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Carter, Regina
Profession:
Jazz musicians;
Violinists; Entertainers; Musicians
Biography from Current
Biography (2003)Copyright (c) by The H. W. Wilson
Company. All rights reserved.
"I think a lot of people look at
the violin and they get a little nervous," the jazz
violinist Regina Carter said, as reported on the Web
site Fiddlechicks. "They have a stereotype of what
the violin is--very high, kind of shrill-sounding with
long notes, and a lot of vibrato. It doesn't have to be
that at all, it can be a very fiery persuasive
instrument and that's how I like to use it." While
most people probably do not think of the violin when
thinking of jazz, Carter has pointed out that the
instrument has a long tradition in that genre. The
classically trained Carter, who turned to jazz as a
teenager, after hearing the music of the violinist
Stephane Grappelli, had by 2001 released several
well-received albums and attracted the attention of two
jazz luminaries--the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and the
singer Cassandra Wilson. Her profile rose further that
year, when she became the first African-American and the
first nonclassical musician chosen to play a violin that
had once belonged to the 18th/19th-century Italian
virtuoso violinist and composer Niccolo Paganini. (The
instrument is so valuable that only one musician a year
is chosen to play it, and candidates must submit to a
lengthy process in which their training and musical
backgrounds are examined thoroughly.) Carter played the
instrument in a concert in Italy on New Year's Eve 2001
and subsequently used it to record portions of her album
Paganini: After a Dream, which was released in April
2003. While some musicians and classical-music lovers
were initially unhappy that the valuable instrument
would be played by a jazz musician, Carter won most of
them over with her performance.
Regina Carter was born in about 1963 and
grew up in the Palmer Park neighborhood of Detroit,
Michigan. Her father, Dan Carter, was an auto worker for
Ford, while her mother, Grace Williamson Carter, was an
elementary-school teacher. She has two older brothers.
According to her family, when Carter was two years old,
she interrupted her older brother's piano lesson and
successfully picked out the notes to the song he was
practicing. She started taking violin lessons at age
four, following the Suzuki method, which calls for
students to play by ear before learning to read music
and focuses more on rhythm than do traditional teaching
methods. (Carter played for seven years before learning
to read music.) By age four, she was putting together
tunes of her own, not caring that they broke musical
rules, and her teacher encouraged her to improvise in
her playing. "I really enjoyed it," she told
Susan M. Barbieri for Strings magazine (February/March
2002, on-line). "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. "My mother thought it was
important to be exposed to many different things so that
our career choices would be broader," she told
Barbieri. "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." She spent Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. in
group lessons, and often spent time at the homes of her
fellow students, many of whose parents were professional
musicians. She played with the Detroit Civic Symphony
Orchestra in her youth. "In my house, we listened
to everything," she told Mark Ruffin for the Jazz
USA Web site (1999). "First of all, I was studying
European classical music, so I had to bring home stacks
of that music and listen to it every day. My dad was
listening to, I guess, easy listening radio, which is
where I first heard [the jazz guitarist] Wes Montgomery.
And my brothers were listening to Motown, Stylistics,
Parliament-Funkadelic, and we all went to the symphony.
Plus we lived near an area where I heard a lot of Arabic
music and we had a big Latino population, so I heard a
lot of Latin music."
When Carter was 16 a friend took her to
a performance by Stephane Grappelli. She had never
before heard jazz violin, and the experience changed her
career goals. "Seeing him live was kind of what
really did the trick for me," she told Seth Rogovoy
for the Berkshire Eagle (April 19, 2001), in a story
posted on the Berkshire Web site. "Seeing how much
fun he was having--the passion and freedom in the
music--I wanted to have that same experience whenever I
played." She soon discovered the work of another
jazz violinist, Jean-Luc Ponty, who became her jazz idol
once she saw him perform. She has also cited the
classical violinist Yehudi Menuhin as an early influence
on her work. Carter took a master class with Menuhin
when she was 16; her regular teacher told Menuhin
unenthusiastically that Carter wanted to play jazz.
"He picked up his violin and played some kind of
jazz lick, as if to say, 'It's OK!' I felt I had
won," Carter said, as quoted in the Raleigh, North
Carolina, News and Observer (February 8, 2002).
At 18 she enrolled in the New England
Conservatory of Music, in Boston, Massachusetts, where
she discovered the work of other jazz violinists,
including Stuff Smith, whose music proved to be still
another source of inspiration for her. She initially
studied both jazz and European classical music; after
her first year she decided to focus solely on jazz.
Since the school did not have a jazz-violin teacher, she
returned home after two years and enrolled at Oakland
University, in Rochester, Michigan, where she began to
understand jazz composition and improvisation. "My
teacher at the time gave me some good advice," she
told Tim Blangger for the Allentown, Pennsylvania,
Morning Call (September 15, 2002). "He said there
weren't enough jazz violinists out there, and that I
might end up sounding like one of them. He said, 'Quit
listening to violin players. Listen to horn players.
Learn how to breathe.' It was really helpful."
Taking that advice, she sat in the saxophone section of
the school's jazz band and transcribed solos, and did
the same with recordings. "It was weird at first
listening to these horn players, especially Charlie
Parker, trying to transcribe the stuff so I could play
it," she told Rogovoy. "I'd put a tune on and
listen to it and be really intimidated and not want to
do it. It'd take a while, but the more you do it the
faster it comes. Eventually I did a couple of Bird
[Parker] solos, 'Scrapple from the Apple' and
'Ornithology.' My thing was to play it so much that I
could sing it first. That's kind of how Suzuki was--if
you could sing it you could play it, teach it to
yourself on your instrument."
After earning a B.A. degree in
performance from Oakland University, in 1985, Carter
moved to Germany, where she remained for two years,
sitting in with jazz combos in Munich nightclubs and
enjoying being on her own. "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 told Barbieri. "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 returned to Detroit.
There, she continued to train in jazz, working with the
trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, the bassist Bob Hurst, and
the organist Lymon Woodard and joining the all-female
fusion group Straight Ahead, playing electric violin. In
1991 she left the group to pursue a solo career and
moved to New York City, where she played with the New
York String Trio for six years, contributing to the
group's records Intermobility (1993), Octagon (1994),
Blues . . . ? (1995), and Happy Valley Blues (1997). She
also played on the 1993 album Movement, Turns &
Switches, by the Oliver Lake String Project. She
released several albums of commercial, contemporary jazz
that were largely ignored, including Regina Carter
(1995) and Something for Grace (1997). Carter drew more
attention for her work on the recording of Wynton
Marsalis's composition Blood on the Fields, which won a
Pulitzer Prize. She toured with Marsalis in 1997 and
went on the road with Cassandra Wilson, for the "Travelin'
Miles" tour, in 1998.
After signing a contract with Verve
Records, Carter released the album Rhythms of the Heart
(1999). Time named it one of the year's top 10 records;
the album includes covers of songs originally recorded
by Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Thad Jones, and Milt
Jackson. Her follow-up record, Motor City Moments
(2000), was also well received. ("Motor City"
is a nickname for Detroit.) "Carter lets each tune
open a different window onto her musical past as well as
the city's," Matt Abramovitz wrote about that album
for the National Public Radio (NPR) jazz Web site.
"She covers the haunting 'Love Theme from
Spartacus' that Detroiter Yusef Lateef made famous. She
takes us to the plateau of Stevie Wonder's 'Higher
Ground' without sparing us the challenging ascent. . . .
Regina Carter plays so well that her violin sometimes
seems too polished. Without that edge, Motor City
Moments may roll a bit flat for some listeners. Still,
the album is overflowing with talent, spirit, and
beauty." Carter was a guest artist on two albums by
pianists released in 2000: Kenny Barron's Spirit Song
and Danilo Perez's Motherland. In 2001 Carter's
Freefall, a critically acclaimed collaboration with
Barron, appeared. The album includes improvisational
original pieces as well as versions of the show tune
"Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise," Thelonious
Monk's "Mysterioso," and the pop star Sting's
"Fragile," which earned a Grammy nomination
for best jazz instrumental. "Carter and Barron
match each other at every turn, voicing melodies with
aching melancholy while improvising freely around the
sparse arrangements," a reviewer wrote for
Billboard (May 19, 2001). "Although the music is a
bit laid-back at times, many passages build slowly into
sections that sizzle and yet maintain an undeniable
grace--as on Sting's 'Fragile,' where statements of the
original song's melody give way to inventions wholly
Barron and Carter's own."
On December 31, 2001 Carter became the
first jazz musician and the first African-American to
play the 250-year-old Guarneri violin once owned by
Niccolo Paganini. The violin, dubbed "The
Cannon" because of its huge, sonorous sound, and
insured for $40 million, is kept in Genoa, Italy, and
played there only once a year by a virtuoso chosen by a
committee. Carter's longtime pianist, Werner "Vana"
Gierig, had contacts in Genoa and urged Carter to
petition the committee to let her play the instrument.
After a long process in which the committee investigated
her training, she was selected. At that point the
committee let her play Paganini's violin for the first
time. "I was scared of [the famous violin],"
Carter told Charlie Rose for 60 Minutes II (January 29,
2003, on-line). "I didn't want to touch it. And I
said, 'Oh my God, what am I going to play? What am I
going to play?' And it just came--my mother came to mind
and said, 'Play Amazing Grace.'" Among the numbers
she played at the concert were the Billie Holiday ballad
"Don't Explain," the jazz standards
"Black Orpheus" and "Chattanooga Choo
Choo," her original composition "Forever
February," the Ella Fitzgerald song "The Music
Goes Round and Round," several Bach pieces, and
works by Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk. "It's
a very difficult instrument," she told Blangger.
"The neck of the violin is much longer than a
traditional violin and after third position [on the
violin's fret board] nothing is where you think it
should be. Also, string players tend to tighten up when
we get nervous and dig the violin bow deep into the
violin string, but this violin won't respond to that. It
will wolf back at you. It really is a temperamental
instrument." Still, she recalled for NPR (May 14,
2003, on-line) that she felt let down upon returning
Paganini's violin at the end of the concert: "They
gave me my violin back to do one more tune and when I
went to play it, it sounded like a mouse. . . . The
sound was so small in comparison and so quiet. . . . I
had to make friends with my violin again." The
concert benefitted Doctors Without Borders and the
families of victims of the 2001 World Trade Center
disaster.
Some critics had felt that Paganini's
violin would be "debased" when it was played
by a jazz musician; Carter has observed that many
musical purists look down on jazz as being less worthy
of serious attention than European classical music.
"Jazz is a music that's improvised, but when you
look back at Paganini's history and the era that he came
out of, he was a baroque musician and baroque musicians
improvised," she told the interviewer for NPR.
Despite the response from some in the classical-music
community, the audience was on its feet throughout
Carter's concert. Genoa city officials were so pleased
with her performance that there has been talk of her
playing the instrument in a concert in New York City,
which would mark the first time that the violin left
Italy. Carter used the famous violin to record her most
recent CD, Paganini: After a Dream. The album includes
renditions of Maurice Ravel's "Pavane for a Dead
Princess," Astor Piazzolla's tango
"Oblivion," and music from the films Black
Orpheus and Cinema Paradiso. Writing for the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution in an article reprinted on the
Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune Web site (April 27,
2003), Sonia Murray called Paganini: After a Dream
"an album that anyone should find absolutely
beautiful. . . . While this is no classical-music album,
the adjective 'classic' surely qualifies as an apt
description of Carter's treatment of this broad range of
offerings."
Carter has not only faced resistance
from those who consider jazz inferior to classical
music; from the beginning of her career, she has had to
overcome the preconceived ideas of those who do not see
the violin as a jazz instrument. Record-company
executives initially told her that they could not market
a jazz band led by a violinist. "I remember when my
first record came out and they were testing it on radio
stations. . . . When the radio people saw the violin on
the cover, they wouldn't even try to play it," she
told Joe Klopus for the Kansas City Star (March 8,
2002). "People think it's not part of the jazz
idiom, but it definitely is. If you look back, there's a
great history--Stuff Smith, Eddie South, Ray Nance with
Duke Ellington's big band--and when the avant-garde came
around, you didn't see as many players, but they were
still out there." She has also found a divide
between classical and jazz musicians. "Classical
musicians tend to say, 'Jazz is just some kind of
noise,' and jazz musicians say, 'Classical music is
museum music, it's dead.' People are only used to
hearing violin in European classical music or country
music, and so we get stuck in this idea that this is
what a violin is supposed to do," she told the News
and Observer. She said to Jim Beal Jr. for the San
Antonio Express-News (November 15, 2002) about the
violin, "It's just an instrument. It doesn't come
with a set of instructions that say, 'For classical use
only.'"
Carter and her quintet (whose membership
has changed from time to time) frequently perform at
symphony halls and jazz clubs across the country.
Currently, the group includes Vana Gierig, the
percussionist Mayra Casales, the bassist Chris Lightcap,
and the drummer Alvester Garnett, all of whom play on
Paganini: After a Dream. "We've been really
fortunate. Our audience has a wide age range from kids
to senior citizens and it's culturally varied, too. We
go into schools and play for kids. We believe in taking
the music to them," Carter told Beal, adding,
"I am an African American. I am a woman. I'm going
to represent that anyway. I just want to see young
people, girls especially, see music [as] a career
option. My percussionist is a woman and it's great to
see the young girls watch her. We don't have the music
role models that men do. I want women to realize they
can make music and still be a lady." Among the
musicians she has played with are R her playing shows a
decided vocal influence."
Although many musicians dismiss the
Suzuki method, Carter has defended her training,
pointing out that children become bored quickly with the
scales and simple etudes typically assigned to new
students. "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 told Barbieri. "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?'" Carter has said that while
she does not like to practice, she usually does so for
several hours a day, playing jazz exercises, scales, and
classical pieces. She takes a correspondence course in
music theory taught by the improvisation guru Charlie
Banacos, as well as lessons in classical music with the
soloist Gerald Bill.
Carter, who is on the road about eight
months out of the year, lives in the New York City
borough of Manhattan. The five-foot-tall musician was
voted the world's greatest jazz violinist by Down Beat
magazine's critics' poll four years in a row. -- K.E.D.
Suggested Reading: 60 Minutes II (on-line) Jan.
29, 2003, with photos; (Allentown, Pennsylvania) Morning
Call E p1 Sep. 15, 2002, with photo; BerkshireWeb
(on-line) Apr. 15, 2001; Strings (on-line) Feb./Mar.
2002, with photo
Selected Recordings: Regina Carter,
1995; Something for Grace, 1997; Rhythms of the Heart,
1999; Motor City Moments, 2000; Paganini: After a Dream,
2003
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