Ron Carter

Two basses is the idea, and it is a good one. Carter plays the piccolo bass all night as a lead instrument, in the register of a guitar or a cello, and Buster Williams plays the actual bass underneath him, so the band has a bottom and Carter is free to be the horn. Kenny Barron and Ben Riley fill it out, and the four of them are so comfortable that Barron, Williams and Riley went on to form Sphere together after this.

It was recorded over two nights at Sweet Basil in the Village and spread across two LPs, seven tracks, eighty-two minutes. "Saguaro" runs eighteen and a half. Scott Yanow's line at AllMusic was that it is mostly recommended to lovers of bass solos, and you should know that going in. But the solos are not the point so much as the sound of a quartet built around an instrument nobody else was playing this way.

The jacket gives the nights as March 25 and 26, though they are also listed as March 26 and 27. Orrin Keepnews is credited as supervisor, not producer. Arnold Newman took the cover photo. Four stars, and the first essential record of the Milestone years.

The rhythm section of the second Miles Davis quintet, nine years after the band ended, in a studio in San Francisco for one day with no horn in the room. They cut enough for two albums. Five tracks came out under Hancock's name as Herbie Hancock Trio. These six came out under Carter's, and they are the ones to have, because three of the six are his tunes and the record is built the way he builds records: the bass line first, then everything else.

"Stella by Starlight" is the track. They had played it a hundred times behind Miles and here they play it for themselves, eight minutes, with Williams doing the thing where he plays time and commentary at once and Hancock waiting him out. "Dolphin Dance" is Hancock's tune and Carter walks it like he wrote it. "Lawra" is Williams's, and "United Blues" is three minutes of pure trio blues that ends before you want it to.

The release history is a mess, which is why the label line reads the way it does. The first issue was Japanese, on Victor with a Milestone logo, in 1978, and the US Milestone LP did not exist until 1982. The 1977 you see in most discographies is the session year. Five stars, because it is the best record on either of these pages.

The Piccolo quartet back in the studio, at Van Gelder's this time, with a four-piece woodwind section written by Bob Freedman on every track. The jacket calls it "Ron Carter with Woodwinds," which is accurate and undersells it. The woodwinds are flutes, clarinets, oboe and bassoon, not a horn section, and Freedman writes for them like a chamber group, so the record has a sound nobody else on Milestone had.

The piccolo bass is out front on three tracks with Buster Williams underneath, the same two-bass idea as the live album, and on the other three Carter plays the regular bass himself. "My Ship" is the odd one out and the best one: Carter's bass and the four woodwinds, no piano, no drums, the Kurt Weill melody played straight and slow. "Epistrophy" is here again, a year and a half after Yellow & Green, and the woodwinds make Monk's tune sound like it was written for them.

The jacket gives the session dates as November 18, 19, 21 and 22, and they also appear as November 16, 18, 21 and 22. It was released in April 1978 with a hand-colored Phil Bray photo on the cover, and it gets four stars.

Joe Henderson, Chick Corea and Tony Williams are the quartet, and on five of six tracks a seven-piece horn section arranged by Wade Marcus sits on top of them. That is a lot of firepower for a bass player's record, and the trick of Parade is that it never sounds crowded, because the horns are written as color and the quartet is left alone to play. DownBeat called it the record Carter had been meaning to make for years, and you can hear why.

"Gypsy" is the quartet by itself, no horns, eight and a half minutes, and it is the one Carter kept. He recorded it again on Skyline nearly forty years later. "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" is the opposite: piccolo bass and the horns, no Henderson, no Corea, no Williams, the spiritual played as a chorale. Between those two poles the title track and "Tinderbox" are the big-band-with-a-small-band tunes, and Williams is having a very good day.

Roy DeCarava took the cover photograph. It is usually listed as a 1980 release, but it came out late in 1979, and DownBeat reviewed it in March 1980. Four stars, and if you only know Carter's Milestone years from the duo records, this is the one that will surprise you.

A sextet with three horns and no piccolo bass, which after the previous four records feels like a decision. Art Farmer on flugelhorn, J.J. Johnson on trombone, Hubert Laws on flute, and the front line is all warm middle register, nothing bright, nothing that cuts. Kenny Barron and Billy Cobham are the rhythm section and the five tunes are all Carter's. It is the most straight-ahead record of his Milestone run.

The title tune is four minutes of a good line played by good people, and "A Slight Smile" is a ballad Farmer was born for. The two long ones on side two, "Aromatic" and "Alternate Route," are where the band stretches, nine minutes each, and Johnson, who had spent most of the seventies writing for film and television, sounds glad to be back in a room with a rhythm section. "Tierra Española" adds Jay Berliner's acoustic guitar and Ralph MacDonald's percussion for the one Spanish-tinted tune, a habit Carter kept from CTI.

A Japanese Victor pressing came out in 1979, a few months ahead of the US Milestone LP, which is a pattern with Carter's Milestone records. The first US CD was an OJC in 1996, and it gets a quiet four stars.

Ten years after Alone Together, the same two players, a different club, and this time Carter's name is first. Village West was a short-lived New York room, and this record is most of the reason anybody remembers it. Eight tunes, seven of them standards or jazz classics, one Carter original called "New Waltz." "St. Thomas" is on both duo records, and comparing the two versions is a good afternoon.

What changed in the decade is mostly ease. The 1972 record has the feeling of two people proving that a guitar and bass duo can hold a room. This one takes that as given. "Bag's Groove" opens it with Carter walking and Hall comping like a pianist, "Blue Monk" gets the Monk treatment they would both give it separately for the rest of their lives, and "Laverne Walk," the Oscar Pettiford tune, is a bass player's nod to the bass player who made this kind of playing possible.

Jim Anderson recorded it, the start of a long run of Carter records with Anderson at the board. The 1992 CD adds two tracks the LP did not have room for. Roy DeCarava photographed the cover, as he had for Parade, and it gets four stars.

The third Carter and Hall duo record, and the only one made outdoors. Two years after the Village West date they played the Concord Pavilion in California in August 1984, and Carl Jefferson put the set out on his Concord label the following year. Seven tunes, the same two instruments, and a much bigger room than either of the New York clubs where the first two duo records were made.

The center of it is "Alone Together," the song that named their first duo album in 1972, and here it runs past ten and a half minutes. "Stardust" gets almost eight, and those two long ballads set the pace for the whole set, which is why this is the one to put on last thing at night rather than first thing in the morning.

Michael Erlewine at AllMusic heard "lots of space, and a slow pace" and thought it might be a little too intellectual, and he is not wrong about the pace. That is also the case for it. In 2001 Concord paired it with Live at Village West on a two-disc set called Telepathy, which puts the second and third duo records side by side, and it gets four stars.

Carter spent three days at Clinton Recording Studios in New York in December 1991 and came out with a record on which he is the only musician. He wrote Bach arrangements for a choir of basses, up to eight parts, and then played every one of them himself on bass and piccolo bass, one track over another. Looking back on it in a 2022 DownBeat interview, he called it "a pretty complicated project," which undersells it.

The pieces are ones most people already know, which helps. "Air" opens it, "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" and the "Gavotte en Rondeau" sit in the middle, and the short chorales between them work like palate cleansers. The two long preludes are where the multitracking earns its keep, because a fugue needs voices that stay out of each other's way, and here every voice is the same man with the same tone.

Nobody swings anything. When Jim Trageser reviewed it for the North County Blade-Citizen in 1993 he noted that Carter plays it straight, "not in an improvisational or jazzed-up vein," and that is exactly right. Jim Anderson, who had recorded Live at Village West nine years earlier, engineered it. This is a record for a quiet room and full attention, not for the car, and it gets three stars from a jazz site, which probably says more about the site than the record.

Piano, guitar and bass, no drums, a lineup with a long history that runs from the Nat Cole trio through Oscar Peterson to Ahmad Jamal's early group. Carter's version of it, with Mulgrew Miller and Russell Malone, became his touring band for years afterward and this is where it starts: one day at Avatar in July 2002, released first in Japan on Somethin' Else and then by Blue Note in the States.

The title track is John Lewis's tune from the Modern Jazz Quartet book, which tells you the register the record lives in: chamber jazz, quiet, exact. Carter brings back three of his Milestone tunes, "N.Y. Slick," "Parade" and "A Theme in 3/4," and hearing them without horns or drums is like hearing the sketches for the paintings. The Rodrigo adagio is the kind of thing that can go wrong fast, and does not, because Malone plays it as a guitar piece and not as a jazz cover of a guitar piece.

There is no vinyl. Every pressing in the world is a CD, and the Japanese one is the original. Jim Anderson recorded and mixed. Four stars, and the beginning of Carter's best late-career band.

The title has a comma in it, because it is a letter. Carter played with Miles Davis from 1963 to 1968 and this is the tribute, cut in one day at Avatar with his working quartet of the time, Stephen Scott on piano, Payton Crossley on drums and Roger Squitero on percussion. Seven tunes from the Davis book, two Carter originals, and "As Time Goes By" for reasons that are his own.

The Miles material is the material you would guess: "Seven Steps to Heaven," "My Funny Valentine," "Stella by Starlight," "Bye Bye Blackbird," "Someday My Prince Will Come." Carter does not try to recreate the quintet, which would be foolish, and he does not turn them into bass features either, though Scott Yanow's review warned that there are a lot of bass solos. The percussion is the thing that dates it. Squitero is tasteful, and the tunes did not ask for him.

The Japanese Somethin' Else release was July 2006; the US Blue Note edition came a year later, which is why it is usually listed as 2007, and both are CD only. Three stars, and Third Plane is the better Miles tribute, even though it was not meant as one.

A Brazilian program with a Brazilian rhythm section, Portinho on drums and Guilherme Monteiro on guitar, plus Javon Jackson and Stephen Scott from Carter's regular band. Two Jobim tunes, Milton Nascimento's "Salt Song," Benny Golson's "Whisper Not" for some reason, and five Carter originals, one of which, "De Samba," is the tune from Anything Goes thirty-three years earlier, finally played by a band that knows what a samba is.

Jackson is the surprise. He plays the bossa tunes with a big tenor sound instead of the breathy Getz approach everyone reaches for, and "Wave" is better for it. Carter, who had been playing this music since the Kudu years, is exactly where you expect him, low and unhurried, and Monteiro's guitar does the work of a whole rhythm section on the quieter tracks. "Saudade" closes it in two minutes.

One day at Avatar, Jim Anderson at the board, Bob Freedman credited with arrangements. The Japanese CD came out in June 2008 and the Blue Note edition in July. There is no vinyl, and probably never will be. Three stars.

A correction first, because this record gets filed as a Ron Carter leader date, sometimes even as a Blue Note one, and it is not. Chemistry is a Houston Person and Ron Carter duo on HighNote, the fifth of six records the tenor player and the bassist made together over nearly thirty years, and Person produced it. It belongs here anyway, because it is one of the best things Carter put his name on in the 2010s.

Tenor and bass, nothing else, ten standards, forty-nine minutes. Person plays the melodies the way singers do and Carter plays the way he played behind Jim Hall in 1972, as rhythm section, harmony and second voice at once. "But Beautiful" and "Blame It on My Youth" are the slow ones and they are the reason to own it. "Blue Monk" is here because it is always here; Carter plays it on three of the records reviewed on these pages.

Matt Collar at AllMusic called it lovely and heartfelt, which is right, and it gets four stars. It is CD only, like most of the HighNote catalog, and the sound of the room is the same room as Blues Farm and Peg Leg, forty years on.

Three leaders, no leader. Gonzalo Rubalcaba's label, Jim Anderson at the board, three years between the session and the release, and a Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Album at the end of it. Each player brought two of his own tunes. Carter's are "Gypsy," the quartet track from Parade, and "A Quiet Place," which DeJohnette had played on the first time around in 1978. Rubalcaba's "Promenade" was written for Carter in the nineties.

So it is a record of old tunes played by people who have known each other for decades, and it sounds like it. "Gypsy" at nine minutes is the version to have now. The two Cuban boleros, "Lágrimas Negras" and "Novia Mía," are where Rubalcaba pulls the trio toward Havana, and Carter, who played this kind of thing on the CTI records with Cobham and MacDonald, does not need to be shown where the clave is. DeJohnette's "Ahmad the Terrible" is the loud one.

Recorded October 2018 at the Power Station, which is the same building as Avatar, where the Blue Note records were made, and Carter was eighty-one at the session. Four stars, and a vinyl double LP exists, which for this stretch of his catalog is rare.