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by Seth Rogovoy
LENOX, Mass., Aug. 31, 1996 -- There is no one like Betty Carter. Nobody sings the way Betty Carter does, and it is unimaginable that anyone would even try. From top to bottom, sideways and upside down, Betty Carter is wholly, exclusively an original, and at the Tanglewood Jazz Festival on Friday night, Carter did her singular, extraordinary thing.
The term "jazz singer" only loosely approximates what Carter does. And since Carter is the very best at what she does, and since no one does anything like what she does, if she was indeed the best jazz singer, there would be no other jazz singers in the world. What would be the point?
The term sui generis -- a category unto itself -- is perhaps better applied to Carter, but even that does not go very far in describing just what it is that she does. As she did on a selection of standards, obscurities and originals at Seiji Ozawa Hall on Friday night, Carter becomes one with her songs, plunging herself so far inside of their essence that her entire body -- face, head, hands especially -- and her entire being express themselves musically.
When Carter sang, she became the very picture of music. In her dancerly gestures and poses, it was as if her body was spelling out the notes and phrases she was singing -- notes, incidentally, that were utterly her own, that would be impossible to transcribe. With a smile, a stare or a grimace, with a raised arm or bent elbow, she was an expressive pictogram of Carterese -- the language and style of Betty Carter.
In more conventional terms, what Carter did with a song was first to slow it way down, and then to isolate its elements into byte-size chunks of information, whether they be meaning, emotion or just pure sound. Carter then worked with the basic tools of a word or at most a phrase, investing them with her full and complete attention. An utter minimalist, Carter threw out anything and everything extraneous, so that what was left stood out in high relief, much like her dress layered with ivory gauze. Nothing was glossed over; there were no bridges. Even her pauses and silences, of which there were plenty, were evocative and fully resonant.
Throwing herself into her material with unparalleled intensity and commitment, Carter was a spellbinding performer. She eschewed conventionally melodic singing for vocal gestures more akin to painterly brushstrokes. She accumulated the gestures, each distinct from the next, until they added up to a complete, shimmering picture of emotion.
Given her impressionistic treatment, which conjured up meaning through mood, the songs themselves -- familiar material like "The Nearness of You" or "What's New" or originals like "Fake" or "Thirty Years" -- almost didn't matter. As objects, they faded to reveal their essence, not because Carter pays no heed to the lyrics -- indeed, she is perhaps one of the most meaningful lyric singers in jazz -- but because in her singular approach Carter literally and figuratively rewrites any song she sings.
Recognizable melodies were broken down or abstracted into component parts, and with her trombone-like technique that glides and slides, her phrases rarely resolved on any note found on a keyboard. There isn't a system of musical notation in the world that could account for the sort of bent, slurred notes or languorous phrasing that Carter gets away with.
Carter is also a most exacting bandleader. Unlike many, she doesn't just front her trio. She fully engaged her musicians, conducting them, prodding them on, smiling at them when they pleased her and staring them down when they didn't. She wasn't averse to getting right in their faces at times, and the demands she made on them paid off in the subtly elegant accompaniment provided by pianist Travis Shook, drummer Bryon Landham and bassist Vashon Johnson.
Presumably, Carter gets away with it because she demands no less of herself. Unfortunately, on Friday night, she was battling forces even greater than her own. Carter was obviously perturbed by the time constraints she said had been placed upon her by Tanglewood; she repeatedly made disparaging references to these.
This seemed to affect her performance, that she might have been rushing from song to song to fit them all in, rather than taking her time between them to introduce them and herself to the audience. After a brief intermission, she was apparently pushed out on stage while much of the audience had yet to take their seats. "Hurry, hurry, hurry," she said, looking toward the wings mockingly at her overseers, who at the end, in spite of the resounding standing ovation she received just a few minutes after 9:30, did not allow Carter to perform an encore.
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