(1953-2024)
Ron Carter, highly respected jazz educator and saxophonist, passed away on February 24, 2024. He was professor emeritus at the Northern Illinois University School of Music and directed the NIU Jazz Ensemble and Jazz Studies program. Carter helped to grow the Jazz Studies program, considered one of the top graduate programs in jazz. In 2009 Carter was named an NIU Board of Trustees Professor, one of the first six to receive the honor from the university. Prior to his appointment at NIU, he began his teaching career at Lincoln Senior High School in East St. Louis, Illinois. He taught in East St. Louis for 17 years. He earned his baccalaureate degree from Bethune Cookman University and a master’s degree from the University of Illinois. He collaborated professionally with such artists as Clark Terry, Jimmy Heath, The Temptations, Wallace Roney, and Lena Horne. His many career awards include the Downbeat Magazine Jazz Educators Hall of Fame and the Midwest Clinic Medal of Honor.
The following are excerpts from our 2014 interview with him as a tribute to a remarkable life and career.
Who first nurtured your passion as an educator?
My high school band director, Sam Berry, started me on trombone first, but I was so small I couldn’t get the position. I switched to bass clarinet and then Bb clarinet. My family was the only black family in the middle school. This was in the early 1960s in Georgia, so you can imagine what was going on. They actually closed all of the black high schools and bussed all of the black kids over to the larger white high school. Sam Berry took the job at Lowndes County High School for one year before becoming director of bands at Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach. He instilled in us a strong work ethic and demonstrated great dedication to students. It made me want to do the same thing. I was an all-state clarinet player in my junior and senior year in high school, and I played in the youth orchestra in the local college, Valdosta State, at the time and studied clarinet with a professor named Robert Barr. At this time I wasn’t into jazz at all. I was a classical nerd. I told my mom that I wanted to go to school and major in music. Berry said that when I graduated, he wanted to give me a scholarship to come there, so that’s where I went.
What are some ways in which you have seen jazz or music education change since you started working in East St. Louis through your time at Northern Illinois?
The biggest change is that because of technology, students don’t really communicate with each other anymore, so they don’t know how to listen. I teach all over the world, and students in other countries listen to the music and study it. Students in this country learn a solo or they learn some scales, but do not commit to learning the jazz language. I think that’s the biggest breakdown that’s happened now.
Students have the illusion that you can learn a scale, core relationship, and improvise, and think that was the foundation of improvisation, not realizing that it is a language that you have to study. I taught at Lincoln High School for all those years, where Miles Davis went to school. I talked to Miles Davis about whom he listened to, and I also talked with Dizzy, when Dizzy played with my high school band, about what you should listen for. There’s no such thing as stealing in jazz; you learn the language and you use it.
There are still many jazz bands that play great traditional jazz and teach students that musical foundation. We don’t speak negatively about traditional wind literature or traditional orchestra literature. I realize the importance of making that foundation. It is essential to study and perform that music. I tell students all the time to study Duke Ellington, who is the foundation for everything. The foundation for every voice spoken out there came through that Duke Ellington band or the Count Basie band in some kind of way. If you study those two bands, then everything else falls somewhere within there. A student might say he likes Michael Brecker or Stan Getz, and I will ask “Okay, who’s he coming from?” Whoever you like, go back and find out who they studied, and go study those people as well. Then put your own spin on it – put that in your language and personality and develop your own voice. That’s the point you’re trying to reach. Benny Golson taught me something that stuck with me for many years. He said, “When you hear something and you really like it, it’s already a part of you. Your job is to connect with it.” If students don’t listen, they never connect with it.
There are many factors involved in teaching students how to listen and learn the jazz language. I am giving a workshop at Midwest on this. Students are listening, but then they don’t know what to listen to and they are not committed to listening the same way we were committed to listening to learn language.
I give students names of jazz artists with the instruction to put these players’ names in their cell phones, because they are not going to lose that. I give them very few names for people to listen to now. I say, “Just go listen to Lester Young and listen to Ben Webster” for tenor saxophone. Some directors give out these long lists, but it is wasted ink. Students are not going to go through these long lists. It’s like saying, if you want to learn English, I’m going to give a thousand different folks to listen to from across the country who speak English differently. Attention spans are extremely short now, and that makes this very difficult.
If I was to start teaching at a school without a jazz band, what would you tell me are the benefits my students could gain from jazz that they would not learn from concert band or marching band?
They will learn how to use the human voice. Once you start singing phrases, you start listening to how you fit, balance, blend, and intonation – all of the things that most directors address. I am constantly working with my college group by singing phrases. If they get used to hearing when the focus is pitch, and they are singing and reproducing it, then it helps with their instrument. On all the instruments, you’ve got to be able to hear. It’s not just pressing the right valve, putting the right slide position out, you have to be able to hear.
Also, jazz is an essential part of this country’s history. You can study classical literature, but it is really music from a foreign land. Jazz is the only music that was actually molded in the United States. Everyone else in the world realizes that and respects American jazz musicians at a high level, but in this country everything is taken for granted.
Of course, I am classically trained, so I’ve studied Brahms, Mozart, and Webern, but I couldn’t really study who I am through that music or what happened in this country through that music. I just loved the music and still do. I learn so much from understanding what Duke Ellington went through – how he had to buy his own train car because he couldn’t ride in the other cars. In all these different Ellington songs you hear train effects or how he voiced a chord sounded like a train horn blowing or steam coming from a steam engine. Those insights are very influential.
What is the best advice you can offer to fellow educators?
Never stop learning. I was telling a young man recently that during my first ten years of teaching, I went to school every summer to take jazz arranging, brass methods, and rhythm section methods because those were areas in which I needed more expertise. I didn’t run from what I didn’t know. After a while, my rhythm section was always the best rhythm section. I learned how to play trumpet all over again, so if a student had a problem, I knew how to help. I truly believe that the only thing that can hold a student back is the teacher because students will learn anything if you give them the opportunity and have patience to give them enough time.
