

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.

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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

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.

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