Prof. Betty Offers Lessons in Jazz, Life : Jazz: Vocalist Carter’s bands have been a virtual who’s-who of young talent. She’s back in town tonight with a new crop of students.

Name an important young jazz rhythm section player in the 1990s and there’s a strong likelihood that he has served an apprenticeship in the band of Betty Carter, the vocalist once described by Carmen McRae as “America’s only true jazz singer.” Godmother Jazz. The University of Betty. Lady Enthusiasm.

Any and all of the above titles can be, and probably have been, applied to Carter.

But these days Carter is far less concerned with discussing her own remarkable skills than she is with trumpeting the abilities of the impressive brood of talent that has come to maturity beneath her wings--a list that includes pianists John Hicks, Cyrus Chestnut, Jacky Terrasson, Benny Green and Mulgrew Miller, bassists Chris Thomas, Michael Bowie and Ira Coleman, and drummers Clarence Penn, Gregory Hutchinson, Lewis Nash and Kenny Washington.

And when she opens a weeklong run at Catalina Bar & Grill tonight, the 65 year-old Carter will be performing with an even younger quartet of players: pianist Xavier Davis, 21; tenor saxophonist Mark Shim, 21; bassist Matt Hughes, 20, and drummer Will Terrill, 21.

Each is a product of Jazz Ahead, an annual workshop for young musicians that Carter has been conducting for the past three years.

“It’s a one-week program,” Carter says. “We bring 20 or so musicians to town [New York], we put them up at a hotel, we feed them and we rehearse for about four days. Then we perform two days before the public at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem and the Majestic Theatre in Brooklyn.”

Jazz Ahead is a collaboration between Carter and 651, an independent presenting organization affiliated with the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

“651 came to me a few years ago,” Carter recalls, “and asked if I wanted to have a program where I could bring in young musicians [mostly recommended by established players] and give them an opportunity to start honing their craft. And I said, ‘Sure!’ It was like a chance to expand on what I was already doing with my own bands.”

In addition to those who have moved into Carter’s quartet, other members of this year’s Jazz Ahead crop have already begun to filter out to such ensembles as Branford Marsalis’ Buckshot LeFonque, Roy Hargrove’s band and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.

In her work with the young players in Jazz Ahead, Carter is a firm taskmaster who demands that imaginative flights of fancy be thoroughly sustained by essential jazz elements.

She takes a similar tack with the musicians she has chosen for her backup group. Often criticized for her willingness to deconstruct melodies and rhythms, Carter insists that her players learn both the musical and the lyric content of the classic songs in her repertoire.

“You have to remember,” she explains, “that most of these young players have never been inundated with all these standards the way older musicians were. So, at rehearsals, I make sure that they hear the melody to these tunes, hear the chords, understand the song’s story.

“Some musicians get carried away with themselves and just play, play, play, without listening to what’s going on around them. So I try to help them decide where to play in a song, so that I have room to get the lyrics out. They have to learn that lyrics are the most important thing when you have a singer up front. I tell them, ‘I want you to be creative, of course, but I want you to listen, too.’ ”

Perhaps more than any other singer, Carter is musician first and vocalist second. The ferocity of her presentation is legendary, as she stalks the stage, bending and shaping her voice, taking songs apart and putting them back together with a penetrating passion.

She credits her consistently innovative, envelope-stretching artistry to the high quality of the young musicians she has worked with over the last decade or two.

“They help me to think differently,” Carter says. “I’m not in a trap. I won’t sing a song with Cyrus [Chestnut] the same way I do with Jacky [Terrasson]. Jacky’s going to come at me from a different way, and I’m going to have to think another way. And that’s what I really want. I really want the difference. I really want to improve. I really want to know that I can think and react on the spur of the moment.

“Don’t ask me why I get this kind of musical stimulation from young players. I just do. It’s not something that I woke up and planned. But it’s the best way I know to keep this music alive.”

Carter, who was born Lillie Mae Jones on May 16, 1930, in Flint, Mich., was a precocious teen-ager, singing with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker in Detroit in 1947. The performance clearly had an impact on the youngster, and she began touring with the Lionel Hampton big band the following year using the name Betty Bebop. She worked with Miles Davis in the late ‘50s, and appeared with Ray Charles for three years in the early ‘60s. By 1969, she had begun organizing her own groups, and has continued to use a variety of trios and quartets ever since.

The declining interest in acoustic jazz in the ‘70s forced Carter to release albums on her Bet-Car label, among which was the Grammy-nominated “The Audience With Betty Carter.”

“Those were difficult years,” she recalls. “I almost panicked because I was convinced that we were going to lose the audience. And we did. And we lost clubs, too. I was determined to not let that happen to me. I was determined to stay fresh, and the energy of working with young people was what I wanted and what I needed in order to stay fresh.”

Carter’s insistence upon concentrating on the music eventually paid off. In 1988, she signed with Verve, winning a Grammy that year for “Look What I’ve Got,” and another nomination in 1990 for “Droppin’ Things.” She has been voted No. 1 in Down Beat’s critics and readers polls for the past seven years and was awarded an American Jazz Masters Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1992.

But Carter has never had a far-reaching, signature song comparable to Ella Fitzgerald’s “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” or “Lady Be Good,” Billie Holiday’s “Lover Man” or Sarah Vaughan’s “Misty.” And, although her recordings have sold fairly well, she still is better known to the jazz community than she is to the wider audience.

Articulate, thoughtful and outspoken, she is a tenacious advocate for jazz, as aware of its commercial considerations as she is of its creative potential.

“I’ve told some of the record companies that they should take the example of Disney and ABC,” Carter says with a chuckle, “and go out and buy up about five radio stations and get some jazz programming going. Seriously. It seems so reasonable to me. Because if you do that, say, in Detroit or Cleveland, a jazz club will open up in a year or two. And there we are. We’ve got something.

“But record companies don’t think long term except with how much money they can make off reissues. They’re satisfied with jazz acts selling 50,000 copies of an album. Why? The audience is out there, but we have to start working harder to reach them.”

With Carter, however, everything ultimately comes back to the music, and to her unwavering confidence in the expansive promise of jazz.

“A very famous musician,” Carter recalls, “once said to me that he wished he could keep the same rhythm section for the rest of his life. I could not believe what I heard. It was so far-fetched to me--the thought of having to do a song the same way every night.

“Because to me,” she says, “it’s very simple. Jazz always reaches for the new stuff. And not wanting to know newness is not understanding what jazz is really, really all about.”

* Betty Carter and her quartet at Catalina Bar & Grill through Sunday. 1640 N. Cahuenga Blvd., (213) 466-2210. Two shows nightly, at 8:30 and 10:30. For further information on Jazz Ahead, contact Bet-Car Production West, (415) 386-3315.