Betty Carter: Leadership Through Challenge
Betty “Bebop” Carter
One of the most original scat and song stylists in jazz history, Betty Carter was encouraged by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker to continue pursuing her passion—bebop jazz—in the mid-1940s. Her apprenticeship with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra from 1948-1950, as well as her tenure recording with Ray Charles in the early 1960s—upon Miles Davis’ recommendation—solidified her style, while grounding her reputation in the 1970s through her death in 1998 as a master leader and groomer of young talent.
When Carter fell in love with the bebop style architected by Parker and Gillespie, the two vocalists who had followed Billie Holiday at the apex of female jazz singers were Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. Sarah, as Betty would recall in interviews, had the most beautiful voice. Ella was unfazed by the challenge of bebop and had already set the standard for scatting supremacy via her renditions of “How High the Moon” and “Lady Be Good.”
Making her mark would require Betty to develop a unique sound and approach. She rose to the challenge. Having grown up in Detroit, a mecca for black American music after the early 20th-century Great Migration, she was surrounded by high standards of musical excellence. Although during her tenure with Hampton’s big band she didn’t fully appreciate the apprenticeship (she’d have preferred to perform with Dizzy’s big band), she honed her ability to improvise on tunes by scatting, singing syllables and phrasing accents and musical lines like a jazz instrumentalist taking a solo. Hampton’s wife Gladys, a keen businesswoman, gave Carter the nickname “Bebop Betty” when bop was the hot new style on the scene.
By the time her fame grew through recording and touring with Charles in the early sixties, and via hits such as “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” she was among a select few who could be called a true jazz innovator. Indeed, Carmen McRae, another true jazz star of Carter’s generation, once remarked: "There's really only one jazz singer—only one: Betty Carter.” Nancy Wilson, who preferred to be called a song stylist, told me practically the same thing in an interview: Betty Carter was a vocalist with total dedication to jazz.
Seeing her in concert was an adventure of dramatic intensity and sonic bliss. The swing, that resilient buoyancy of joy, of her groups was so supple that if you entered sick you’d leave healed. Extending the innovations of bebop in tempo, Betty would play numbers super slow to blazing fast. Her arrangements, in line with masters of that craft like Quincy Jones, Jimmy Heath, Slide Hampton, and Benny Golson, put fresh touches on standards and originals, which allowed audience members like me, whether live or on record, to hear those songs in a renewed way. Her sui generis phrasing, breathy, with legato swoops and staccato swerves, made her as much of a sound innovator as Miles Davis. With one note you could tell it was Miles; with one scat phrase or lyrical inflection, you knew it was Betty.
Entrepreneur and Educator
Betty’s uncompromising refusal to sing in styles other than jazz in the 1960s cramped her career yet crystallized her artistic integrity. Betty didn’t follow trends or the fashion of the moment. When major record labels no longer carried her, she had had enough of their stuff anyway. Betty didn’t cry willow weep for me in the face of challenge; she stepped up to the entrepreneurial plate in 1970 and swung for the fences with her own Bet-Car Records. Creating original content and owning her recording masters paid off when Verve Records released much of that material starting in the late 1980s.
In the 1970s she began performing on college campuses and included jazz history in her concerts. By the late ‘70s she was a grandmaster guiding younger musicians in the ways of the music, carrying forth the idiom via apprenticeship while being energized by their youthful drive.
Schooled By Betty Carter
Just a few of the musicians who have come through the training grounds of the Betty Carter School are drummer Kenny Washington and pianists Mulgrew Miller, Cyrus Chestnut, and Benny Green. Vocalists today carry the flame of her influence too, with Cecile McLorin Salvant, Charenee Wade, and Jazzmeia Horn among their number. Furthermore, hundreds of promising students have been nurtured through the program she founded in 1993, Jazz Ahead, a workshop residency for jazz musicians and composers in their teens through 25. Jazz Ahead began in Brooklyn at 651 Arts and was brought to the Kennedy Center in D.C. through the invitation of Dr. Billy Taylor. Now the program is in the able hands of the Kennedy Center Jazz Artistic Director for Jazz, Jason Moran, who experienced the Jazz Ahead residency in 1998.
Tough love is one way to describe the intensity of her practice sessions with budding artists. She’d tell them to bring it, to never hold back on stage or in life. “Do things to make people follow you,” she’d emphasize when making the point that originality, spontaneity, and individuality were how you make your mark on the music. “What’s your thing? Jazz demands that you become an individual,” a lesson she learned when starting and developing her career.
Carter would leave room for her young charges to grow while constantly challenging them to stretch beyond their comfort zones. Engaging in call-and-response “trading fours” to the improvisational lines of the ensemble pianist or sax player, Carter consistently demonstrated antagonistic cooperation at its best.
This exciting interplay is evident in this short YouTube clip of one of her most famous songs, “Tight.”
Betty would also explain musical concepts in sensual ways, making her points even more memorable. She would tell the men to take their time when playing a ballad, as they should when romancing a woman. Don’t rush. Start soft. Pace yourself. “You have eight bars to climax, just like sex,” she once said in a short documentary, “New All the Time.”
Once, after a lackluster performance by a young saxophonist on a ballad, Carter reportedly said to him at the next rehearsal that “If you knew how to make love to a woman, you’d know how to play a ballad!”
How’s that for challenging leadership?