Farewell to a jazz cosmopolitan

As gracious and warm as Carter was, he was also driven. He needed to be, to deal with life on the road during segregation, spearhead the integration of the black and white musicians' unions in 1950s Los Angeles and succeed in the studios. An arranger had to be fast and service-oriented -- if you turned down one assignment, the client might not give you another. A tenor saxophonist and arranger from a later generation, Benny Golson, said that when he quit the studios to return to jazz, it felt like manumission. Given the press of Carter's arranging work from the late 1940s through the 1960s, he limited his public appearances to occasional Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts, but continued to lead some albums as an instrumentalist and composer. In later years, when he visited New York as a performer, he was always scrambling to complete arrangements for the next concert or recording session.

His move back to performing was partly Hollywood-driven. Studio work began to dry up in the 1970s, as rock displaced jazz and singers like Fitzgerald lost their mass-market record sales. Successful enough to have a house in the hills above Los Angeles, Carter could have gone into comfortable semi-retirement. But while jazz often ignores performers in mid-career, it promotes players over 70 as "legends." For the first time, Carter had hit a P.R. sweet spot, and he made the most of it. In the early 1970s, Princeton professor Morroe Berger organized a series of workshops and concerts for Carter at the university. By mid-decade they had morphed into a touring schedule that would take him around the world.

In 1976, as he approached the magic age of 70, Carter did his first album as a leader in 10 years. Playing what he liked, and acclaimed by the jazz public for it, he went on to lead 26 more big band and small group albums before retiring in 1997 at age 90. Few jazz musicians were as prolific in those years. In the late 1940s, it looked like bebop revolutionary Charlie Parker had passed him as the leading alto man, but Carter's resurgence made him more current than Parker, who had died young and recorded few LPs with modern sound quality. Ironically, the one Parker album that has remained central to the repertory, judging from radio airplay on WBGO, the New York metropolitan area's leading jazz station, is "The Charlie Parker Jam Session" (1952), a head-to-head-to-head between Parker, Carter and Johnny Hodges that displays their distinct styles at a peak.

Carter's playing retains its youthful buoyancy on "Central City Sketches" (1987), which marked his first American big-band album in 20 years, updating arrangements of older compositions and including the shimmering new six-movement title suite. He thickened his tone and simplified his rhythmic filigrees, which may have been concessions to both the newer hard bop sound and his distaste for long hours of daily practice. (Like Boston Celtics great John Havlicek, Carter had the gift of getting into playing shape quickly.)

After he turned 80, he used fewer fireball tempos and more sustained notes, which he shaded dynamically and tonally to convey emotion and build rhythmic tension. Carter avoided the modern tendency to play chord changes like a sewing machine -- the melody still shone through. The Grammy-winning "Elegy in Blue" (1994) vibrantly reworked the signature tunes of departed jazz greats, but it depressed Carter, by reminding him of all the contemporaries he had outlived. In the final years of his career, his tone became drier and his phrases shortened, but he remained adventurous. His last CD, "Another Time, Another Place" (1996), features an up-tempo, nearly unaccompanied alto duet with Phil Woods on "Speak Low" that would have made many younger players implode. At age 89, he flew to Thailand to play a command performance for King Bhumibol (an amateur jazz saxophonist).

Carter lived for whatever he was doing next. His Los Angeles house had a wall full of awards that spilled out onto nearby tables, including the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts, but he resolutely refused to dwell on the past. I talked with him regularly in his last years, and everything I learned about his era I learned from books. (These included the excellent Carter biography by Morroe Berger, Ed Berger and James Patrick, who somehow got him to reminisce.) Once, at a Lincoln Center tribute concert, Wynton Marsalis dredged up a 1930s Carter composition that its author couldn't remember. "At my age you start forgetting things," Carter said. "It's the things I want to forget and can't that are the problem."

Carter is an immortal in jazz, and by living to 95 in good health he even came close to that in the real world. But while mortality catches up with all of us, Carter's wit, elegance and propulsion live on, burnishing the American spirit.

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