Photograph courtesy Jazz at the Bistro
She learned piano by ear when she was 2. After she deliberately ended a recital with a wrong note, her parents switched her to violin and the Suzuki method, which was open and flexible enough to accommodate her monster creativity. By high school, Carter was playing with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and studying with Itzhak Perlman and the late Yehudi Menuhin. Then, at 16, she heard French jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli play live. And she decided her path was more Monk, less Beethoven.
You can still hear the echo of the symphony hall in her notes, but her sound and vision are too kinetic and cosmic for an orchestra pit. The music holds entire worlds inside it: Beale Street, Bourbon Street, Paris cafés, the loft jazz of Billy Bang and the archetypal voice of the griot. Her latest album, Reverse Thread, funded by a Macarthur Fellowship, is a collection of African folk songs translated into the jazz idiom.
On the record, Carter’s rich strings are filled out with accordion and kora, a harp made from a halved calabash, played by traditional storytellers in Guinea, Mali, and Senegal. She also worked in field recordings: on one track, you can hear Ugandan women singing, the soft bleating of goats audible in the background. It is this willingness to experiment, bravely stepping away from the easy schmaltz and fast cash of the Great American Songbook, that gives Carter the power to, as one TIME writer put it, “take the listener into the future of jazz.”
Regina Carter Quartet, November 20 through 23, 7:30 p.m. $33 to $38. Jazz at the Bistro, 3536 Washington, 314-289-4030, jazzstl.org.
