JAZZ : Horns Aplenty : Although a relative youngster, saxman--and inveterate collector of instruments--James Carter has already made his mark with a style that resonates with the sounds of jazz history.

James Carter, described by Rolling Stone as “the most exciting young saxophonist to arrive on the scene in the past 25 years,” has never played a saxophone he didn’t like. And he’s got several rooms full of gleaming instruments to prove it.

Carter’s New York apartment is bursting at the seams with at least one example of nearly every variation of the versatile instrument devised by Belgian Adolphe Sax in the mid-19th Century--from the tiny sopranino to the elephantine bass. And the collection is growing by leaps and bounds.

“I’m in the lower 40s right now,” Carter says, carefully avoiding a frown from his fiancee, Telvis Williams, “and knocking on 50’s door real hard.”

A few of those instruments--most likely his trusty soprano, tenor and baritone--will turn up on June 18 during Carter’s appearance with Bill Cosby’s band, the Cos of Good Music, at the Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl. A different selection of saxophones (and even a flute or clarinet) may be on hand for his performance the following night at Catalina Bar & Grill in Hollywood.

“I’m not sure what I’ll use yet,” says Carter, whose meticulously groomed appearance is the definition of sartorial conservatism. “It’s a lot to carry, man. I’d need a truck to bring on my full assembly of horns.”

A broader panorama of Carter’s multi-instrumental skills, including performances on bass flute and bass clarinet as well as a battery of saxophones, is evident on the two albums he currently has in release: “Jurassic Classics” (DIW/Columbia) and “The Real Quietstorm” (Atlantic).

“This guy is jujifruits,” says Cosby with a laugh. “Johnny Griffin, Lester Young, he does all of them. And then he’s got that other little thing he does that sounds like the horn blew up. But what I love about him most is that, with all of that, he has a real sense of humor.”

Carter’s ability to perform in commanding fashion on a variety of instruments has not been common among top-level jazz artists. Johnny Hodges played alto sax, adding an occasional appearance on soprano. Charlie Parker dabbled in tenor on a few albums. Coleman Hawkins played tenor--and that was it--as is the case with Sonny Rollins. On the other hand, Eric Dolphy’s forays on alto saxophone, bass clarinet and flute and John Coltrane and Branford Marsalis’ work on tenor and soprano saxophones have set a high standard for a kind of mini-multi-instrumentalism.

More recently, a number of fusion artists--Kenny G, Dave Koz, Grover Washington Jr. among them--have moved freely among soprano, alto and tenor saxophones. But there has been little distinction in how they approach each instrument, with each generally sounding like an aural extension of the other.

Carter laments this approach, pointing out that “it doesn’t take into account the fact that each instrument has its own characteristics and properties.”

“Look at it this way,” he says. “If you were writing [music] about an elephant, you certainly wouldn’t employ a piccolo to play the depiction. You’d have to call in a lower woodwind instrument such as a baritone saxophone or bass saxophone or contrabass clarinet. And that illustrates one of the reasons why I use multi-instruments. It’s because of my desire to have a broader scope of sounds and timbres so that I can have the liberty to express everything that comes to mind. Each instrument can represent a certain thing that I might want to apply or get over to the audience.”

What makes Carter distinctive, however, is not simply the number and variety of horns he uses but what he does with them. Described in its essential character, his playing resonates with the sounds of jazz history. But Carter--whose style bristles with everything from the dark lyricism of Ben Webster, the urgent swing of Chu Berry and the raucous shouting of Illinois Jacquet to the hard bop complexities of Rollins, the soaring passion of Coltrane and sound-crunching avant-gardisms of Albert Ayler--incorporates without imitating, synthesizes without parodying. And everything Carter plays, whatever its source, is filtered through an utterly personal musical vision.

“Jazz, regardless of how the critics or the media or the public at large want to describe it--avant-[garde], swing, be-bop or whatever--all comes from the same well,” he explains. “I’ve always believed in that notion, rather than saying, ‘Oh, now I’m going to play a little avant’ or ‘Now I’m going to do a little of this and that’ like I’m a mad scientist mixing up some diabolical form of swing or something.”

At his best, Carter is fully capable of integrating--from that “same well” of jazz--everything from gutbucket, bar-walking blues to lightning-swift avant-garde flurries into the outer limits of the saxophone. And he has the capacity to contrast the envelope-stretching up tempos with ballads touched by warm lyricism and with grooving middle tempos cheered by an irrepressibly whimsical sense of humor. The range and breadth of his imagination would be remarkable in any player, but it is especially striking in one who is only 26 years old.

Last month, Carter was in Los Angeles briefly to receive a more tangible acknowledgment--the first CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts for music. The newly created honor--granted to five early- and mid-career artists who are making a significant impact with their work in the areas of theater, dance, music, visual arts and film-video--includes a cash grant of $45,000 plus $5,000 in expenses for an artist residency at CalArts next fall.

Was he surprised to have been chosen to receive the award?

“Oh, yes. But I pretty much remained levelheaded about it,” Carter says. “Of course, everybody else inside and outside my family was more enthusiastic. Especially,” he adds, cocking an eyebrow at Williams, “my other half. She just kept going, ‘Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah!’

“I’m just glad,” he continues, “that CalArts is giving awards to people while they’re still in existence. That posthumous stuff is OK, but this way is a lot better. I keep thinking about the fact that Bird or Fats Navarro never even had much film taken of them while they were alive. Then, after people like that are gone, they build all these memorials and set up scholarships in their names. But I guess maybe it’s easier to honor people like Bird and Fats after the fact instead of having to deal with what they were playing while they were alive.”

Carter’s career has been meteoric, even in the context of the surge of talented new players emerging in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. At age 16, he performed with Wynton Marsalis at Blues Alley in Washington. An association with Lester Bowie that began in 1988 resulted in two albums with the trumpeter’s New York Organ ensemble. Other collaborations have included a tour with Julius Hemphill, a critically acclaimed five-saxophone album titled “Tough Young Tenors” and performances with the Mingus Big Band and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. Earlier this year, Carter participated in a concert series and recording project with soprano Kathleen Battle.

He attributes his rapid musical progression, in part, to growing up in Detroit in a family environment in which music was front and center. Carter is one of five children, all of whom were “musically inclined.”

“I have a sister who plays piano,” he says, “a brother who sings and plays guitar. My oldest brother sings and plays various percussion instruments. I also had another sister, who passed away, who used to sing. I also have a cousin who plays violin, and we kind of influenced each other back and forth. Everybody was always singing because we covered the whole vocal range from soprano all the way down to bass. And it was kind of cool having all that diversity around at such an early age.”

Carter describes a youthful milieu in which there was music “24 hours a day.” In typically whimsical fashion--”Humor,” he says, “has a certain optimism”--he remembers what happened when he went to an elementary school class with a Parliament/Funkadelic tune in mind.

“It was around the time,” he recalls, “when ‘Motor-Booty Affair’ came out. I was always hearing music, and as we were taking a math test one day, all of a sudden in the back of my head I could hear this tune, ‘Aqua-Booty.’ Well, I started grooving along with it, just in my mind. But it was so quiet in that room that you could hear a pin drop. It was so quiet you could hear whatever your clothes were doing.

“There’s this one part in the tune where the bass plays--’boom, boom, boom-ba doom boom’--and then there’s this, like, crow sound: ‘Carooow, carooow.’ And it just comes out of nowhere--great stuff. Well, as I was hearing that in my mind, I suddenly broke out--right in the middle of all that pin-drop silence--with ‘Carooow, carooow!’ Suddenly, I looked up and the teacher was staring down at me. ‘Who did that?’ she said. Everybody ratted on me, of course, and I wound up having to write down 200 times, ‘I will not make birdcalls in class.’ ”

Carter does not say whether the bird calls led to his attraction to woodwind instruments, but it’s clear that his knack for storytelling has been preserved in his emotionally rich improvisations. Equally important is a belief that all music--jazz and otherwise--represents something far more powerful than notes on a page, and he is an articulate advocate for an expansive view of jazz.

“As instrumentalists,” he says, “our primary goal was to be an extension of the human voice. Somewhere down the line, that directive got flipped around to the idea that we’re supposed to have this perfection of sound and expression. That kind of controlled vibe.

“But even if you listen to classical music--like take one of the earlier recordings of [Enrico] Caruso, for example, where he sings in the Sextet from ‘Lucia di Lammermoor.’ He’s out of tune, he’s coming in at the wrong spots. But the music is there. The urgency of the music is what’s happening, what’s present. And it’s present in music that nowadays is called legit, or classical, just the way it is in jazz, and it shows that music was never supposed to be performed in just one particular kind of way.”

Perhaps because of his jazz perspective that allows for an almost infinite number of musical possibilities, Carter is not pleased about the tendency to associate him with the mainstream-oriented “young lions” who have been arriving on the jazz scene with great regularity in the last few years.

“People seem to need to have definite influences that they can hang on to,” he says, “whether it’s Lester Young or Charlie Parker or whatever. But I don’t have that kind of thing going on. There’s not that kind of chief influence in my playing--the kind of chief influence that is an extension of somebody that’s passed or is an antecedent. To me, there’s a whole other level to dealing with all the jazz antecedents that goes way beyond just absorbing musical things. It isn’t necessarily something that is on your instrument. It’s more like using all these antecedents to get to who you are, right now.

“But to a lot of listeners, jazz has become like a sporting match, where everybody’s trying to see how fast they can play through all the traditional chord changes. And that’s sterilizing the music. All music gets sterilized by revering only one type of individual or only one type of style, and by doing it strictly to the letter.”

For Carter, jazz is an art that must be examined, understood and illuminated with all the fascination and curiosity that he brings to his large collection of instruments. With 12 tenor saxophones to choose from at any given time, he has to make a kind of creative decision every time he picks up a horn.

“Each horn has different metal properties, different manufacturing techniques, and each speaks in a slightly different way,” he says. “But these differences aren’t problems. I like to think of them as variables. Variables that can be dealt with and incorporated--with optimism and imagination, in the same way that all those musical antecedents can be incorporated into the music.”

Does this mean, then, that even more saxophones will be arriving at Chez Carter in the near future?

“Hey, why not?” Carter says. “I’m just getting started.”

Telvis Williams, ever patient, ever understanding of her acquisitive companion, can only roll her eyes skyward.

* James Carter plays June 18 at the Playboy Jazz Festival, Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Hollywood. (213) 850-2000. He also plays June 19 at Catalina Bar & Grill in Hollywood. 8:30 p.m. (213) 466-2210.