John Carter; Jazz Clarinetist, Music Educator, Composer

John Carter, an award-winning jazz clarinetist, musical educator and composer, has died of complications from lung cancer.

His son, John Jr., said he was 61 when he died at Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Inglewood on March 31.

Winner of a Down Beat award in 1973 for his own small combo and another Down Beat honor in 1982 as the clarinetist most deserving of wider recognition, Carter was considered a reed virtuoso. He also played saxophone, flute and oboe in the seminal years of West Coast jazz.

Although one of his lungs was removed last year, he continued to perform in public, most recently in February for the Society for Jazz and World Music in Santa Barbara, said his agent, David Keller.

A native of Texas who graduated from college when he was 19, Carter spent much of his later career teaching throughout the Los Angeles school system. He and fellow jazz artists George (Red) Callender and James Newton had formed the L.A. Wind College, a group of musicians who were active in teaching.

Most recently, his compositions explored the history of blacks in recent centuries. Last September in an appearance at the Japan America Theatre in Los Angeles, he displayed one of those pieces, “Castles of Ghana,” an impressionistic suite inspired by the slave trade in 16th-Century West Africa.

In 1964, he formed the New Art Jazz Ensemble, the beginning of a lengthy collaboration with trumpeter Bobby Bradford, whom he met while playing with the Ornette Coleman band. In the 1970s he became part--with Bradford and Newton--of the Little Big Horn workshop.

In the 1980s, Carter began work on a series of five suites he called “Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music.” In them he combined the dynamics of modernism with the traditions of jazz and blues.

In a 1990 interview with The Times, Carter said he conceived of the project after one of his sons returned from a trip to West Africa and told him of the Ghana castles that had been used as holding pens for Africans about to be shipped to America as slaves.

In addition to John Jr., Carter is survived by his wife, Gloria, two other sons and a daughter.