Betty Carter Trio: 199th NDR Jazz Workshop Hamburg 1985

Betty Carter, voc
Benny Green, p
Tarik Shah, b
Winard Harper, dr

recorded live at NDR Studio 10, Hamburg, May 29, 1985

1. Tight (Betty Carter)
2. Look What I Got (Betty Carter)
3. Dearly Beloved/ Blue Moon
4. Timeless (Betty Carter)

Arguably the most adventurous female jazz singer of all time, Betty Carter was an idiosyncratic stylist and a restless improviser who pushed the limits of melody and harmony as much as any bebop horn player. The husky-voiced Carter was capable of radical, off-the-cuff reworkings of whatever she sang, abruptly changing tempos and dynamics, or rearranging the lyrics into distinctive, off-the-beat rhythmic patterns. She could solo for 20 minutes, scat at lightning speed, or drive home an emotion with wordless, bluesy moans and sighs. She wasn't quite avant-garde, but she was definitely "out." Yet as much as Carter was fascinated by pure, abstract sound, she was also a sensitive lyric interpreter when she chose, a tender and sensual ballad singer sometimes given to suggestive asides. Her wild unpredictability kept her marginalized for much of her career, and she never achieved the renown of peers like Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, or Carmen McRae. What was more, her exacting musical standards and assertive independence limited her recorded output somewhat. But Carter stuck around long enough to receive her proper due; her unwillingness to compromise eventually earned her the respect of the wider jazz audience, and many critics regarded her as perhaps the purest jazz singer active in the '80s and '90s. Additionally, Carter took an active role in developing new talent, and was a tireless advocate for the music and the freedom she found in it, right up to her death in 1998.
1982 brought a live album with orchestra backing, Whatever Happened to Love?, and five years later, she recorded a live duets album with Carmen McRae at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall. She continued to tour as well, and when Polygram's reactivated Verve label started signing underappreciated veterans (Abbey Lincoln, Shirley Horn, Nina Simone, etc.), they gave Carter her first major-label record deal since the '60s. Verve reissued much of her Bet-Car output, giving those records far better distribution than they'd ever enjoyed.