The green room at
Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis is filled with Suzuki strings teachers
attending a master class with jazz violinist Regina Carter, who is
in town with her band for a concert with former Tonight Show bandleader
and jazz trumpeter Doc Severinsen and the Minnesota Orchestra. Carter
hands out a bass-line melody and announces that she is going to teach
the teachers how to swing. "This is Minnesota," one woman jokes. "We
don't swing." When the laughter subsides, Carter sets out to prove
her wrong.
Carter picks two
volunteers from the audience to improvise around the bass line, which
the group plays pizzicato. It's jazzy; it swings. Carter answers their
questions from the teachers, who seem concerned about "wrong" notes
and ask a lot of questions about showing interested students how to
practice jazz and blues. "With improvisation, it's your own story,
so you can't be wrong," Carter tells them. Then she adds with a laugh,
"and in jazz, you're always a half-step away from where you want to
be, so make that wrong note really convincing."
She urges the teachers
to have their students do inside slurs on phrases (slurring the middle
two notes) to get the swing. She recommends staying in one position,
"because if you're shifting all the time, you miss a lot of stuff."
And lose the vibrato, she instructs–a tall order for classically trained
string players, but vibrato in jazz sounds too "corny," Carter says.
The (Other)
Motown Sound
As a Detroit schoolgirl
during the '70s and '80s, Carter grew up at a time when the Motor
City was a hotbed for jazz–perhaps a natural evolution from the formulaic
Motown pop and light R&B of the previous decade. Hip urban sophisticates
could spend weekends cruising the jazz circuit, hearing pianist Ramsey
Lewis or guitarist Earl Klugh at Baker's Keyboard Lounge, French jazz
violinist Stephane Grappelli on the terrace at the Renaissance Center's
jazz festival, and a parade of national and local acts at the P-Jazz
shows at the old Hotel Pontchartrain.
There also were a
half dozen small clubs nestled in Detroit's riverfront warehouse district,
and you could walk from one to the next, catching unknown jazz and
blues artists at the Rattlesnake or the Soup Kitchen Saloon: brick
walls, burgers, and beer; red-and-white checked tablecloths; no cover
charge. On the way from one part of town to another, you'd tune your
car radio to the seminal jazz station of the time, WJZZ-FM. The city's
nightlife was vibrant with jazz. Detroit really knew how to swing–and
how to nurture homegrown musical talent.
"There's just so
much music that came out of Detroit," Carter has acknowledged, "and
it all inspired me."
Growing up in the
Palmer Park neighborhood, just a stone's throw from Baker's, Carter
didn't have to travel far for that inspiration. Music was a big part
of her home life as well. There were piano lessons on Monday, violin
lessons on Tuesday, and tap and ballet lessons on Thursday. Saturdays
were spent downtown at the Detroit Community Music School with her
violin, her Suzuki lesson books, and a diverse group of violin-playing
friends. But by the time she was a teenager, Carter began feeling
hemmed in by the classical repertoire. There had to be something else
she could do with her chosen instrument beyond staid minuets and gavottes,
she reasoned.
Then one day, the
14-year-old saw Grappelli perform at the Renaissance Center jazz series,
and everything changed. "I said, ‘Wow, he's got a band behind him.
There seems to be a freedom, they can improvise, they don't have to
play the piece the same way over and over,'" she recalls. "And then
seeing Stephane Grappelli live–when you see live musicians there's
just nothing like it. He was having such a good time, and I felt really
elated after that. I said, ‘If I could feel this way all the time,
that would be it.' So that's what jazz meant to me. That feeling."
Grappelli's live
performance was an eye-opener: Carter realized that it was possible
to improvise–and even swing–with the violin. Not only that, but a
solo violinist could play something other than classical music–and
be famous. Carter knew for certain that she wasn't cut out to be second
fiddle in an orchestra. "For me, playing in a [string] section was
boring because I wanted to be out front. I was just a stage baby.
It's about me!" She laughs at the diva put-on. "I wasn't going to
wear that black and white outfit. No."
Carter has come a
long way since then. She's on the road eight months out of the year,
playing a wide range of venues–from the Minnesota Orchestra pops series
to the high-energy TV cooking show Emeril Live. She has recorded several
albums as a bandleader and performed as a guest soloist on recordings
by jazz trombonist Steve Turre, jazz singer Vanessa Rubin, and soul
singer Mary J. Blige, among others. Carter's most recent CD is Freefall
(Verve), the critically acclaimed collaboration with piano legend
Kenny Barron. The sparsely arranged duo recording represents a few
firsts: It is Carter's first acoustic outing, and the first project
in which she had complete artistic freedom. The eclectic disc includes
improvisational original pieces, a Latinesque take on the Romberg-Hammerstein
chestnut "Softly in as a Morning Sunrise," a cover of pop star Sting's
"Fragile," and an intriguing rendition of Thelonious Monk's "Mysterioso."
Seated in the lobby
of a Minneapolis hotel, Carter says her first "unplugged" CD was a
bit of a departure; her next album will include her own quintet–and
her electric pickup. "Sometimes you get tired of all the rules and
regulations and you just want to play music," says Carter, a very
down-to-earth woman who hails from a city that more than one person
has described as a shot-and-a-beer town.
Rules and regulations
notwithstanding, such assured solo efforts as 1999's Rhythms of the
Heart and the follow-up album Motor City Moments were successful enough
to earn Carter a reputation as one of the world's most accomplished
jazz violinists. When she takes the old standard "Lady Be Good" to
the concert stage, starting out bluesy and then ratcheting up the
tempo to a crazy, high-speed swing, Carter is being good, all right.
Really good.
Lowell Pickett thinks
Carter pretty much has it figured out. Pickett owns the Dakota Bar
& Grill, the premier jazz club in the Twin Cities. Carter has
appeared at the Dakota three times–twice with her band and once with
a group assembled by Steve Turre.
"I've heard people
who focus on European classical music play jazz, and it's not as free
and it doesn't have that same thing that's defined as ‘swing.' And
she has it," Pickett says. He adds that the members of Turre's ensemble
responded to Carter in a way that showed a great deal of respect,
even though Carter herself told Pickett she felt humbled to be on
the same stage as those great musicians.
That's part of Carter's
substantial charm, Pickett says–though she is a virtuoso player, her
ego doesn't overwhelm her performance.
"In Regina's case,
her playing speaks beautifully for her, yet she's very modest about
it, which makes her a very likeable person," Pickett says. "So other
people on stage respond to Regina for her musical qualities and then
for her personal qualities.
"People that I've
talked to in the jazz world are really happy for her because she's
someone who deserves to be successful," he adds. "She's a great player
and she's so much fun. You can tell the way she just dives into the
music and pulls out everything she can and then just throws it at
the audience in a way that lets them share in the joy that she's feeling."
The Routine
That ability doesn't
come without hard work. Though Carter freely admits that she hates
to practice–"I have the attention span of a five-year-old," she jokes–she
does try to stick to a routine when she's at home. The windows of
her Manhattan apartment offer a commanding view of Central Park, but
that's not the first thing she sees when she wakes up at 7:30 or 8
in the morning and walks out into the living room–Carter leaves her
violin case right in the middle of the room the night before so it
can silently admonish her the next day to practice.
She first warms up
for 15 to 20 minutes on open strings and scales to get her bow arm
going, then works on jazz exercises. "When you're playing classical
music, you have a book of scales, etudes, the piece that you're working
on, so you have it and you know what to do," she says. "With jazz,
there's nothing like that. When you come out of the classical world,
which is so structured, it's hard to know what to do. And it's still
difficult for me to structure practice."
Carter takes theory
lessons by mail that help her with "the swing thing." The exercises
are difficult, she says, so Carter works on these first, focusing
on the inside two notes of each phrase. For instance, if there are
four eighth notes, she slurs the inside two. Using less bow, and no
vibrato.
Carter might spend
up to an hour on those exercises, take a break or go for a jog, then
come back and work on scales and any classical pieces she may be playing
for her lessons with Gerald Bill in New York. Some years ago, Carter
suffered bouts of numbness and pain in her bow arm. Bill corrected
her posture and taught her some relaxation techniques. Through her
classical lessons, she revisited her bowing technique and learned
how to shift without clamping down on the instrument.
"If I want to really
swing hard, my body tends to tense up–and you don't swing at all when
you do that. The sound is not coming out; you're pinching it. You
have to really stop and say, ‘Be loose, be loose.'"
She composes a bit
when original phrases or melodies occur to her and she doesn't want
to forget them. And though Carter learns a lot of jazz riffs by ear,
she also transcribes works by such jazz artists as trumpeter Clark
Terry and tenor sax player Ben Webster. She doesn't write out works
in their entirety; sometimes she is only transcribing bits to analyze
different approaches.
"I did a lot of Charlie
Parker stuff, trying to look at how he used the notes. First I learned
it by ear and played it. And a lot of times some of those movements
stick with you and you won't even think about it, it'll just come
out," Carter says. "So then I try and look at the reasons he approached
that note that way. It just helps you to understand theory to look
at it and see why he did certain things."
But when she's improvising,
forget the theory and the analysis–it's anything goes. And a snippet
from Cole Porter's "Anything Goes" just might wind up in one of her
solos. Carter doesn't plan to quote from pop songs in her solos, but
jazz playing is something of an out-of-body experience, she says.
"It just kind of
comes out and I don't realize it. People will say, ‘Oh, you played
a quote from this or that,' and I don't even know. The band knows
that when I hear things it's dangerous. There's this one cell phone
ring, and it's like, ‘Oh, God, no. If that gets in my head, it's going
to come out.'"
A Different
Path
Carter is the youngest
child of Dan Carter, a Ford Motor Co. auto worker, and Grace Williamson
Carter, an elementary school teacher. According to family lore, when
Regina was two, she interrupted her older brother's piano lesson and
successfully picked out the notes to a song he'd been practicing.
Though neither of her parents was musical, Carter's grandmother often
came over to play piano. As a preschooler, Carter started piano lessons
but soon switched over to violin.
"I started on piano
and was too young to start violin lessons so the teacher said, ‘Just
let her do her thing on her own.' But when I was four, the teacher
said, ‘They're offering Suzuki violin,' and my mother said, ‘OK, we'll
try it.' And I really enjoyed it. I think I just really loved music.
We would have these group lessons on the weekend, so all of those
kids became my friends and I had a passion for it at a very young
age."
Carter attended the
Detroit Community Music School, also known as the Center for Creative
Studies. The prestigious school of the arts was across the street
from the Detroit Institute of Arts, but like so many of the familiar
places of her youth, the school is gone now. "My mother thought it
was important to be exposed to many different things so that our career
choices would be broader," Carter explains. "So we all had to take
music. We all took piano, and we all took dance. I took tap and ballet;
my brothers took tap. They quit music lessons when they were about
12 and my mother assumed I would, too."
"But I loved the
violin so much. I said that's what I wanted to do."
Still, it was a bit
tough being an African-American child playing an instrument and music
associated with dead European white guys, she admits, especially in
the blue-collar neighborhood in which she grew up. "Those kids were
like, ‘You have to go to music class?' And I said, ‘But I like to
do that.'"
Carter spent every
Saturday from 8 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon at the music
school in group lessons with her friends. Many of those children had
musician parents, so when Carter spent the night at a friend's house
and practiced the Suzuki repertoire with them, she also got the benefit
of guidance and instruction from adults with experienced ears.
Carter laughs, still
able to recall some of those early pieces. In midinterview, she breaks
into a childlike rendition of "Minuet 2" by J.S. Bach from Suzuki
Book No. 1. Like most kids, she didn't know what a minuet was; it
was just music to her.
"My teacher would
make us do some of those dances sometimes to make us understand [the
rhythms]," Carter says. "I didn't know any other music then, really.
My brothers were listening to their Motown stuff, but I wasn't buying
any recordings of any kind, I was just listening to my little classical
records that I brought home and going to the symphony. And Itzhak
Perlman would come to the school and give master classes. That was
my whole world."
At 18, she enrolled
at the New England Conservatory, intending to become a soloist in
a major orchestra. In her youth, she had studied and performed with
the Detroit Civic Symphony Orchestra. But she never really took to
Boston, and the conservatory had no jazz violin teacher. Carter floated
rather aimlessly through those two years. "No one knew what to do
with me, and I didn't know what to do," she says. "So I went back
to Detroit.
I knew they had a
jazz scene there."
Carter enrolled at
Oakland University, which had a jazz band. The jazz teacher there
suggested she transpose the alto sax parts, and simply sit in the
middle of the brass section and listen. Soon she met Detroit trumpeter
Marcus Belgrave and became part of the jazz community.
"Back home, I just
felt like that's where I needed to be," she says. "There was so much
music going on and so many opportunities."
After graduation,
she heeded a strong inner voice that told her to travel to Germany–Carter
likes to joke that she may have been German in a past life. Upon arriving,
she sat in with jazz combos in Munich nightclubs and got an apartment.
A short romance and some odd jobs saw her through her nearly two-year
stay in Europe. It was a liberating experience.
"It was like I was
supposed to be there. My life was so completely structured from the
time I was four, at this point I needed to be able to have a period
of my life where I had no structure," she says. "If I wanted to play
music, I could find a band and play with them. Or I could teach. I
was an au pair for a while. I could goof off."
In 1987, she moved
back to Detroit, where she joined an all-woman band called Straight
Ahead. Nightclub owner Clarence Baker–proprietor of Baker's Keyboard
Lounge in her old neighborhood–has long since retired to suburban
Detroit, but he remembers Carter well. "You don't find people playing
jazz violin as often as you used to many years ago. That's one thing
that makes her unique–and her style," Baker says. "When she first
started, she was very young and had a nice presentation on the stage.
She played a fine violin; she was a good jazz artist. It made an impression
on me. It seemed like she had a very fine future–and she has proven
that."
In 1991, Carter moved
to New York and cut her debut CD three years later. Her solo career
took off. Since then, she has played with a broad range of musicians–from
jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and R&B legend Aretha Franklin
to country star Tanya Tucker and hip-hop phenom Lauryn Hill. These
days, Carter and her quintet are heating up symphony halls, intimate
jazz clubs, and live TV shows from coast to coast.
Although she only
gets to Detroit about once a year, the Motown influence is still very
much with her. And if the somewhat mechanical "Minuet 2" still sends
mock shudders through her, Carter has a lot of affection for the Suzuki
method. After all, she says, she owes much of her improv skills to
her early ear training. Carter finds that classical musicians trained
in traditional methods tend to have the most difficulty making the
transition into jazz. "If you're sitting in with a band and somebody
calls for standard 12-bar blues, you can't be analyzing and thinking,
‘Oh, that's a diminished seventh,'" she says. "You don't need the
music in front of you to know the chord changes. A lot of it you learn
by hearing and listening. The theory you can get; learning how to
hear is more difficult."
Although many musicians
and traditional string teachers are dismissive of the method, Carter
vigorously defends Suzuki training. After all, being able to play
real music quickly is appealing to kids who might otherwise be turned
off by the drudgery of scales and etudes. No one knows this better
than Carter.
"Children are not
always taken with an instrument; they want to play something right
away. So if they can play a tune right away, then you've got them.
Otherwise, it's not music; it's exercise," she says. "Even at this
point, I still hate doing those. I go to my lessons now, and my teacher
says, ‘You're sick of this, aren't you?' And I go, ‘Yeah, is my hour
up?'"
