Benny Carter, Just 87, Remains a Player to Be Reckoned With : Jazz: Talent and luck have had much to do with the saxman’s longevity. But wide recognition is still missing.

It seemed easy, at first glance, to dismiss Benny Carter’s appearance at the Playboy Festival as just another Golden Oldies performance--a polite nod to the jazz past. After all, when Carter, 87, walked on stage at the Hollywood Bowl, the venerable saxophonist- trumpeter-composer-arranger was accompanied by his lifelong pal, trumpeter Doc Cheatham, 90.

But polite references to the jazz past disappeared as soon as the music kicked into high gear, and the enthusiastic audience quickly realized it was in for a joyous musical romp.

The ever-elegant Carter strode to the center of the platform, planted himself in a majestical position, wrapped his hands around his shining alto saxophone and soared through one brilliantly articulated number after another. At his side, the slender, almost lanky Cheatham, lifted his horn to the sky in a series of brassy trumpet manifestoes that called up shimmering echoes of the legendary New Orleans jazz giant Buddy Bolden.

It was a performance to remember--as are so many others in Carter’s extended years of musical seniority.

On Wednesday night, that seniority will be acknowledged by the jazz community with a special program at the Jazz Bakery celebrating Carter’s 88th birthday. He will play at the venue through Sunday with a sterling quartet that includes Roger Kellaway, piano; Larry Gales, bass, and Sherman Ferguson, drums.

There is, however, one small glitch amid the celebratory enthusiasm--even though it is one that Carter disregards. His luck may have helped keep him hale, hearty and filled with creative energy long past the point when most men would be happy to have a comfortable easy chair and an ever-handy remote control, but it has not brought him either the high-profile visibility or the broad, reverent esteem that has come to many jazz artists of his musical stature.

Carter has been content to maintain a steady, solid career, admired by professionals and respected for his accomplishments, without becoming especially well-known to the general public.

“You know, I’m not really conscious of things like that,” Carter says. “I suppose I may be, subliminally, but that’s the only way. I just try to do what I do the best I can, and hope the good stuff comes out.”

As it almost always does. But superstardom has never been much of a motivating factor for the New York-born musician, who has always expressed greater interest in the exploration of his craft and the opportunities jazz has provided to travel and see the world.

This, despite the fact that Carter, along with Johnny Hodges--two months his senior, and a major star of the Duke Ellington Orchestra for four decades--virtually created the sound and the substance of the alto saxophone in jazz. Until the arrival of Charlie Parker in the ‘40s, no alto saxophonist alive could imagine using anyone other than Carter or Hodges as a model.

Carter dislikes such comparisons, and is far more generous in his depiction of Hodges than he is of himself.

“The only thing I can say about Johnny Hodges,” Carter says, “is that I loved his playing then, and I still love everything I hear today. No one treated a melody as he did. And I shy away from doing things he’s done. For example, I very often get requests to play Ellington’s ‘Warm Valley.’ But I hear Johnny playing it in my mind and I say, ‘No, thanks, just go put on a Johnny Hodges album and hear it as it should be played.’ ”

Asked how he developed his own uniquely airy, melodically venturesome alto saxophone style, he is characteristically modest, given the revelatory nature of his reply.

“Unfortunately, we had no real models,” Carter says. “The only model that I had for playing was Frankie Trumbauer on C Melody sax. And I didn’t have my C Melody sax for very long, because I was told that if I had any expectations of playing with an orchestra, I’d better get myself an alto and figure out what to do with it. Which is what I did.”

He is similarly reticent in his portrayal of the musically eventful years of the late ‘20s and early ‘30s in which he was beginning to produce the charts that would define big-band arranging for decades to come.

Taking on a kind of debonair aw-shucks-it-wasn’t-anything- special demeanor, Carter replies: “Everything that happened at that time, we just sort of took it and went with it. Everything seemed normal, although different. We were doing what we did for fun. And I must tell you that we would probably just as well have done it for free.”

Carter’s first instrument was the trumpet and, though he now plays it rarely, he continues to view it with great affection.

“After having a few lessons on the piano,” he recalls, “I got a trumpet. But it only lasted over a weekend. Because I brought it home and thought I was going to be an instant Bubber Miley, who was then living around the corner and starring with Duke Ellington. But I couldn’t get a sound out of the thing. The next Monday, a friend who lived in the neighborhood who played saxophone suggested that I go and get a saxophone because it was much easier. So I took his advice. But my love was always the trumpet.”

Eventually, he came back to the trumpet with Cheatham’s aid.

“I had a big band at the Arcadia Ballroom in New York City at 52nd and Broadway in 1932,” Carter says, “and Doc was my lead trumpet player. He insisted that I take his horn and practice, and go up to the mike and play a solo. He was just a constant encouragement--a wonderful guy then and a wonderful guy now.”

By the time he moved to Europe in 1935, Carter was proficient on both trumpet and alto saxophone, and now and then played the piano and sang. With an introduction from critic-musician Leonard Feather, he became a staff arranger for the BBC, and recorded with a wide range of players, expanding and enhancing the understanding of jazz in Europe. In 1937, he led a multinational, multiracial band in the Netherlands.

But the following year, with the shadow of Nazi Germany looming over the Continent, Carter returned to the United States. “I saw what was coming,” he says, “and it was one of the reasons I came home. Some of the black musicians who were over there at that time actually wound up in concentration camps. They really were an endangered species.”

Carter resettled in Los Angeles in 1942, becoming one of the first African American musicians to work regularly in film and recording studio orchestras and an influential figure in the integration of the two segregated musicians’ unions in 1953.

In the ‘50s and ‘60s, he played and composed for an array of singers--Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald and Ray Charles among them. Since then he has mixed occasional performing with recording and arranging assignments. In 1974, Princeton University awarded him an honorary doctorate of music.

These days, he frequently works with younger musicians and is delighted by the revival of straight-ahead jazz that has taken place in the last decade. Although he is reluctant to single out any single player for praise (“They all sound great to me”), he mentions pianists Kellaway and Benny Green and trumpeter Arturo Sandoval as musicians who have recently attracted his attention.

Carter’s formula for his uncommonly vital longevity is as laid- back as his approach to jazz.

“Nothing unusual,” he says. “I just to try to eat every day and sleep every day. And I don’t overdo exercise--although I did get in the pool once.”

Nor does he have any special diet tips.

“Just so long as there’s enough for a second helping,” Carter adds with a smile. “I try to live my life, in everything I do, in moderation. I try not to overeat, I have a little drink every day, and I try not to overdo anything. And I take a lot of time off.”

He now resides in a comfortable home in the Hollywood Hills with his wife, Hilma.

“That’s the woman I love,” he says. “We’ve been married for 17 years, but we’ve known each other for 56. A couple of other marriages came in between, but I think we finally got it right.”