Review: RON CARTER QUARTET Walks at Regattabar

There's a powerfully resonant, special quality to the lifelong oeuvre of a jazz master, such as in the inimitable example of bassist Ron Carter. In the 1960s, integral to the rhythm sections of Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis, his artistry may have seemed shadowed by the towering giants of the music that was to give voice to the Great Migration, the most significant movement of peoples in U.S. history.

Such individuals as Ron Carter are more than musicians, they are blaring signposts on the winding paths of history, such as have since reclaimed the proud heritage of African-American people through a signature sound that has become essential to popular culture, down to the meaning of being American.

Ron Carter "wrote the book on walking," said bassist John Patitucci in the July 2015 edition of Bass Player Magazine. And from his bookish visage, Carter walks the walk, tuxedoed and grinning from a soft-spoken, humble presence that is the very cool embodiment of a personality authentic to a life lived in jazz.

The Charles Hotel jazz lounge, known as Regattabar, is a classy joint, where Bostonian music buffs treat themselves to stiff mixed drinks, such as the choice selection, "Another Night in Tunisia" named after the now-famed Bobby McFerrin tune.

Well-cropped and eccentric Ivy League students welcome the intelligentsia beneath antique stone archways across the street from Harvard Square. Around the block, another green space dubbed Winthrop is known to have built the first farmer's market in Cambridge. Nearly four hundred years later, residents still sprout up fresh, locally harvested produce in open-air storefronts.

Cambridge is a remarkable exhibition of living history. The city swells calmly with the airs both regal and revolutionary, where technological and literary cultures have merged to academic, histrionic proportions.

After receiving an advanced music education in New York City, Carter has since changed the sonic horizons of the human world with his ingenious jazz compositions, his innovations as a recording artist, and world-touring performer.

Beside his accomplishments as an educator, author, composer and arranger, there is the basic truth that the sound of the acoustic bass would be unrecognizable to the contemporary ear were it not for the jazz music of Carter.

He first became a bandleader in 1961 on the album Where?, released by Prestige Records. The incomparable visionaries Eric Dolphy and Mal Waldron shared in the muses that moved them together. As Carter explained for his audience warming up to whiskey and coffee in the subtle, early autumn chill at Regattabar, he became a bandleader simply to call his favorite songs.

Astute followers of Boston music heritage remember the early days of Paul's Mall from the Boylston Street of the 1970s, where Carter once fascinated an eternally impressed Massachusetts fan base. Nostalgic eyes still boggle at the sight of the great, bearing photographs and stories from the springboard that once hosted everyone from Bob Marley and Muddy Waters to John Coltrane and Sun Ra, not to mention a candlelit Billy Joel concert during the great Northeast blackout.

Today, Massachusetts is a proud home to the recent Jazz Radio chart-topping, New Bedford-based Whaling City Sound production, Thrasher Dream Trio, where Carter recorded with legendary pianist Kenny Barron, and drummer Gerry Gibbs. The Trio has become prolific.

The Ron Carter Quartet is now animated by the effervescent magic of pianist Renee Rosnes, who so gently minded the harmonic graces, the rhythmic breaks and gravity-defying melodies of the evening. She almost stole the show, if not for the powerfully intoxicating moods of Carter himself.

Her interpretation of My Funny Valentine struck speechlessly perfect chords as to leave half the room breathless, choked up by the sheer beauty of creative fruition, that essence of human life that only real art can summon with such universality as in the appreciation of the listening public.

When an acoustic bass string rattles with that immense, vibrant strength, and all in the hands of a master in the art of sound, the seeker is humbled. Carter stretched the musical imagination for his first set, just over an hour, which featured his compositions, 595, Mr. Bow Tie (dedicated to his father), and Seven Steps to Heaven.

At 78 years of age, he leads Latin rhythms and African roots through jazz progressions as complex as they are exquisite. In philosophy, the concept of negative capability could best be apt to describe the character and nature of the sound that Ron Carter exudes onstage. Simply, the idea is about embracing ambiguity and transcending presupposition, which, in the jazz world as led by Carter, would basically translate as improvisation.

Photo Credit: Steve Mazza

Photo Details: Ron Carter, January 1976 at Paul's Mall (The Jazz Workshop) on Boylston Street in Boston

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