soulpope "Ever Since The World Ended, I Don`t Get Out As Much"
Registriert seit: 02.12.2013
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Benny Green erinnert sich an seine Zeit mit Betty Carter …. :
Things I Didn’t Understand About Betty Carter
While touring Europe with Betty, we’d often travel by train rather than by plane, playing strings of „one-nighters” and going from one town or country to the next on a daily basis. As the trains would maintain a precise schedule, they’d only stop for about one minute in a particular station before moving on, so we each and all had to wake one another up, communicate and move quickly. We’d transfer our large items either when changing trains at a station, or conversely once arrived at our destination, by way of what was known as a “bucket brigade“. One or two band members would toss our luggage out of the train window while momentarily stopped in a station, as one or two other band members would catch-and-receive the suitcases. This was a great morning workout and it kept us all in-shape, as well as being a necessary shared physical activity which bonded the band humanly. Betty preferred to sit on the train facing backwards rather than forwards.
We kids (we thought we were men, but in hindsight, we were merely “man-ish“ boys), generally preferred to sit facing forward whenever seats were available for us to do so. One day Betty said, “I like to look and see where I’ve BEEN”. At the time, I didn’t think much of it, yet so many things that she once said which seemed like mere “asides”, have stayed with me and echoed inside over the decades. I think of Betty every day now, reflecting on many things that I didn’t really consider while I was playing for her. Knowing that I can’t actually go back in time, I can only forgive so very many short-sightedly youthful blinders extant in myself and others, as noticing, considering and in some instances divesting from old and useless notions, is an ongoing and never-ending human process for me. I’ve come to see that my lasting memories of those days have been stored as a conscience of ever deepening empathy for human artists as a species of sorts – of highly unique, rare and expressive creative beings who neither look nor speak exactly alike. Bravely creative artists are like galaxies unto themselves.
Artists of true conviction and integrity fight throughout their lifetimes for respect and understanding, and bandleaders often incur emotional and psychological battle scars over the years, which others might read as nothing more nor less than mere eccentricities or comically exaggerated ego trips – “they crazy”. When I joined Betty’s band, she told me – “I teach young men and I make them strong. I give them the experience and they become known and respected while playing for me. But down deep, what they really want is to play with male horn players, and eventually they always leave me to work with male horn players”. I didn’t connect the dots for myself at the time, that she was telling me that she lived with a sense of loving people while feeling perpetually “used” by them. I didn’t try to imagine how that might have felt to her, like “Here comes a kid who life’s brought me to patiently train and share my gold with, who at the end of the day really just wants to be playing with Art Blakey“.
Betty turned 53 about five weeks after I joined her, which was just after I’d turned 20. During my four years in her band, I didn’t think about biological changes that were going on in her life as a woman, I just figured that she was extremely mercurial. I didn’t have a clue about other stuff, not that I have much more of a clue now, but today I do think about things which might have been very real on her mind, that she couldn’t really talk about with us young men. On our first trip to Europe, an interviewer told Betty that I reminded him of Bill Evans. Betty relayed this to me, and said that she’d told him that although she liked Bill Evans and she’d carefully acknowledged Mr. Evans to the journalist as a master musician, she didn’t personally think that my playing sounded particularly like Bill Evans. She told the interviewer that as far as she was concerned, he wasn’t really listening, but rather that he was just “looking” at me and likening me to the great Bill Evans merely because the writer saw that I was white. This made me wonder what I did sound like to Betty.
An hilarious follow-up to the Bill Evans comparison occurred when the great drummer “Philly” Joe Jones came to hear us at Blues Alley in Washington, D.C. in the late summer of 1986. I wanted to impress upon Philly Joe that I dig Wynton Kelly. I’m a huge fan of so many records they made together such as Wynton Kelly’s album “Kelly At Midnight“, which I’ve found that many drummers consider to virtually be Philly Joe’s greatest recording. With this objective of wanting to impress Philly by how “hip” I thought I was, as we played our opening two trio numbers and following throughout Betty’s entire next set, I tried my best to affect my most directly representative Wynton Kelly-isms, to show Mr. Jones where I was at. For the whole set, I set my sights and maintained a focus to “try to play like Wynton”. After the set, Philly motioned for me to come over to his table. “I can tell you really like Bill Evans”, said Philly with wine breath, wearing big, dark glasses and charismatic as hell. I didn’t know what to say. Philly continued, “Bill Evans was my favorite pianist, he was like all the flowers in the world”. So I took this as a positive, that in fact he did like my playing, but man – was the joke ever on me for trying too hard to affect a character and donning a musical mask that night.
Betty would inevitably climax at the end of our concerts with a lengthy, high-powered, romping vamp built off of one of her originals, such as “Sounds.” She’d sing the words – “I gotta go, the boss is lookin’, I’m overtime,” as she continued onward, scatting, driving us to dig in ever-deeper, and circling back to singing that phrase of lyrics, only to be followed by more scatting and propelling the band, on and on into the evening. Collectively, we as her young band members wondered why it seemed that Betty actually wanted to stay up there for as long as she possibly could. I believe she didn’t want for the magic to end, that she didn’t look forward to returning alone to her hotel room to watch HBO and CNN – Betty lived for all that took place while we were on that bandstand. Singing for an audience was her way of being alive, it was her hugs, it was her being in the flow of magic. Years after I’d left Betty’s band, my girlfriend and I walked into the Village Vanguard to hear a show, and there was Betty sitting in the back of the room next to the bar – “Surprise!”, she said, and we laughed. “I know you and your lady probably want to sit up front”, Betty said. But I asked her if I could sit with her for the show. After a couple of minutes, I turned to Betty and said, “I don’t feel like I’ve ever really thanked you. I want to say ’thank you’ for all that you’ve done for me”. Betty just looked at me and with zero emotion, she said seemingly almost begrudgingly – “Okay”
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"Kunst ist schön, macht aber viel Arbeit" (K. Valentin)