She’s Got the World on Four Strings

There’s a virtual traffic jam on the stage of the Hollywood Bowl.

A good half of the players in the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra are lounging around their seats, doing their musician routines, trading jokes, noodling a few notes here and there, waiting for a full ensemble rehearsal to begin. Soundmen dart in and out, setting up a microphone, moving a speaker, as video cameramen adjust their equipment and photographers crouch to get precisely the right angle.

It seems like mass confusion, but in front of it all there’s a small circle of calm. In the center, Regina Carter is both the youngest and the smallest participant in a quartet of rehearsing musicians. Looking at her, it’s hard to imagine that she is one of the most highly praised new jazz artists to arrive in years. And that the praise comes, despite her being that rarest of jazz birds--an African American, female jazz violinist. How many of those have you seen lately?

Onstage at the moment, however, she is surrounded by veteran high achievers: on one side, elegant-looking singer Dee Dee Bridgewater; on the other, legendary bassist Ray Brown. In front, guiding the proceedings with his usual calm demeanor, bassist John Clayton, creative director of jazz for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Clayton kicks off a tempo, and he and Brown dig into the familiar, grooving melody of “Centerpiece,” a jazz standard composed by Harry “Sweets” Edison and chosen as a tribute to the late trumpeter. As the rhythm picks up, Bridgewater adds a melody line, immediately supplemented by an added harmony from Carter’s violin.

Behind the quartet, the orchestra members perk up, listening approvingly, abandoning for a moment their characteristically jaded musician personas.

The rhythm breaks for a beat, and Carter spins out a funk-driven, irresistibly rhythmic, improvised line.

“All right!” mouths a saxophone player, as one of the trumpeters raises his eyebrows appreciatively. Around the stage, the clamor settles down, with stagehands, audio men, photographers and assorted hangers-on pausing to listen closely.

After a few more phrases, Clayton brings the number to a halt. “Yeah, Regina,” he says to the nervous-looking young musician. She smiles shyly, still seeming a bit awed by her surroundings, as Clayton discusses a quick, improvised modulation of key before adding the entire group to the mix.

Carter nods agreement and, when the piece starts again, soars through the ensemble passage, into the modulation, perfectly setting up the musical energy for the stirring entrance of the orchestra.

Was she really nervous?

“Sure, I get nervous,” she said backstage in her dressing room before the show in early August. “I’ve always loved being in the spotlight, even as a child, but I do get nervous. I try to keep in mind what one of my teachers used to tell me: ‘Don’t think of it as being nervous, think of it as being excited about what you’re about to do.’ But sometimes even that doesn’t work. Still, I know that if I didn’t get nervous, something would be wrong, so I guess it’s just part of the game.”

Maybe so, but it’s a game where the stakes have risen significantly. Two weeks ago, she performed with her group before a reportedly rapturous crowd at the Monterey Jazz Festival, and as part of an all-star ensemble with Kenny Barron, Clark Terry and others. On Oct. 6, she opens a six-night run at the Jazz Bakery, her first stint in Los Angeles leading her own group. And her debut album on Verve, “Rhythms of the Heart,” has been receiving rave reviews.

“Carter creates music that is wonderfully listenable, probingly intelligent,” wrote Christopher John Farley in Time magazine, “taking the listener into the future of jazz.”

High praise for any artist--particularly for a jazz violinist. Although the instrument has had a long and varied history in the field--from Stuff Smith and Stephane Grappelli to Jean-Luc Ponty and L. Subramaniam--it has never been a vanguard voice. And only rarely a female voice--a very short list that includes Ginger Smock, active in the ‘50s; fusionist Karen Briggs; Latin jazz stylist Susie Hansen; singer-violinist Nicole Yarling, who was a Joe Williams protegee; and San Francisco’s eclectic Patti Weiss.

And breaking through for Carter, as a female and an African American, playing an uncommon instrument in a musical field that still retains some surprisingly strong sexist attitudes, has not been easy. It wasn’t until she met Barron, a highly regarded veteran pianist, that she began to attain some real credibility.

“I’d been hearing her name,” said Barron in a phone conversation from his New Jersey home, “but only because of the instrument. But when I finally met her at a festival in Telluride three or four years ago, I was really impressed. She had great ideas, great intonation and a great sense of time. She plays with a lot of fire, and she’s got big ears; she can hear anything.

“So, about a year later, when I had a gig at Sweet Basil [in Greenwich Village], I called her, invited her to perform with me, and it was fantastic. From that, she got her own gig at the club, and she hasn’t looked back since.”

Carter, pointing out that Barron is too modest in his assessment of what he has done for her, views the association as crucial to her career.

“He’s my mentor, first of all,” she explained. “There’s so much to learn from him, in terms of the subtleties of music. And of course, he’s so respected in the business that just for him to hire me to play for his band actually convinced people that [to think], ‘Well, maybe she really can play.’ ”

But Carter is well aware that she is traveling through terra incognita.

“The violin in jazz is still so mysterious,” she said. “It was after I went to see Stephane Grappelli, when I was about 15, that I decided I wanted to play jazz. But I didn’t even know what that meant. I just wanted to do what Grappelli and Ponty were doing, because it seemed there was so much freedom to that kind of playing.

“When I got started, and to some extent even now, it’s kind of like going through a dark room and trying to feel my way around, not knowing what to listen for, how you even learn to do this music right. Each step of the way there’s someone who will say, ‘Hey, listen to this music or that person.’ There’s just so much to learn, so much to hear.”

That adventurous sense of probing is part of what makes Carter’s playing so fascinating to hear. And she has enhanced it by performing in an astonishingly wide array of musical settings, from playing in background ensembles for Aretha Franklin and Mary J. Blige to jamming with Lauryn Hill and soloing impressively on Wynton Marsalis’ “Blood on the Fields” and Cassandra Wilson’s “Traveling Miles.”

Earlier this year, Carter was even in the cast of Anna Deavere Smith’s “House Arrest: First Edition” at the Mark Taper Forum. In the production, Carter was called upon to perform as both a musician and an actress.

“Anna was looking for a violinist to work on the play with her,” Carter recalled. “She picked up a couple of my records and came to hear me play, and from then on we immediately became friends.”

A great deal of time was spent discussing the script, but Carter was still startled when she actually had the experience of performing the piece--an experience that was closer to the improvisational aspects of jazz than she had anticipated.

“Anna was changing things even as we were performing,” Carter said. “I couldn’t just sit behind a music stand.”

At the start of the play, Carter played Thomas Jefferson (“because he played violin”). Later, as the dramatic line moved around in time, she played a musician in the contemporary White House.

“I thought I was really cool,” she said, “when I made a score for myself. But then [Smith would] say, ‘No, I’m taking out Page 70 through 71 and I’m adding these pages.’ Sometimes she’d move me around the audience, and I had to run around and play, and remember that when someone drops a teacup, I have to start playing the blues or something. It was really intense, but really fascinating to do.”

Carter’s musical eclecticism, combined with a rational approach to the commercial aspects of the music, led her to record two albums in the mid-’90s for Atlantic that she admittedly describes as “pop jazz.”

“When I started writing for my first record,” Carter explained, “I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to do, because there were so many influences that I liked. But I realized that some of them I couldn’t do, because the mainstream audience wasn’t ready for them yet. At the same time, I knew that record companies were dropping artists who weren’t selling records. . . . And, since there are more smooth jazz, or pop jazz, radio stations than there are traditional stations, I kind of figured it would be smart to do a pop jazz album.”

As it turned out, she left Atlantic anyway, and her Verve debut--clearly not a “pop jazz” album--has garnered more attention than her calculatedly commercial earlier efforts.

“What sold me on her was hearing her play with Kenny Barron and Steve Turre,” said Richard Seidel, senior vice president of artists and repertoire for the Verve Music Group, who signed Carter and produced “Rhythms of the Heart.” “I noticed that no matter what band she played in, no matter which performance it was, she always got more applause than anyone in the band, including the leader.”

Faced with Carter’s prior albums having not created any special buzz, Seidel decided to take a moderate path with her first Verve release.

“Versatility can be a curse in a business that likes performers to fit into categories,” Seidel said. “So we knew we had to come up with an album concept that allowed the variety of what she can do while finding some way to link it all together. And the concept that we used was rhythm, the sense of drive that she brings to whatever she plays.”

For Carter, it was simply a relief not to have to worry about the commercial potential of what she was doing in the studio.

“I was really happy to have a chance to do something totally different from my first two records,” she noted. “And maybe that’s paid off. It’s a totally acoustic record, which is something I haven’t done before. And the material that I chose, even though it seems all over the map, it’s really not. I think of it more as a kind of survey of where I’ve come from, the musical influences that I’ve had in my life.”

Those influences are apparent in the album’s selection of tunes, ranging from a jaunty, swing-style rendering of “Lady Be Good” and Tadd Dameron’s boppish “Our Delight” to the ballad standard “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” and--with a vocal by Cassandra Wilson--the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.”

But they represent influences that came after she had passed through an earlier phase of music. Carter, who will divulge only that she is in her “early 30s,” started out as a classically trained performer--first on piano, then on violin, via the learn-by-listening Suzuki method. Born and raised in Detroit, her inherent musical abilities were apparent almost from the beginning.

“It came easy for me,” she said, “and I took to it. But I didn’t actually know that I wanted to play music for a living until I was older.”

She studied music at Cass Technical High School, then moved to Boston to study at the New England Conservatory, before transferring to Oakland University in Rochester, Mich.

“That was when I made the decision to totally play jazz,” Carter said. “At the time I felt as though I had come to hate classical music. I thought it was such an uptight music. . . . Later, I found a great teacher in New York who told me, ‘It’s not the music that you hate, it’s how the people have been teaching you.’ And so, even though I’d made a commitment to jazz, she helped me to find the beauty in classical music again and to start, for myself, to study it again and regain some of that technique.”

Her mother--whom she still calls every day--did not, however, take well to the jazz direction.

“Basically, she had a fit,” Carter said. “She said, ‘Oh, no you aren’t. There’s no pension, no health insurance, no benefits.’ And she was right. She thought that if I could get a job in a major symphony orchestra that I would be OK.”

But Carter quickly realized that the pickings were slim. The classical field is overflowing with string players, especially violinists, competing for orchestra positions. And once those positions are gained, the players often stay put until retirement age and beyond.

“I have so many friends I grew up with who are great violinists,” Carter said. “They keep auditioning, but they’re not getting into any of these orchestras, and they’re panicking because they don’t have any other kind of music that they can do. Whereas, because I can do both, it’s made my life much easier. If someone calls and asks me to do a Broadway show, I could do it; if it’s a string quartet or a jazz gig, I can do that too.”

It doesn’t seem likely that Carter will be showing up in an orchestra pit any time soon. But, ever the realist, she gauges her success via incremental measures.

“I could say I’m a success right now,” she said with a grin, “because I haven’t had to call home and ask for money lately. That’s a big step in the right direction.

“I just want to make sure,” she added, “that it’s about the music first and the marketing second.”

Later that night, when Carter came onstage at the Hollywood Bowl with the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, it was clearly about the music. The diminutive violinist, beautifully gowned, ripped through a swing-saturated rendering of “Lady Be Good,” then found a dark resonance with Billie Holiday in an intimate version of “Don’t Explain.”

Someone whispers in the audience: “I didn’t even know that you could play jazz on the violin. And I sure didn’t think that a woman could do it.”

Had she heard the remark, Carter would undoubtedly have let loose her full-throated laugh. But it recalled a final comment she’d made earlier in the afternoon.

“There’s a lot of challenges in what I’m trying to do,” she said. “The first is playing the violin. The second is playing jazz on the violin. And being a female is definitely part of the challenge. Sometimes if my schedule is way too busy or things just don’t seem to be working out right, I’ll break down, start crying and call my mother. And she’ll say, ‘Well, it’s what you wanted to do, so dry your tears and go on and do it.’ And I’ll say, ‘Gee, thanks, Mom.’ ”

Carter laughed again. Not in a self-deprecating manner, but with a kind of roll-your-eyes-back, parents-are-all-that-way expression. As the laughter faded away she sat back, thoughtful for a long moment, before adding something else.

“Right now I’m OK where I am,” she said. “The truth is, I don’t necessarily want things to come so fast. And, believe me, they haven’t, because I’ve been out here a long time. But I like when things take their time coming to you, because I want to work really hard for everything.

“Maybe that’s an old thing that’s been drilled in to me,” Carter said. “But I believe that if you work really hard for something and you get it, it’s yours to keep. But if it’s just given to you, it can be taken away just as fast. So I just do what my mom said, dry my tears and go on and do what I have to do.” *

* The Regina Carter Sextet at the Jazz Bakery, 3233 Helms Ave., Culver City, Oct. 6-10. (310) 271-9039. $20 admission, Oct. 6-9 at 8 and 9:30 p.m.; $18 admission, Oct. 10 at 7 and 8:30 p.m.