At 88, Ron Carter, Jazz Legend and Upper West Sider, Still Finds New Notes 

By Bonnie Eissner

Jazz bassist Ron Carter has outlived many of the musicians he’s played with — Miles Davis, Art Farmer, Chet Baker, Roberta Flack, Aretha Franklin, to name a few. But Carter, the most recorded jazz bassist in history, with over 2,200 recording credits, shows no sign of stopping.

Instead, the longtime Upper West Sider celebrated his 88th birthday last week with 12 performances — two sets a night for six nights (including his birthday, May 4) — at the Blue Note Jazz Club in Greenwich Village. 

Tuesday’s sold-out 8 p.m. show drew fans from across the country and overseas, revealing that decades into his career, Carter is still much revered, with a genuinely global audience.

Among those in line for Tuesday night’s show was Django van Dijk, a high school student who studies jazz drumming in Amsterdam and came from Holland with his mother to hear the jazz great. Van Dijk said: “When I heard that he’s playing here, I said, ‘Of course, I’m going to go.’” 

Also on line was Cang Huynh, visiting New York from Sydney, Australia. “I wanted to see a living legend,” he said. “He’s still playing at 88 years old. That’s crazy to me.”

By the time the doors opened at 6 p.m., the line stretched down the block, and the club was packed when Carter and his band members — tenor saxophonist Jimmy Greene and drummer Payton Crossley — took the stage. (Pianist Rene Rosnes, the fourth member of Carter’s Foursight Quartet, was ill.)

Carter, 6 feet 4 inches tall and angular, came alive as he coaxed elegant, stirring sounds from his double bass. Playing for long stretches with his eyes closed, engrossed in the music, he showed the depth of his talent and training. He performed his own compositions and jazz standards, such as “Joshua” by Victor Feldman and Miles Davis. And in a memorable solo medley, he touched on “A Few of My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music, as well as J.S. Bach’s Suite No. 1 in G Major — originally composed for the cello. 

Carter, who grew up in Ferndale, Michigan, the fifth of eight children, started playing the cello at 11 but switched to the bass in high school.

As a cellist, he saw that “Only the white kids were getting gigs, even though I worked just as hard and played just as well,” Carter said in an email interview with West Side Rag.

Then he realized that the sole bass player at school was about to graduate. 

“If I was the only bass player available, there’d be no passing me over for the gig anymore,” he said. “I made the switch thinking it would be easy; it wasn’t.” By practicing about five hours a day, though, he mastered the new instrument, and, he said, “found a whole new world of music opened up to me — the world of jazz.” 

As a high school senior, he played in a friend’s jazz band, but he remained determined to be a classical musician and landed a scholarship to the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. There, in his senior year, Leopold Stokowski, who then led the Houston Symphony Orchestra, came as a guest conductor. “I was told,” Carter recalled, “he’d love to have me in his orchestra, but he thought that the board of directors was not ready to accept an African American man with some talent.”  

Fortunately, Carter had already developed his jazz chops playing for pay at clubs in and around Rochester. Musicians who passed through town told him talented jazz bassists could find work in New York, so Carter headed to the city after graduation in 1959.

By 1963, Carter was a fixture on the booming New York jazz scene and working for trumpeter Art Farmer when Miles Davis invited him to join his new band. Carter showed his backbone, saying he’d only jump ship if Davis asked Farmer first, according to his biography, Finding the Right Notes. Farmer released the bassist, who ultimately stayed with Davis for five years, becoming an essential member of his legendary second quintet.

He left as Davis moved toward his signature fusion of jazz, rock, and pop. Carter, by then the father of two sons, was building a freelance career and landing recording contracts. He was ready to strike out on his own.

Still, he remained friends with Davis and visited him at his brownstone on West 77th Street, especially after 1973, when Carter and his family moved to an apartment on West End Avenue in the same building as Harry Belafonte.

“My kids got too big for our Harlem apartment,” Carter said of the move. 

Carter lives in the same building today in a spacious 10th-floor apartment filled with African American art. “It’s nice to come home and be encased in an environment of like artists who make their expressions heard through a medium other than spoken word,” he said in the 2022 documentary also titled Ron Carter: Finding the Right Notes.  

Since his days with Davis, Carter has earned esteem as a band leader and a sideman. He has played with top musicians of genres from jazz to rock, pop, and even hip-hop — Branford and Wynton Marsalis, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Paul Simon, and A Tribe Called Quest, among many others. 

In his biography, Carter likens a jazz bassist to a football quarterback. “He must find a sound that he is willing to be responsible for,” he said. 

Pianist Herbie Hancock offered a different analogy, speaking about Carter in the 2022 documentary film. “He’s like an architect,” said Hancock, Carter’s fellow Davis band member. “He’s thinking ahead, and he’s building a direction when he plays, but at the same time, he’s listening to what the drums are doing and what the piano is doing. Every part of it, all of that happening at the same time. But that’s what creativity is about in jazz.” 

At the Blue Note, Carter was clearly in command of his band. The drummer and saxophonist conversed with their leader, displaying their abundant talents as soloists, but always following Carter’s direction. And they gave Carter ample room for solos that ranged from refined to playful — each solo beautiful enough to listen to all night. 

Sergio Larios, Carter’s bass technician and assistant, has worked for Carter for over 30 years, since he graduated from The City College of New York, where Carter, a distinguished professor emeritus at the school, was his teacher. 

In the club just before the performance, Larios spoke about Carter’s approach to music and his longevity.

“He’s very focused on his work,” Larios said, observing that he “gives all himself” to “make sure that fans leave with something from the music.”

He added, “I think his passion is love for continuing to develop. He doesn’t feel that he’s done everything yet.” 

Carter reflected in the email conversation on what keeps him going even after he’s lost so many fellow musicians. 

“It’s very frightening,” he said, “and my job is to keep carrying the flag until I cannot carry it anymore.”

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