Dignified Look at Life, Times of Benny Carter

The question is not large, relative to matters of international relations or the debt crisis. But it gets to the heart of persisting attitudes about jazz and jazzmakers. Will popular audiences accept a portrait of a great jazzman who is also a solid citizen with no known major bad habits?

Harrison Engle, whose documentary on Theodore Roosevelt, “T.R.,” enjoyed major success a few years ago, has now completed a film about the life and times of the fine jazz musician Benny Carter, called “Benny Carter: Symphony in Riffs” after one of his best-known big band compositions.

Carter, at 82, is still touring the world and playing cool, fresh and invigorating alto saxophone and trumpet, and composing and arranging. The thing is, Carter is not a dope addict, has not had to hock his horns to feed his arm, his nose or his thirst. His vocabulary would not cause alarm in a preacher’s house. He is very happily married to a former schoolteacher and lives a tidy upper-middle-class life here in Los Angeles.

The D word that springs to mind in his connection is Dignity, not Drunk, Druggie, Debauchee or Decadent.

It boggles the mind to contemplate the problems Engle had doing a documentary on a man who is a living legend of jazz but who could easily be taken for a college professor.

But it further boggles the mind to realize that Carter was part of the Harlem ‘20s, the Harlem of the jam sessions where modern urban jazz (to be called “swing” in its big band form) was taking shape. Or that Carter played with Fletcher Henderson, one of the early shapers of big band jazz and who is now an icon in jazz history.

The film, inspired and financed by Lucille Ostrow, herself a composer whose music Carter has recorded in the past, posed other kinds of problems. There is little early footage of Carter, and virtually none of him performing. But there are scrapbooks of stills, and Engle has used them expertly, playing Carter’s early records behind them to heighten a kind of you-are-there feeling.

The stills, and some well-chosen newsreel footage, evoke not just a life but a whole era, from the Roaring ‘20s in full cry, to the ‘30s and Carter’s expatriate times in London and Paris.

There are several of those shipboard photographs, a genre which has found no real equivalent in the Jet Age. There is Hollywood early and late: Carter and horn backing Lena Horne in a movie, Carter writing for the Hitchcock show and other television series.

In its broadest outlines, Carter’s story is typical of many another jazzman’s: the acclaim that came earlier and louder abroad than at home (a situation that even now has changed less than it should have).

For a black musician, there were the compounding problems of segregation at home. Carter was one of the first to have an integrated orchestra, and in the ‘50s he was a leader in the fight to merge Los Angeles’ two musicians union locals--one black, one white, a single union with a colorblind pay scale.

Threaded through the documentary is a long reminiscing interview with Carter and contemporary footage of him performing in concert abroad and in nightclubs here and in New York. There are admiring comments about Carter from Andre Previn, Ella Fitzgerald and others, and a delightful shipboard tete-a-tete with Carter and Dizzy Gillespie.

The hourlong film, with a warm narration written by Ted Strauss and read by Burt Lancaster, had its debut at a private screening in Hollywood recently for a few hundred of Carter’s local admirers, many of them his fellow musicians.

What remains to be seen is whether television can accommodate a skillful portrait of a great musician who, however, violates the image, enhanced by the media over the decades, of all jazz players as substance-abusing dazed wrecks.

There’s another way to tell it.