The return of the noteworthy
Tomorrow night’s onstage reunion between the octogenarian jazz bassist Ron Carter and his local former protégé promises to be a memorable gig, writes Rob Garratt.
Ron Carter’s mantra might be “finding the right notes”. As well as being the title of his authorized biography, it’s also what the jazz legend has been doing for the past six decades. His search for the right notes on some 2,221 records has earned the American musician a Guinness World Record as the most-recorded bassist in the history of music.
“That’s not accurate anymore — that record is like three years
Kader Attia’s
old,” scoffs the 81-year-old, speaking on the phone from his New York home, a week before touching down in Hong Kong to perform at Tsuen Wan Town Hall tomorrow evening.
A few dozen more now need to be added to the tally, he says.
A handful of those records remain legendary even 50 years after they were first released. These include the recordings Carter made in the late 1960s as a member of the trumpeter Miles Davis’ Second Great Quintet — an epochshifting ensemble of blistering musicality often hailed as the best jazz group ever.
“I don’t do those definitions — I just try to play,” says Carter, who discusses his career with the quiet insight of an educator coupled with the guarded detachment of a rock star. “I understand that I’m probably the oldest guy who’s kind of famous right now playing the bass, and I don’t shy away from that. But I don’t wear the same tie every night. I try to play differently with everybody.”
Carter’s original plan was to become a concert cellist, a dream shattered by the racially prejudicial classical establishment of his day. “I had the talent, I had the look, I had the feeling, I knew the library,” he says. “I could have been a major player.”
Following market demand, he switched to double bass, and jazz, scoring early breaks when he played on records by the free jazz pioneer Eric Dolphy and saxophone icon Coleman Hawkins.
In 1963 Carter became one of the four young trailblazers who revolutionized Davis’s band, alongside pianist Herbie Hancock and drummer Tony Williams. The three newcomers were joined a year later by saxophonist Wayne Shorter. Together, over a string of seminal LPs including E.S.P., Miles Smiles and Nefertiti, this prodigious quintet developed an untethered “time, no changes” improvisational approach — which saw the rhythm maintained while the harmonic structure freed up beneath the soloist, facilitating a wilder, freer approach to improvisation. It marked the artistic peak, and final notable evolution of, small group acoustic jazz.
“For me, Ron really got his reputation from his time with Miles — that was one of the best groups in the world,” says former sideman Ted Lo, widely dubbed the godfather of Hong Kong’s jazz scene. “After that he had a recognized sound — that Ron Carter groove.”
By 1968, the quintet had crumbled as Davis followed his muse into electric jazz-rock, but while bandmates Hancock and Shorter found stadiumsized success making fusion records that crossed over to a mainstream audience — as part of their respective Headhunters and Weather Report bands — Carter refused to plug in. “I had no interest in that,” he says. “I appreciated what they had to do, and at the time they were successful. I’m not competing with those guys.”
Instead Carter pursued an eclectic solo career, clocking some 50 recordings as leader and finding time to guest on more than 2,000 others. He’s rarely happy listening to any of them today, however. “You know the word ‘cringe’? I cringe when I hear those choices I could have made,” he adds. It seems the right note is all a matter of perspective.
Carter’s record-breaking discography includes sideman duties on multiple LPs by fellow-traveling legends including Chet Baker, Chick Corea, George Benson, Horace Silver and Quincy Jones — as well as reviving the Davis-era band, without its leader, as VSOP — and even being called on by hip-hop forefathers A Tribe Called Quest.
“I’m just trying to find the right notes,” says Carter. “I’m still looking, man, finding the right combination. That’s why going to work is fun every night for me.”