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Legendary double-bass player Ron Carter is among those performing at the annual NEA Jazz Masters concert at Flushing Town Hall Dec. 15.
Legendary double-bass player Ron Carter is among those performing at the annual NEA Jazz Masters concert at Flushing Town Hall Dec. 15.
Ron Carter towers over jazz — literally and figuratively.
At 6-foot-4, Carter is that rare double-bass player who’s as tall as his instrument.
Just as rare is his stature in the music world.
Literally, when you look up “jazz bass” on Wikipedia, there is a photo of Ron Carter at the top.
Five years ago, Guinness World Records certified him as the busiest jazz bass player of all time for working more than 2,200 recording sessions during his six-decade career. He’s added a few hundred more sessions since then.
Carter and his stand-up bass are set to anchor the biggest night of jazz in Queens, the annual NEA Jazz Masters concert at Flushing Town Hall, next Friday.
“I haven’t seen a lot of these people in a long time,” said Carter this week. “I go back a long way with these guys.”
The band for the FTH concert is a one-night-only group. The qualifications for getting in are steep. All but one player has been named by the National Endowment of the Arts as a Jazz Master, the closest thing the jazz world has to a Baseball Hall of Fame.
Admission is by secret ballot of a select group of musicians, music execs and jazz historians.
“It’s a very important statement,” said Carter, a member of the Jazz Masters class of 1998. “It says this person so deserves the accolade of his peers that his importance has to be documented.”
Practically speaking, said Carter, “You get more gigs, more respect for the record companies. It is something that is carried on your biography for the rest of your life.”
The band this year includes pianist Joanne Brackeen (NEA class of ’18), trumpeter Jimmy Owens (class of ’12) and two of the Jazz Masters newest members, drummer Louis Hayes (class of ’23) and saxophonist Gary Bartz, who was named last spring. Tickets and info for the Dec. 15 concert are at flushingtownhall.org.
Flushing Town Hall has been producing an all-star show with NEA masters since 2006, when saxophonist Jimmy Heath (class of ’03), founder of the jazz program at Queens College, put together the first group, which included Dr. Billy Taylor and Clark Terry.
When Heath died in 2020 at age 93, the show’s longtime producer, Clyde Bullock, asked the affable Owens — who turns 80 a few days before next week’s concert — to take over.
Carter, who is 84, can recall when and where he met nearly everyone in the NEA band. There’s a story to tell with each one.
Not surprisingly for the Guinness World Record holder, nearly all of them stretch back to a recording studio somewhere in New York.
Carter and Jimmy Owens go back to a legendary group from the early 1970s called the New York Jazz Quartet, led by pianist Sir Roland Hanna.
“Roland heard Jimmy play on some commercials and hired him,” recalled Carter. “I told him ‘Why not?’
“We used to call Jimmy ‘Magic.’”
It’s not a bad nickname for the night at FTH. Jazz Masters meet to play only one other time during the year — a tribute show at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, shortly after the new list of inductees is announced.
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