An Awesome Arsenal of Talent

To win an important award is an honor, the significance of which has been slowly diluted by the proliferation of media ceremonies. Today the rarest and most prestigious tributes go to the men and women who, in effect, have themselves become awards.

Bennett Lester Carter has just joined the elite group. Last month, at the Hollywood Bowl, the first annual “Benny” award, in the form of a bronze bust of Carter, commissioned by the American Federation of Jazz Societies and sculpted by the bassist-turned-artist John Heard, was presented to Carter. In future years it will go to others who come closest to matching his achievements.

Such artists will be hard to find. Carter today, instead of resting on the laurels accumulated during overlapping careers as saxophonist, composer, arranger, bandleader, songwriter, trumpeter and drafter of scores for television series and movies, remains as active as ever. He has just composed his first-ever extended piece for two vibraphones, to be premiered Tuesday evening at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall, with Milt Jackson and Bobby Hutcherson in the featured roles. An hour after the concert ends, his 83rd birthday will begin.

“I’m calling it ‘Good Vibes,’ ” he said over tea at his Los Angeles home overlooking the Valley. “It will run from 30 to 40 minutes; the Classical Jazz Orchestra, a repertory ensemble, will perform it. Bobby Hutcherson will double on vibes and marimba, an instrument you don’t hear often enough. It’s a long the lines of the ‘Kansas City Suite,’ which I wrote for Count Basie in 1960--a swinging thing, with ballad and Latin interludes. We’ll probably record the whole suite in a studio a few days later.”

Carter’s recording career is in higher gear than ever. He is a guest soloist on a current album of his tunes recorded by pianist Marian McPartland, for Concord. Next month the session he recorded with Phil Woods, an alto saxophonist who came out of the Charlie Parker generation, will be issued by Music Masters.

“Phil is younger than my daughter,” he says, “but age has never been an issue. I wrote a song called ‘My Man Phil’--words and music; I sang it on the record--and he dedicated a number to me.”

Lyric writing is the newest addition to Carter’s arsenal of talents. Over the years he has had such collaborators as Johnny Mercer (“A Kiss From You”) and Sammy Cahn (“Only Trust Your Heart”) but lately he has devoted himself to the serious study of how lyrics are devised.

In the works now is a Benny Carter songbook album that will belatedly bring together, in vocal version on one CD, some of his best known standards, among them “Blues in My Heart” (1930), “When Lights are Low” (1936), “All That Jazz” (from the Sammy Davis movie “A Man Called Adam”) and “Key Largo.”

Also due sooner or later is “Benny Carter: Symphony in Riffs,” a 60-minute documentary that has been shown and praised in England while ironically an American release is still to be set. The film, narrated by Burt Lancaster, includes splendid evocations of Harlem in the ‘20s and of Carter’s expatriate years and Hollywood movie successes.

Carter’s gift for melodic creation has been expressed most memorably through his improvisations on alto saxophone. The logic, symmetry and beauty of these solos set a standard that has never been outdated, despite the inroads of bop, modality, the avant-garde and whatever other movements have prevailed since his style was essentially set in the 1930s. His orchestral arrangements, particularly those of a five-piece sax section on such records as “Further Definitions” in the early 1960s, are paradigms of skill and sensitivity.

Carter’s writing has been interpreted with panache by musicians at a one-or-two-generation remove from him. Those who played in his orchestra at the recent Hollywood Bowl concert (and who will return when he shares a bill there with Ella Fitzgerald Aug. 22) range from musicians in their 30s (saxophonist Jeff Clayton and his bassist brother John) to others in their 60s, like the trombonist Buster Cooper.

He has gone from being the youngest man in the band (“I was only 23 when I joined Fletcher Henderson”) to becoming the oldest.

Carter’s longevity has enabled him to triumph over many obstacles--most conspicuously racism, which he has opposed actively on many levels, whether it was fighting to retain ownership of a home in Hollywood against the objections of bigoted neighbors, or taking an active role in eliminating the segregated musicians’ unions that long existed in Los Angeles, until the two combined in 1953.

Carter’s achievements in broadening the vocabulary of the music world he has inhabited for 65 years have involved most of jazz history’s honored names: he has played with (or written arrangements or conducted for) Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Dizzy Gillespie, Django Reinhardt, Max Roach, Buddy Rich, Quincy Jones, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Dexter Gordon, Coleman Hawkins--not to mention Ella and Peggy and Sarah and Carmen and a constellation of other singers. He has outlived many contemporaries, but those who have survived are all good friends.

It becomes hard to find a negative word to say about Benny Carter, to avoid the overtones of press agentry. For the record, then, let it be said that he was a co-composer of “Cow Cow Boogie,” a song of which he is less than proud (“but it made a fair amount of money for me”), and that his singing is, well, not on the level of his other accomplishments. At that point the negatives have to stop.

The tributes, though, go on and on; just last month, with a thousand names from which to choose, an international panel of 64 jazz critics voted him Jazzman of the Year in a Down Beat poll.

He has done it all and won them all--what possible unrealized ambition can remain?

“Easy,” he said, “To live to be a hundred--and in good health.”

Don’t bet against it.