Ron Carter
He grew up in Ferndale, on the north edge of Detroit, started on cello at ten, and switched to bass in his last semester at Cass Tech, because the school orchestra needed a bassist and bass players got more work. By 1963 he was the bassist in the Miles Davis quintet, and by 2015 Guinness had counted 2,221 recording sessions and called him the most recorded bassist in jazz history. The records under his own name are a smaller story inside that one: a cello debut, the CTI years as house bassist, the piccolo bass quartet on Milestone, the Jim Hall duos, and a Grammy at eighty-four for a trio record. Twenty-two albums across two eras, in recording order. Browse below.
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Through the CTI years he was a sideman for hire making his own records on other people's terms, first for Herbie Mann, then for Creed Taylor. From Pastels in 1976 on he produced himself, through a company called Retrac, which is his name backwards. Both pages run in recording order. Every review carries personnel details, session dates and catalog numbers, Apple Music audio previews, track listings, and album art.
Nine records. The 1961 debut Where?, with Eric Dolphy and Carter on cello for half of it, then eight years of silence while he played for Miles. Uptown Conversation with Herbie Hancock, the live guitar and bass duo Alone Together with Jim Hall, the CTI run from Blues Farm to Yellow & Green with All Blues as its peak, the Kudu funk record, and Pastels with strings.
Thirteen records. The two-bass quartet live on Piccolo, the Miles Davis rhythm section reunited on Third Plane, the woodwind record Peg Leg, Parade with Joe Henderson, Chick Corea and Tony Williams, two more Jim Hall duos, a Bach record on which Carter plays every part, the drummerless Golden Striker trio, the Miles letter, a Brazilian set, Chemistry with Houston Person at Van Gelder’s, and Skyline, the Grammy winner with Jack DeJohnette and Gonzalo Rubalcaba.
Five Ron Carter records as full-album videos, Where?, Uptown Conversation, Spanish Blue, Telepathy with Jim Hall and Ron Carter Meets Bach, plus a full 2019 concert by his Foursight Quartet.
Open the Ron Carter video page →Carter is on more records reviewed on this site than any leader is, and the sideman side of the story is on his player page: every reviewed record he plays on, from the Miles Davis quintet through Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Freddie Hubbard to the CTI catalog. The Sideman Map draws the whole network.
Twenty-two albums is a fraction of the leader catalog. Not yet reviewed: Magic (Prestige twofer), A Song for You (1978), Pick ’Em (1978), Patrão (1980), Etudes (1982), The Bass and I (1997), the other Houston Person duos, and the Great Big Band and Foursight records of the 2010s.
Ron Carter, born 1937
Ronald Levin Carter was born May 4, 1937, in Ferndale, Michigan, just over the Detroit line. He started on cello at ten and switched to bass at Cass Technical High School, the same Detroit school that produced Donald Byrd, Paul Chambers and Dorothy Ashby; the orchestra needed a bassist, and Carter switched in January 1955, during his last semester. He took a music degree at the Eastman School in Rochester in 1959, playing jazz at night in a house band at the Pythodd Room with Pee Wee Ellis, and a master’s at the Manhattan School of Music in 1961, the year he cut his first album as a leader with Eric Dolphy.
He joined Miles Davis in 1963 and stayed until 1968. With Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams he was the rhythm section of the second great quintet, the band of E.S.P., Miles Smiles and Nefertiti, and in the same years he was the bassist on a long run of Blue Note records, Speak No Evil, Maiden Voyage and Speak Like a Child among them. That is the sound most people know without knowing whose it is: a walking line that pulls forward without rushing, and a tone with no edge on it.
In the seventies he was the house bassist at CTI, on nearly everything Creed Taylor produced, and he used the same studio and engineer for his own records. He developed the piccolo bass, a smaller instrument tuned a fourth higher, into a lead voice, and on Milestone he built a quartet around it with a second bassist underneath. He has recorded on cello throughout his career.
He taught at the City College of New York for many years. He has won three Grammy Awards, for “Call Sheet Blues” from the film Round Midnight, for the Miles Davis Tribute Band, and in 2022 for Skyline. In September 2015 Guinness World Records verified 2,221 recording credits and named him the most recorded jazz bassist in history. He has recorded several hundred more sessions since, by his own count.