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FINDING A UNIVERSITY WITH A JAZZ PROGRAM MAY BE EASIER THAN EVER THESE days, but the surest route to jazz proficiency -- the old-fashioned apprenticeship -- is another matter. The big band, the archetypal jazz university, peaked long ago, and, with the deaths of Arthur Taylor and Art Blakey, there are ever fewer older band leaders willing to discover and mold young talent.
Betty Carter understands this. She studied at the Detroit Conservatory of Music as a teen-ager, but it was by singing with band leaders like Lionel Hampton that she really learned music -- how to write an arrangement, how to keep the piano player from ruining a perfectly nice tune by tacking flowery arpeggios onto the end.
Carter, now one of most formidable song stylists in jazz, also runs its most successful finishing school. Dozens of musicians have graduated from her trio -- most recently, a flock of excellent pianists including Cyrus Chestnut, Jacky Terrasson, Benny Green and Mulgrew Miller. But Carter can shuffle only so many players through her trio. So three years ago, she rounded up about 20 young musicians from across the country and brought them to New York for a week of composing and arranging, capped off by a weekend of concerts. She called the project Jazz Ahead and vowed to do it once a year, which gives her 12 months to scout the next generation by sifting through cassettes and trolling through clubs and festivals.
This year's ensemble, who performed at the Majestic Theater in Brooklyn under the aegis of the arts center 651, was typically extraordinary. The 21-year-old trumpeter Peven Everett played with such cool force that his colleagues fixated on him, even during rehearsals. Already, the Carter experience has worked for Everett -- he'll tour this summer with Buckshot LeFonque, Branford Marsalis's new band; and Karriem Riggins, a drummer who played the last two years with Jazz Ahead, has joined Roy Hargrove's band. By the evidence so far, Carter will repopulate the jazz scene as successfully with this large group as with her trio.
She is a cranky, loving teacher. During rehearsals, she routinely scolded the musicians to tighten up the pieces they had written and to purge their playing of cliches. Above all, she's after originality, both in composition and improvisation. Sometimes, it's the basics that need work. Jennifer Vincent, a 25-year-old bassist, was having trouble swinging on one tune; Carter came and stood beside her and, moving her own hands as if juggling, coaxed Vincent into the groove.
The concert the next night featured one solid composition after another, one startling solo after the next. When Peven Everett delivered a particularly fiery trumpet solo, Carter introduced him to the crowd as "a veteran who will be flying off on his own soon." She paused, mock bittersweet. "But that's O.K. -- that's what this is for." -- STEPHEN J. DUBNER