jazz musician; violinist
Personal Information
Born ca. 1966; grew up in Detroit, Michigan; daughter of Grace Carter, a schoolteacher.
Education: Graduated from Cass Technical High School, Detroit; attended Oakland University, Auburn Hills, Michigan; graduated from New England Conservatory of Music, Boston, Massachusetts.
Career
Jazz violinist. Studied classical violin from age four; switched to jazz in high school; joined jazz band Straight Ahead, 1987; recorded two albums for Atlantic with Straight Ahead; moved to New York, 1991; joined String Trio of New York; signed to Atlantic Records as solo artist, 1995; released Regina Carter, 1995; toured with Wynton Marsalis Blood on the Fields live production, 1996; released Something for Grace, 1997; released album Rhythms of the Heart on Verve label, 1999.
Life's Work
By the last months of the twentieth century, Regina Carter was bringing together the various strands of her career as a jazz violinist. Signed to the Verve label, a jazz imprint with a deep sense of tradition yet a long record of receptivity to innovation, she had released her third solo album, Rhythms of the Heart. In the words of Playboy reviewer Neil Tesser, it was "the first on which she fully integrates voluptuous tone, bop-forged technique, affinity for R&B and lessons learned from the avant-garde."
Melding all her influences together into a cohesive style of her own had been Carter's great challenge. Her talent, nurtured since she started taking piano lessons at the age of two, had never been in doubt. And unlike some jazz musicians who kept to the narrow paths of an increasingly refined art, Carter had always remained open to the music around her, soaking up new sounds and incorporating them into her art. Yet Carter's road to jazz prominence was a long one. Some of its twists came from the dual difficulty she faced from the start: jazz has had few violinists and few female instrumentalists of any kind. As a female violinist, Regina Carter was something new in the jazz world.
Studied Classical Violin
Carter was born around 1966 (a 1999 Seattle Post-Intelligencer interview gave her age as 33). Growing up in Detroit, she gained motivation from her mother Grace, an elementary-school teacher who recognized her daughter's oval scrawls as attempts to write music and encouraged her. Carter studied classical violin from age four, and her talents were strong enough to get her into master classes with the classical virtuosos Itzhak Perlman and Yehudi Menuhin. Learning the violin first by the innovative Suzuki method, in which children learn tunes by imitation rather than by reading music, Carter did not learn to read music until she was ten.
When she encountered the improvisationally-based art of jazz as a high school student, Carter was ready. She heard performances by the jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty and guitarist Wes Montgomery, but hesitated when she heard the usual warnings that it would be impossible for her to play well in both classical and jazz styles. Inspiration struck when a friend took her to see the legendary French swing violinist Stéphane Grappelli. "We're sitting at this club and out walks this distinguished old man holding a violin," Carter told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "I thought, 'This guy is going to play jazz? This guy is going to hit all the changes and swing at the same time?' Oh, but how he played. That was it. I knew then and there what I wanted to do with my training."
Despite opposition from her mother, Carter sought out jazz training, first hanging out with Detroit trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, and then at suburban Detroit's Oakland University, where she played in a multi-ethnic group that included white, black, and Indian musicians and a Chaldean (Iraqi Christian) vocalist who sang the rock number "Wild Thing" in Arabic. Graduating from the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, she headed back to Detroit and in 1987 joined the all-female band Straight Ahead. The growing success of this group inspired Carter to take the plunge and move to New York in 1991.
Joined Trio
Carter hooked up with the String Trio of New York, a jazz group that valued Carter's classical background and eclectic musical ways. This group released three albums for the Black Saint label, Intermobility, Octagon, and Blues...?, but Carter's life as a struggling jazz musician was not easy. Living in the rough Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn, she suffered from panic attacks and was barely able to pay her bills.
Still, Carter's energetic live performances were gaining her wider notice, and Atlantic signed her to a solo contract in 1995. Her solo albums for Atlantic, Regina Carter and Something for Grace (dedicated to her mother), fell into the smooth jazz genre, heavily influenced by rhythm and blues music and targeted for air play on urban radio stations. The extent of Atlantic's commitment to its new instrumental star was demonstrated by the presence in her stable of longtime hitmaking producer Arif Mardin, who helmed three tracks on Something for Grace. That album also contained straight-ahead jazz tracks that won the admiration of purists such as Scott Yanow of the All Music Guide to Jazz, who praised Carter's "near-classic renditions" of Eddie Harris's "Listen Here" and Mal Waldron's "Soul Eyes."
Appeared with Wynton Marsalis
Carter, it seemed, was searching for a rougher edge than her Atlantic sound offered room to develop, and she delved both into more popular forms and into more experimental types of jazz. She appeared and recorded with popular vocalists such as Faith Evans, Patti Labelle, and even country vocalist Tanya Tucker--asked whether she could play country fiddle to back up Tucker for a television appearance, she answered (recalling the encounter in a Down Beat interview), "I can now!" Carter appeared on Lauryn Hill's pathbreaking hip-hop overview of the recent African-American musical past, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. On the jazz front, she performed with the touring ensemble of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis's Blood on the Fields production, taking a dramatic solo near the end that, according to Yanow of the All Music Guide to Jazz, "nearly always stole the show."
By 1999, Carter was ready to put the varied pieces of her career together. The Rhythms of the Heart album on the Verve label seemed to mark the true birth of a distinguished career. The album contained various kinds of jazz, including Afro-Cuban, Brazilian bossa nova, blues, swing, r&b, hard bop, and bebop; the stylistic diversity made her feel comfortable and showed the beginnings of a recognizable violin sound, influenced by earlier giants such as Ponty but absolutely distinctive. Carter looked forward to a reinvigorated jazz scene, and hoped to expand her musical creativity into the area of composition. As she really had been doing all along, she strove toward a deeper self-definition. "Now I really need to figure out, 'Who am I?'," she told Down Beat. "Or, 'Who do I want to present to the world?' Am I ready to stand up and say, 'This is me?'"
Works
Selected discography
- with Straight Ahead
- Look Straight Ahead, Atlantic, 1992.
- Body and Soul, Atlantic, 1993.
- with the String Trio of New York
- Intermobility, 1993
- Octagon, Black Saint, 1994.
- Blues...?, Black Saint, 1996.
- solo
- Regina Carter, Atlantic, 1995.
- Something for Grace, Atlantic, 1997.
- Rhythms of the Heart, Verve, 1999.
Further Reading
Books
- Contemporary Musicians, volume 22, Gale, 1998.
- Erlewine, Michael, et al., eds., All Music Guide to Jazz, Miller Freeman, 1998.
- Down Beat, September 1996, p. 58; November 1997, p. 41; December 1997, p. 76; June 1999, p. 20.
- Playboy, September 1999, p. 26.
- Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 3, 1999, p. 9.
- Time, July 26, 1999, p. 76.
— James M. Manheim
