Benny Carter

Jazz musician

• Born: August 8, 1907
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: July 12, 2003
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Carter was regarded as a jazz virtuoso on the alto sax. His pioneering efforts as an arranger in the 1920’s led him to extensive work in both film and television, making him among the first African Americans to be so employed.

Early Life

Born in the San Juan Hill section of New York, Bennett Lester Carter was one of the three children of Norrell and Sadie Bennett Carter. While he began piano study with his mother at the age of ten, he set his sights on playing trumpet, which he began three years later. Inspired by his cousin Cuban Bennett, Carter soon switched to saxophone.

Carter’s formal schooling ended in the eighth grade after a racially motivated fight in which he was accused of hitting a teacher. During the next few years, he spent time studying saxophone with a series of teachers in Harlem (where his family had relocated in 1923) and playing in local groups. He began playing professionally at this time and for the rest of his life had no jobs unrelated to music.

Initially playing C-melody saxophone, Carter was inspired by the white saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer, although he soon switched to the more common alto sax. At this time he also played numerous casual jobs and began to develop a reputation as one of the most capable improvisers and technically facile saxophonists in New York.

The summer of 1925 found Carter in Pittsburgh and then in Ohio with the Wilberforce Collegians, a dance band led by pianist Horace Henderson and made up primarily of students from the all-black Wilberforce University. While Carter never matriculated at the school, he played with and ultimately led the group.

Life’s Work

Carter returned to New York from Ohio in early 1926 and occasionally subbed in bands led by Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson. Later in the year, he joined Charlie Johnson’s band, playing with it until February, 1928. It was during this association that Carter began to arrange. In this he was self-taught: He bought published stock arrangements and learned how the different instruments fit together by laying the parts on the floor and looking at them in sequence. After leaving Johnson, Carter reunited with the Wilberforce band, appearing with it under his own name in New York City until the end of 1929. During this time, he also began playing trumpet again. Carter’s arranging and performing talents were displayed prominently on record during his tenure with Henderson (January, 1930, to March, 1931). Upon leaving Henderson, Carter began to freelance as a player and arranger, playing for Chick Webb and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers and providing charts for numerous black and white bands.

Carter organized another band in the summer of 1932. This group lasted until the end of 1934 and employed such luminaries as Dicky Wells, Chu Berry, and Sid Catlett. When this band broke up at the end of 1934, Carter freelanced again before joining Willie Bryant’s band and performing with it through May, 1935.

After leaving Bryant, Carter went to Europe at the invitation of bandleader Willie Lewis, partly to escape some domestic difficulties. From the summer of 1935 until March, 1936, he played with and arranged for Lewis’s Paris-based band. Until his return to America in April, 1938, Carter worked as a staff arranger for various British Broadcasting Corporation bands and broadcasts. He also traveled around Europe.

Carter’s return to New York coincided with the apex of the big band era, and he formed a group in which he was featured as a player and arranger. While this band was highly regarded (playing for him was compared with going to a conservatory), Carter’s general low-key personality and conservative demeanor on the bandstand did not encourage popular success, and in 1941, he pared his group down to a sextet.

Carter’s next long engagement was as the staff arranger for Mark Warnow’s Hit Parade—the first time an African American had been employed by a major radio network. His next attempt at leading a big band took him to California in 1942, and he was based there for the rest of his life, opening many doors to black arrangers both in films and television.

The second half of Carter’s life was spent performing with traveling all-star groups, such as Jazz at the Philharmonic, and working for film and television studios, where he was a sought-after arranger. His work on numerous Hollywood films, as well as television programs such as The M Squad, demonstrated his range and ability to work within the confines of a studio system.

By the last two decades of his life, Carter was regarded as an icon in the jazz world and lectured at numerous colleges, including Princeton, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1974. He continued to perform well into his nineties. Carter died July 12, 2003, at age ninety-five.

Significance

Carter’s early reputation was as a soloist. He was considered a member of the first wave of jazz saxophone players. As a performer, he was technically gifted, with little of the blues influence so common to musicians of his generation. Recordings such as “Blazin’” and “Keep a Song in Your Soul” (with Henderson) show his increasing technical abilities as both an arranger and a soloist. In the 1930’s, Carter was regarded as one of the foremost jazz arrangers. His arrangements for his own band (especially “Lonesome Nights” in 1933) and Willie Lewis (“All of Me” and “Stardust” in 1936) featured his arranging trademark—flowing choruses for the saxophone section that sound like a fully scored Carter solo.

Later in his diverse career, Carter became a composer and film and television scorer. In doing so, he opened new career paths for African Americans in arranging for radio, film, and television studios. Perhaps his most visible act in regard to racial justice was spearheading the campaign to combine the black and white Los Angeles chapters of the American Federation of Musicians in 1953.

Bibliography

Berger, Morroe, Edward Berger, and James Patrick. Benny Carter: A Life in American Music. 2d ed. 2 vols. Rutgers, N.J.: Institute of Jazz Studies, 2002. A detailed and exacting biography, discography, filmography, and bibliography.

Dance, Stanley. The World of Swing. New York: Da Capo Press, 1974. A series of biographical essays of many musicians of the 1920’s and 1930’s, including Carter.

Morgenstern, Dan. Living with Jazz: A Reader. Edited by Sheldon Meyer. New York: Pantheon Books, 2004. Written by the former editor of music magazines such as Metronome and DownBeat, this book includes essays on a number of jazz greats, including Carter.

Schuller, Gunther. The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. A comprehensive and technical look at the period, with a subchapter devoted to Carter and his arrangements and recordings.