p), Steve LaSpina (b), Sherman Ferguson (d) also Gene Novi, John Heard, and Roy McCurdy, (p,b,and d) of Benny's compositions, each featuring various singers, including Dianne Reeves, Joe Williams and the like. "The Benny Carter Songbook", Music Masters. Thoroughly enjoyable, with the old boy himself on alto, and still showing great chops.

After Benny, they broke the mold.

RIP, Great One.

[Valerie]

I am deeply saddened. This man was absolutely one in a billion. Obviously, we can't be surprised at his passing but my heart is weeping. May Benny rest in peace. I thank him for his contributions from the bottom of my heart.

Without knowing of his death, I was talking about him last evening with Ernestine Anderson who also wasn't aware that he had left us. We were reminiscing about a record date she had with him years ago that I was fortunate enough to attend.

Bless you, Benny, forever and ever.

[Gary Sisco]

RIP to a real master. It was good, long run, roots.

[frankpop1]

what i thought was so great about benny carter was that he was a great alto sax player! one of the greats! i mite contend that he was the best pre-charlie parker altoist. he was around from god knows when......he played with a who's who list from armstrong, fletcher, fats to gillispie & parker and beyond.

does anybody remember, but did ken (i dont know shit about jazz) burns and marsalis & their minions mention benny in their 20 hr doc?

i dont think that he made many good recordings himself, but a couple of appearances that i heard & like are:


1. 'best of' on verve with a good version of 'it dont mean a thing...'

2. my favorite is an appearance on marian mcpartland's 'plays benny carter'

3. recently i downloaded 'benny carter meets oscar peterson' which is a pretty good recording from emusic.
oh yeah

and so it goes

[hornplayer]

When I saw this thread title I nearly shouted "Oh, NO!"

At 95 he surely had a wonderful run. I'm so glad I had the opportunity to meet him and to hear him live. He was 90 when I saw him lead a big band!

Rest in Peace, Benny Carter... and VERY well done!!!

[stonemonkts]

The two recordings I own with Benny Carter are both stellar (Jazz Giant and Further Definitions). I've enjoyed him in small and large combos. Not many people can play the trumpet and sax both with such excellence and grace. He seemed like a very sweet man. I agree with all the praise, and am sorry I never had a chance to see him perform.

[Mike Schwartz]

After seeing this post while doing my radio program, put together an impromptu hour of Benny Carter music. Great playing and writing over all those decades! One amazing musician on several fronts, as an instrumentalist,composer,arranger, and bandleader.

Blessed to have seen him play on several occasions, always Mr. cool, calm & collected. He played so amazingly well so late in life. And his sound....who will ever come to the bandstand again with a sound like that......?

Have done many radio related projects with the woman who was Mr. Carter's publicist. By all reports he was a sweet, gentle, kind person.

[Dr Dave]

Benny is one of the last to have been alive practically from the beginning of the music. Player, composer, all-around gentleman. His like will not be seen again.

[RainyDay]

Somehow, I thought he might be the one to last forever. RIP.

[cookie]

I just read the news at Yahoo. What a great musician. What sad news for the jazz community. But what a life lived!

Have been thinking about Benny Carter alot these past few years. Caught him on Marion McPartland's show a few weeks back (actually caught it twice on two different stations). My mentor's been playing "Summer Serenade" and I've been playing "When Lights Are Low" for a while now. I just *love* his songs. What a great body of work. To me, Benny Carter wrote some of the most satisfying songs to sing and play. I loved listening to him talk about composition on Marion's show.

Benny Carter is one of my heroes. RIP, sir.

[hornplayer]

I pulled out my 2 volumes of The Benny Carter Songbook, and am listening to them now. The last tune on the 2nd Songbook is Benny singing a song called "When Hilma Smiles," written for his wife..... what a class act! What a love story!

[Valerie]

LOS ANGELES - Jazz great Benny Carter, a master of melodic invention on the alto saxophone who also was a renowned composer, instrumentalist, orchestra leader and arranger, has died, friends said Sunday. He was 95.

Carter died Saturday, after being hospitalized for about two weeks with bronchitis and other problems, said family friend and publicist Virginia Wicks.

"A big, big person walked out of the room yesterday," said friend and producer Quincy Jones. "A great human being."

Carter was largely self-taught as a musician, playing both saxophone and trumpet before becoming a bandleader in the late 1920s.

In a career that spanned more than six decades, he was considered among the top altoists in jazz. He performed with or wrote music for nearly all of jazz's early greats, including Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie.

He received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in 1987, and won two Grammy awards during his career.

St. Louis-based trumpeter Clark Terry, another early jazz pioneer, said Carter was truly revered by other musicians.

"We always called him the king because he was probably the most highly respected musician of the whole lot of us," Terry said.

Though he is perhaps best remembered as a saxophonist, Jones said Carter's greatest contributions to the form were his compositions and arrangements.

Carter was a member of a generation of early jazz musicians responsible for changing public attitudes about the style, which grew out of blues and spiritual music and was largely performed by black musicians, Jones said.

"They came out of this thing that was supposed to be the wicked music, and they brought it to life, and it turned into one of our greatest art forms," Jones said.

Bennett Lester Carter was born Aug. 8, 1907, in New York City. He saved up for months to buy a trumpet as a child, turning to saxophone when he couldn't master the trumpet fast enough. By the time he was 15, he was sitting in at night clubs in Harlem, and at 21 was leading his own band.

[Clay Fink]

The recordings with him, Hawk, Django and Grapelli are unbelievable.

"Further Definitions" is one of my favorite recodings, a real desert island disc.

I've got one on Musicmasters from the 80s that, similar to FD, has an all sax front line (Jimmy Heath, Joe Temperly, ?). Another wondeful recording.

I saw a video of a performance of him with Ben Webster (from the 50s?). He played an alto solo that was sublime, right over the edge.

[Mike Schwartz]

...a lovely picture and a brief announcement at www.bennycarter.com home page

Lots of information & career history there too...

[Valerie]

This is a very informative article:

Benny Carter, Immaculate Jazz Player and Composer

by Steve Voce
London Independent, July 14, 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.
_____

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

[Zephyr]

Just home (3 days North Sea Jazz Festival ) and I see this.


Benny Carter
1907 - 2003

Benny Carter died peacefully July 12 in a Los Angeles hospital after a brief illness. Although physically weak, he remained completely lucid and enjoyed speaking with many of his friends worldwide over the past few weeks. The funeral service will be private but we will post information concerning upcoming memorials. The family has requested that, in lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Morroe Berger - Benny Carter Jazz Research Fund, Institute of Jazz Studies, Dana Library, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ 07102.

http://www.bennycarter.com/"




Thanks for the music, Mr. Carter. Rest in peace!

[Dibble]

Oh dear..another gone RIP Mr carter and thanks..a life lived..and for so long.

Here is some info(now out of date..sadly) from my neck of the woods


bbc benny carter

Debbie

editing to put in another link
here

[stevebop]

Benny's obit just posted for tomorrow's NYTimes:


July 14, 2003

Benny Carter, 95, Jazz Musician and Arranger, Dies
By JOHN S. WILSON

Benny Carter, whose combination of highly developed talents as composer, arranger, bandleader and soloist on a variety of instruments was unmatched in the jazz world, died Saturday at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 95.

A Versatile Master

Benny Carter's career was remarkable for both its length and its consistently high musical achievement, from his first recordings in the 1920's to his youthful-sounding improvisations in the 1990's. His pure-toned, impeccably phrased performances made him one of the two pre-eminent alto saxophonists in jazz, with Johnny Hodges, from the late 1920's until the arrival of Charlie Parker in the mid-1940's. He was also an accomplished soloist on trumpet and clarinet, and on occasion he played piano, trombone and both tenor and baritone saxophones.

He helped to lay the foundation for the swing era of the late 1930's and early 40's with arrangements he had written a decade earlier for his own big band and the orchestras of Fletcher Henderson and Chick Webb, as well as for Benny Goodman before Goodman was acclaimed as the King of Swing. He later contributed arrangements and compositions to Glenn Miller and Count Basie.

From 1929 to 1946, Mr. Carter led big bands sparkling with young talent. His band in the early 1930's included the pianist Teddy Wilson, the saxophonist Chu Berry, the trombonist J. C. Higginbotham and the drummer Sid Catlett. A decade later, his contingent of future jazz stars included the trombonists J. J. Johnson and Al Grey, the trumpeter Miles Davis and the drummer Max Roach.

His compositions included "Blues in My Heart," "When Lights Are Low," "Blue Star," "Lonesome Nights," "Doozy" and "Symphony in Riffs." Beginning in the early 1940's, he composed and orchestrated music for films, and from the late 50's he also composed for television.

In 1962, when Mr. Carter was only 54, the critic Whitney Balliett wrote in The New Yorker that "few of his contemporaries continue to play or arrange or compose as well as he does, and none of them plays as many instruments and arranges and composes with such aplomb."

"Carter, indeed, belongs to that select circle of pure-jazz musicians who tend to represent the best of their times," the piece continued.

His public fame did not always match his accomplishments, and his only major hit of the big band era was "Cow-Cow Boogie," a novelty tune sung by Ella Mae Morse. However, early in his career his fellow musicians nicknamed him simply the King, and among them he was held in universally high regard.

The trumpeter Doc Cheatham recalled that "we broke our backs to get into Benny's band" because musicians learned so much from performing with him. Sy Oliver, whose brilliant arrangements gave the Jimmie Lunceford orchestra of the 1930's and the Tommy Dorsey band of the 1940's their distinctive cachet, said Mr. Carter was "the most complete professional musician I've ever known."

And John Hammond, the record producer who nurtured the careers of Count Basie, Billie Holiday and Benny Goodman, said Mr. Carter was "one of the great influences in American music, one of its unsung heroes."

Mr. Carter was not widely known to the jazz public until his emergence, in his 70's, as an acclaimed elder statesman. His lack of public recognition was sometimes attributed to the fact that his bearing was reserved and dignified, that he was not a flamboyant showman. Moreover, as the drummer J. C. Heard suggested, "his music was a little too refined" for the 1930's and 40's, when he was leading a big band.

Bennett Lester Carter was born on Aug. 8, 1907, the youngest of three children and the only boy. He was reared in a neighborhood called San Juan Hill, then one of the roughest areas in Manhattan, near what is now Lincoln Center.

When he was a youngster, his musical idols were trumpeters — his cousin Theodore (Cuban) Bennett, who never recorded but whose advanced musical ideas were attested to by many musicians, and Bubber Miley, a star of Duke Ellington's orchestra in the late 1920's who lived around the corner.

When he was 13, he bought a trumpet at a pawnshop, but when he was unable to play it after a weekend of effort he traded it in for a saxophone.

By the time he was 15, he was sitting in with bands in Harlem. He got his first full-time job when he was 19, with Charlie Johnson's band at Smalls' Paradise in Harlem.

When he made his first records in 1928, with the Johnson band, the session included two of his own arrangements.

Also in 1928, he joined a band led by Fletcher Henderson's brother, Horace, and shortly after, when the leader walked out during a tour, the abandoned musicians elected Mr. Carter to replace him. He was 21 years old. For the next two decades, as his biographer, Morroe Berger, wrote, "he was either leading a band or regretfully disbanding one while looking forward to organizing another one."

In 1935, Mr. Carter went to Paris to join the Willie Lewis Orchestra at the club Chez Florence. He remained in Europe for three years, playing mostly in France, Denmark and the Netherlands. He also spent 10 months in England as an arranger for the British Broadcasting Corporation dance orchestra.

On his return to the United States in 1938, Mr. Carter formed another big band, which played at the Savoy Ballroom for two years. After that band broke up, Mr. Carter led a small group on 52nd Street while he wrote arrangements for the radio show "Your Hit Parade" and prepared still another band. He then headed toward the West Coast on tour and settled in Hollywood.

He began his association with films in 1943 with "Stormy Weather," for which he wrote arrangements and played on the soundtrack but received no screen credit.

From 1946 until 1970, he was virtually out of the public eye. Aside from a few tours with the all-star Jazz at the Philharmonic troupe in the 1950's, he stayed behind the scenes as a composer, arranger and occasional instrumentalist in films and, starting in 1959, in television.

In Hollywood, he was one of the first black arrangers to break the color barrier, working on top television series like "M Squad." He also arranged music for almost every major singer of the day, including Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Lou Rawls, Ray Charles, Peggy Lee, Louis Armstrong, Pearl Bailey, Billy Eckstine and Mel Tormé.

In 1969, Dr. Berger, who taught sociology at Princeton University and had written his master's thesis on jazz, persuaded Mr. Carter to join him at Princeton for a weekend of seminars, classes and a campus concert. Over the next nine years, Mr. Carter made five visits to Princeton, staying briefly each time except in 1973, when he stayed for a semester as a visiting professor. In 1974, he received an honorary Master of Humanities degree from Princeton.

In the 1970's, Mr. Carter's new academic career revived his playing career. In 1975, he made a tour of the Middle East under the auspices of the State Department, and in 1976 he appeared in a New York City nightclub for the first time since 1942. He made dozens of new albums over the next two decades and saw much of his early work reissued in collections. He continued to perform in the smallest clubs and the largest concert halls in the the United States, Europe and Japan through the 1990's.

Mr. Carter's arranging skills were largely self-taught, and the results echoed his instantly recognizable sound as a soloist, especially on alto sax. One of his trademarks was the sound of four saxophones in intricate harmony, playing one of his swooping, looping melodic passages as if they were a single instrument improvising.

His sound can be heard to good advantage in two of his most famous recordings: the 1937 "Honeysuckle Rose," made in Europe with an international group including Coleman Hawkins and Django Reinhardt, and the 1961 reprise of the same tune on the album "Further Definitions." That album seamlessly bridged the worlds of swing and bebop by joining old masters like Hawkins with young turks like Phil Woods and Charlie Rouse and is considered one of the most influential jazz recordings.

Mr. Carter recalled how he learned arranging in a 1987 interview with Gary Giddins. Starting with all the parts of a commercial stock arrangement, he said, "you lay them piece by piece on the floor, and you get down on your knees and you study each part, and then you start writing the lead trumpet first and the lead saxophone first — which, of course, is really the hard way." It was quite some time before he knew what a score was, he said, "and of course after you know how to make a score, well, you know the score."

Carter arrangements and compositions, old and new, stayed in the books of groups like the Count Basie Orchestra and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra into the 1990's. By 1987 there were more than 50 recorded versions of just one of his tunes, "Blues in My Heart." In the 1990's, the Basie band, then led by Grover Mitchell, was still playing excerpts from his 1960 "Kansas City Suite" at almost every performance.

In 1996, he was one of five recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, and in 2000, he received the National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton.

When Mr. Carter turned 90, in 1997, the occasion was observed with a concert tribute two days before his birthday at the Hollywood Bowl; it could not be held on his actual birthday because by then he was in Oslo to give a concert.

A musician whose recording career extended from the 78 era through LP's and well into the time of CD's, Benny Carter lived to see his own Web site, designed by the scholars Ed and Laurence Berger, sons of Morroe Berger, his biographer, at www.bennycarter.com.

Mr. Carter was married five times. His first wife, whom he married in 1925 when he was 18, died of pneumonia three years later. Three of his marriages ended in divorce. In 1979, he married Hilma Ollila Arons, who survives him, along with a daughter, Joyce Mills, a granddaughter and a grandson. He met Ms. Arons in 1940, when she and her sister went to the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem to hear his band.


Always Know,

Steve Schwartz

Jazz From Studio 4
Friday, 7p-12a
WGBH, 89.7FM, Boston
www.wgbh.org

[Stormcrow]

another master gone... *wishes he had been born sooner*

[clinthopson]

I was hoping Benny would make it to the century mark, but 95 years is a pretty good run.

IMHO Benny Carter was the Promethius of jazz. I can't think of another artist who was the master of so many aspects of the music.

He was a great alto player and a very good trumpeter and clarinetist. He wasa great jazz composer. His arranging was superb. He led a very fine big band.

For those who are not familiar (and I can't believe anyone here is not) with this great artists I recommend his "Further Definitions" which demonstrates the pinnacle of sax section arranging, his duo discs with Phil Woods and Dizzy Gillespie and his singing solos on Ella Fitzgerald's Songbooks and Frank Sinatra's Capitol efforts.

He was the last of the great jazz artists that emerged in the 20's.

Plus, by all accounts, he was one fine, classy gentleman.

[Valerie]

Another very interesting, informative obit:

Benny Carter, 95; Legendary Saxophonist Also Was Composer-Arranger,
Bandleader

by Jon Thurber
Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2003

Benny Carter, whose versatility as a first-rate saxophonist, composer-
arranger and bandleader made him a leading figure in jazz for more
than eight decades, has died. He was 95.

Carter died Saturday morning in his sleep at Cedars-Sinai Medical
Center in Los Angeles following a brief illness. Carter was
hospitalized in late June with bronchitis and other ailments, said
publicist Virginia Wicks.

Although he never attained the broad public recognition of
contemporaries such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Benny
Goodman, he was among the most influential players and leaders in the
history of the music. Indeed, among jazz professionals and
knowledgeable fans, nobody had a better reputation.

"I stand in awe of the proficiency his vast experience has given
him," Ellington said years ago in a tribute to Carter. "He has
tremendous scope, instrumentally, musically."

"He was a great man and a great human being," said Quincy Jones, the
multifaceted entertainment industry figure, who was also a leading
jazz composer and bandleader. "He gave lots of young guys help and
encouragement, including myself."

"He left the room [Saturday] with the same dignity he lived with,"
Jones told The Times on Sunday.

Critics voiced similar words of praise.

"He ranks among the leading individualists in jazz, not only as an
alto saxophonist, but as an arranger of exceptional skill," jazz
critic Nat Hentoff said Sunday. "Nobody could arrange for a reed
section like Carter.

"He had the clearest alto saxophone sound that I can ever recall,"
Hentoff said. "It was crystalline and thrilling. He was always
reaching for something new and never fell back on familiar licks."

While Carter's musical talent peaked in jazz, he did not limit
himself to that form. He was highly successful as a composer,
orchestrator and arranger of all types of music for motion pictures
and television.

Although first and foremost a musician, and a man not given to
crusading, Carter was one of the first blacks to succeed in the
musical side of the film industry.

His view was that race should have nothing to do with a person's
acceptance. Once, according to an anecdote related by a biographer, a
woman asked Carter: "Is your piano player white or black?" Carter
replied: "I don't know -- I never asked him."

In 1945, Carter fought and won a legal battle against the then-common
restrictive covenants that prohibited blacks from owning homes in
some areas of Los Angeles. He also played a strong role in the early
1950s in uniting the separate black and white American Federation of
Musicians' locals in Los Angeles. And while the consolidation of the
two unions didn't fully open all the doors for blacks to do studio
work, it did eliminate the exclusionary excuse that "you don't belong
to the union."

Sophisticated Player

Although considered by fellow musicians as one of the most
sophisticated and knowledgeable of players, Carter had little formal
musical education and was largely self-taught. He could hardly have
had a better teacher.

He arranged for virtually every major big band of the 1930s and '40s,
including at various times Ellington, Goodman, Fletcher Henderson,
McKinney's Cotton Pickers, Charlie Barnet, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw
and Count Basie. Ironically, his own big bands -- considered among
the most swinging, solidly musical outfits of their time -- never
achieved the success of some of the lesser orchestras for which he
arranged.

Carter had a modest, understated view of his bands' relative lack of
fame. "No band I ever had achieved a sound the general public could
immediately identify," he once said. "Goodman had one, and so did
Glenn Miller."

Nevertheless, Carter's arrangements helped establish "the big-band
sound," especially in his use of reed instruments.

In later years, after the big bands went into decline, Carter did
special arrangements for such vocalists as Ella Fitzgerald, Billie
Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Billy Eckstine, Ray Charles, Mel Tormé and
Lou Rawls.

A number of his compositions, such as "When Lights Are Low," "Blues
in My Heart" and "Malibu," became jazz standards.

A novelty tune that he co-wrote, "Cow Cow Boogie," became a huge hit
for singer Ella Mae Morse and bandleader Freddie Slack in 1942, and
the number's success is credited by pop historians with helping
establish the then-infant Capitol Records as a major power in the
recording industry.

Carter wrote the bossa nova hit "Only Trust Your Heart," made famous
by saxophonist Stan Getz and singer Astrud Gilberto. Many attributed
this hit to the great Brazilian songwriter Antonio Carlos Jobim,
which Carter took as a compliment.

Carter's primary instrument was the alto sax, but he also was an
outstanding trumpeter and performed skillfully on clarinet, trombone
and piano. When necessary he could fill in as a vocalist.

"He was as good as he wanted to be on anything he attempted,"
trumpeter Clark Terry told The Times on Sunday.

"He was the king, we all respected him that much," Terry
said. "Musicians called him from time to time just to recharge their
batteries. He was a beautiful person."

Carter was born Bennett Lester Carter, in the Bronx, N.Y. A cousin,
Cuban Bennett, was a skilled trumpet player, and became one of young
Carter's heroes. Carter bought a cornet from a pawnshop, hoping to
emulate his cousin, but soon traded the difficult brass instrument
for a C-melody saxophone.

Although his mother encouraged him in his playing, she did not want
him to become a professional musician. "After all," he said decades
later, "jazz was a dirty word to many black people, who saw it played
in an unwholesome atmosphere She would have been most pleased if I
could have combined music with a respectable career, say, as a
clergyman."

Carter was a teenager when his family moved to Harlem and he began
learning the jazzman's trade from great players such as Bubber Miley
of the Ellington band.

His first professional job probably was at Harlem Connor's Inn in
1923, where on the recommendation of Miley, Carter earned $1.25 a
night as a substitute for another C-melody sax man.

Carter played all over Harlem and Manhattan and worked with virtually
all the leading jazzmen of the time.

It was Willie the Lion Smith who persuaded Carter to give up the C-
melody sax and take up the alto sax, an instrument on which he became
one of the masters in jazz.

Carter played with Earl Hines, Chick Webb, Horace Henderson and
Fletcher Henderson, among other jazz legends. By the mid-'20s he was
a well-established and much-sought-after sideman, playing in famous
clubs like Small's Paradise.

Impeccable Reputation

His reputation already was impeccable. Johnny Hodges, himself a jazz
giant and an alto sax player not known for his modesty, once told a
colleague: "When you got time, you go to Small's Paradise and hear
the greatest alto saxophone player in the world." He was talking
about Carter.

Carter began arranging in the late '20s, a few years after he began
recording. He became an arranger of some note, working with Fletcher
Henderson's orchestra, and many jazz historians say his work
revitalized the band.

"Carter was now the arranger everyone followed," music scholar
Gunther Schuller said of Carter's time with Henderson. By 1933, he
formed his first big band and won considerable critical acclaim, but
was not financially successful.

Carter's band included such players as Teddy Wilson on piano, Chu
Berry on tenor and J.C. Higginbotham on trombone.

Carter disbanded in 1934 to join an orchestra as featured soloist in
Paris. He became a huge success in Europe and virtually a cult figure
in Denmark. With the help of a young critic named Leonard Feather,
who years later became the jazz critic for The Times, Carter was
hired as a $300-a-week arranger for the BBC dance band in London,
where he also led a British band on several recording sessions. In
1937 he organized the world's first international and interracial
jazz orchestra for a summer residency in the Netherlands. Carter
returned to the U.S. in 1938 to resume his career as a recording
artist, arranger and composer.

He formed a new band that played a long residency at the Savoy
Ballroom in Harlem and toured the country. While on the West Coast
with that band in 1943, he was asked to do arrangements for "Stormy
Weather," an early all-black musical.

He gave up the orchestra in 1946 to concentrate on film and
television work. Over the years Carter played on more than 100 movie
soundtracks and orchestrated and arranged music for scores of films,
among them "The Gene Krupa Story," "The Five Pennies," "Thousands
Cheer," "A Man Called Adam," "Buck and the Preacher," parts of "The
Guns of Navarone" and the jazz sequences for "Flower Drum Song."

He also composed background music for dozens of television shows.
Carter took his last big band on the road in 1946, but continued to
play as a featured soloist in jazz concerts and on recordings into
the late 1990s.

Ed Berger, associate director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at
Rutgers University and co-author of the definitive biography of the
musician, "Benny Carter: A Life in American Music," told The Times on
Sunday that Carter's career was phenomenal in terms of longevity.

"He is the only artist to have made an acoustic recording through an
old-fashioned horn before electrical records and then lived to see
his own Web site," Berger said.

And in his 80s, when many musicians see a decline in their work,
Carter was extremely active and vital.

"He recorded 15 albums in all types of settings, duo to combined jazz
band and chamber orchestra," said Berger, who also produced many of
Carter's recordings and was his road manager. "He wrote and performed
six extended works. His most recent was commissioned by the Library
of Congress in 1996. Called 'Peaceful Warrior,' the work was
dedicated to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr."

That same year he completed another major commission called "Echoes
of San Juan Hill," about the area of New York City where he was
raised and where Lincoln Center now stands. Carter was 89 when he
introduced this work and was the featured soloist with the Lincoln
Center Jazz Orchestra under Wynton Marsalis.

Throughout his life, the soft-spoken Carter was an elegant man with
eclectic tastes and a definite style.

Berger recalled Sunday that Carter was a voracious reader who was
passionate about language and had a brilliant understanding of
English usage. He also collected art and became an excellent cook.
Beginning in the 1970s, he conducted seminars and workshops at
Harvard, Princeton and a number of other colleges around the country.

Carter received a variety of awards. In 1987, he was given a lifetime
achievement award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and
Sciences, which in many careers marks the culmination of an artist's
efforts. However, Carter was nominated for seven more Grammy Awards
in the 1990s, and won two.

In 1996, he received the Kennedy Center Honors for an extraordinary
lifetime of contributions to American culture through the performing
arts.

Jazz critic Don Heckman, who reviewed what were Carter's last public
appearances as a player at Catalina Bar & Grill in March 1998, when
Carter was 90, wrote later that he was "amazed at the quality of his
playing."

"There was, first of all, his sheer ability to execute the mechanical
aspects of playing the alto saxophone, which require a complex
combination of lip, teeth and mouth control, synchronized with
precise finger movements, driven by a constant flow of breath Carter
still delivered the same cooly expressive tone and subtle sense of
swing that have always been distinctive elements of his playing."

After that final appearance at Catalina, when friends asked when he
would play again, he told them: "I'm retired!"

Carter is survived by his wife of 24 years, Hilma; a daughter from an
earlier marriage, Joyce Mills; one grandchild and one great-
grandchild.

Funeral services will be private, although public memorial services
may be planned.

In lieu of flowers, the family has asked that any memorial donations
be sent to the Morroe Berger-Benny Carter Jazz Research Fund at the
Institute of Jazz Studies, Dana Library, Rutgers University, Newark,
N.J. 07102.

[Chris D]

Among the general public, Benny is perhaps the least known of the music's true legends. Perhaps his passing will change some of that.
I've got Benny music from each of his decades, and, while they're by no means the most important, perhaps none is more purely enjoyable than those '70s dates he did for Pablo. Comradeship, wisdom, ideas, all flow freely.

Goodbye to the King.