A MILESTONE A MINUTE FOR CARTER

Items from a musician’s notebook:

Complete weeklong nightclub booking in New York. Finish writing 20 minutes of music for use in Glasgow. Fly to Verona for jazz festival. Fly to Glasgow. Perform three times at Glasgow Jazz Festival, leading British orchestra. Fly to The Hague to play North Sea Jazz Festival and to receive festival’s “Bird” award; fly to Cannes; on to Copenhagen for four days at the Tivoli; back to Los Angeles to prepare for Aug. 6 concert at New York’s Lincoln Center.

Quite a heavy schedule, you may say, though not unusual for traveling musicians; after all, they expect their lives to be fairly hectic.

Yes, but how many of them will turn 80 next weekend?

Benny Carter, the alto saxophonist, composer, arranger, trumpeter, educator and bandleader will mark that milestone Saturday at a Malibu gathering of old friends.

His place in 20th-Century music was best summed up in 1972 by the caption under a photo of him in the Saturday Evening Post. It read: “Benny Carter, World’s Greatest Living Jazz Artist, Any Instrument.”

The Carter images are multifarious. Above and beyond his reputation as the preeminent alto sax master, he has among his songwriting credits such abiding works as the ballads “Blues in My Heart,” “Lonely Woman,” “Key Largo,” “Nightfall” and “Melancholy Lullaby,” as well as the perennial “When Lights Are Low” (recorded by Miles Davis, Tony Bennett, George Shearing, Sarah Vaughan and some 60 others), and the pop-oriented “Cow Cow Boogie.”

As a bandleader, Carter was admired for the precision of his ensembles and the beauty of his writing, particularly for the saxophone section, as well as for his ability to select promising young instrumentalists. At one time or another, his sidemen included Miles Davis, Teddy Wilson, Dizzy Gillespie, Big Sid Catlett, Max Roach, Jonah Jones, Eddie Heywood, Vic Dickenson, Ben Webster and Gerald Wilson. A pioneer in reverse integration, he had Art Pepper, Buddy Rich and Paul Cohen in the band in the early 1940s.

J. J. Johnson, who went on to become an award-winning trombonist and a movie and TV composer, joined Carter just before his 19th birthday and remained for two years. “He is the quintessential musician,” Johnson says, “also a dear friend and a perfect gentleman. What more can I say?”

Carter has to his credit 60 years as a composer (his first published work was “Nobody Knows,” in collaboration with Fats Waller), 60 years as an arranger (starting with some charts for a Fletcher Henderson band session in April, 1927), 64 years as a saxophonist, and 58 years doubling in brass (he began playing trumpet regularly in 1929).

The 1930s were mainly spent leading his own bands, one of which was the world’s first interracial and international orchestra, in Holland during his three-year expatriation. Settling in Hollywood in 1942, he arranged some music and played on the sound track for “Stormy Weather,” then worked on at least 100 movies, arranging and/or composing or playing, and appearing onscreen in “Thousands Cheer,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The View From Pompey’s Head.”

Overlapping were his TV years (1958-71), writing countless episodes for “M Squad,” “The Bob Hope Chrysler Theater,” “General Electric Theater,” “Name of the Game,” “Ironside” and “The Bold Ones.”

He is the only jazz musician whose achievements have had to be documented in a two-volume work. “Benny Carter: A Life in American Music” (Scarecrow Press, 1982) was written just before the death of its author, Morroe Berger, a sociologist at Princeton University, where Carter could often be found as a visiting professor and performer during the 1970s. Berger, an expert on Middle Eastern affairs, went along with Carter on a 1975 State Department-sponsored tour of that area. The books, completed by his son Ed Berger, include a discography, filmography, and lists by artist and title of the hundreds of recordings of Carter works. Listing the artists who have not played or sung his music would have been a far simpler task.

That Carter became Berger’s close friend, with many shared interests both in and outside music, was surprising to nobody who knew him. “One of the driving forces in Daddy’s life,” says Carter’s daughter, schoolteacher Joyce Mills, “is his obsession with learning. He never wants to stop acquiring knowledge. He’s a voracious reader. He’s an art collector; his walls are lined with great paintings. He’s an expert cook. He learned about the stock market and became a successful investor. Recently, he borrowed my daughter Mary’s guitar; he wanted to learn how to play it.

“One of my great regrets is that when I finally graduated from college I was in my 40s and didn’t bother to go to the ceremony, though Daddy would have loved to be there. But when Mary graduated from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., nothing could have stopped him from going there.”

One of Carter’s oldest friends is the veteran music publisher Mike Gould. “I once helped Benny get a house in Hollywood, which wasn’t easy in 1943,” he recalls. “Later, when I came out of the Navy, he asked where I was going to stay. He was going away for a month or two and gave me the keys to his house. When he came back he refused to let me leave; I stayed there with my wife and daughter, rent-free, for almost two years. Once you’re Benny’s friend, you’re a friend forever.”

Today, Bennett Lester Carter has reached what might be called a milestone-a-minute stage of his career. His trophy room is almost running out of space for all the plaques, honorary doctorates and poll victory symbols. His birthday will be proclaimed as “Benny Carter Day” in Los Angeles.

He feels too much is being made of the date. Once Bill Berry, then playing trumpet with him in Japan, asked him: “Benny, what is the secret of success?” Carter thought for a moment, then gave a one-word answer: “Survive.”

On the other hand, he recently said: “During a recent tour I received this tremendous ovation one night, and I said to myself, ‘Why should anyone get this just for survival?’ That’s not what we’re selling. We’re offering music to the public, some of whom may never have heard of Benny Carter. Maybe some of them feel it’s possibly their last chance to see me, but I’m certainly not planning it that way.”

Carter lives in a handsome home overlooking the San Fernando Valley with his wife, Hilma Ollila Arons Carter, a retired schoolteacher whom he married in 1979. He seems to be in excellent health, though he does not swim, play golf or exercise. He demurs: “Yes, I do exercise. I climb up those stairs every night to go to bed, and every morning I come down the stairs. I walk to the car, I walk out of the car to the post office or into the bank--thank God--and as you know, even when I used to smoke, it was a pipe, which I didn’t inhale. I think I owe my condition to good genes, good parents--and their parents had good parents too.”

He lives first-class, whether at home or on a plane or in his Rolls or at a favorite restaurant. He accepts only those jobs that interest him and can command a healthy price. He has formed a 10-piece band to tour Japan almost every year since 1977. He still enjoys the academic life and is considering offers from several universities, among them a week of clinics at Harvard next spring.

A main project presently is a film involving him not just as composer but as the star. Lucille Ostrow, a concert pianist determined to translate her admiration into practical terms, is producing what she expects to be a full-length feature for theatrical release. “Benny’s life,” she says, “will be seen as a microcosm for the history of jazz.”

If Ostrow plans to present all sides of the Carter persona, she will have a hard time finding anyone with a negative comment. Typical of the longevity of Carter’s influence and the power of his impact is a recollection by Los Angeles City Councilman and ex-jazzman Ernani Bernardi:

“Benny was playing marvelously when I met him, and I’m talking about 56 years ago! After I went to New York and played with Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, I’d go to hear him leading his own band at the Savoy. He has been my idol all my life, and he’s unbelievably youthful. I’m sure he’ll live to be 120.”