April 20, 2006 @ 2:12 pm

Regina Carter's Love Letter to Detroit

by: Jamie Katz

The acclaimed jazz violinist has released six solid albums as a leader on Atlantic and Verve, and has recorded with Mary J. Blige, Faith Evans, Aretha Franklin, Cassandra Wilson, and Patti Labelle. She played on Wynton Marsalis’ Pulitzer Prize–winning Blood On The Fields, and on the soundtrack for Ken Burns’ landmark PBS series, The Civil War.

And she has amazing musical range. The classically trained Carter, 39, has appeared with symphony orchestras all over the world. Most famously, in a gesture of friendship with the U.S.A. after the September 11 terrorist attacks, she was chosen by Genoa, Italy, to be permitted to play and record with that city’s most cherished possession: the priceless 260-year-old Guarneri violin that once belonged to Nicolò Paganini, the most celebrated violinist of the early 19th century.

right As impressive as Carter’s recordings are, those who’ve enjoyed her work in person know there’s a dimension missing on wax. Before a live audience, she is among the warmest and most accessible of spirits, a musician with that ancient, familiar, almost physical need of all great performers: to connect.

And that was the essence of her concert performance at the Rose Theater of New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center on April 7, where she shared top billing with Barry Harris, the beloved bebop pianist and jazz educator.

Carter and Harris share Detroit roots, a generation apart, and Carter’s program - which featured a newly commissioned work called "Black Bottom" - was very much a tribute to the Motor City’s vibrant musical culture in the Joe Louis era, the 1930s and ’40s.

Her well-meshed quintet included veteran Memphis reedman Bill Easley on clarinet, Matthew Parrish on bass, Alvester Garnett on drums, and pianist Helen Sung, whose thoughtful, crystalline solos wowed the Lincoln Center crowd.

They kicked off the set with a selection of tightly arranged swing-to-bop–style numbers from Carter’s forthcoming Verve CD, I’ll Be Seeing You: A Sentimental Journey, which drops on June 13. The main part of the concert, however, was given over to her alternately upbeat and wistful elegy to Detroit’s long-gone Black Bottom community, as described fondly to Carter in family stories passed down by her mother. (The neighborhood was largely bulldozed to make way for I-75.)

In the spoken-word accompaniment to Carter’s composition, poet Leslie Reese said, "By the 1950’s, Black Bottom was gone / Gone in a phrase of air / Just as if it had never been there."

Gone, yes, but thanks to the rich legacy bequeathed to Regina Carter - and many other remarkable Detroit musicians - not soon forgotten. It wasn’t an evening of cutting-edge writing or groundbreaking improvisation. But as a well-crafted hommage to a jazz culture still worth celebrating, Carter’s work gracefully ventured into a zone more self-important artists too often avoid: sheer pleasure.