Collection: Benny Carter

Benny Carter was born in 1907 in San Juan Hill, the Manhattan neighbourhood later cleared to make way for Lincoln Center. His mother taught him piano. He taught himself trumpet, tried a C-melody saxophone, and settled on the alto. By fifteen he was sitting in at Harlem night spots. He had a short spell at Wilberforce College, then worked through the bands of Charlie Johnson, Horace Henderson, Chick Webb and Fletcher Henderson as both saxophonist and arranger. He formed his own orchestra in 1932. In the mid 1930s he went to Europe, joined Willie Lewis’s orchestra in Paris, and then became a staff arranger for the BBC in London. Whitney Balliett later judged him the most admired alto saxophonist of the 1930s, a status Johnny Hodges only reached after 1940. From the late 1940s into the early 1970s Carter worked mainly as a composer and arranger for film and television, among the first African American musicians to do so. He received no on-screen credit until A Man Called Adam in 1966. He also wrote “Blues in My Heart” and “When Lights Are Low.” He kept playing, and kept the clear, vibrato-light tone that made him famous, into his nineties. In 2000 he received the National Medal of Arts. He died in Los Angeles on 12 July 2003, aged 95.