If jazz today is shrugging off the more doctrinaire aspects of neo-classicism and finding itself in a mix-'n'-match mode, it's no surprise that music's most inquiring young talents are to be found playing it; people like trumpeter Dave Douglas, clarinettist Don Byron . . . and saxophonist James Carter. Already one of the finest of the current stellar generation of jazz musicians, Carter has pursued a course very much his own, more varied than any of his fellow saxophonists, at least as unpredictable as those taken by Douglas and Byron, and arguably more rooted in jazz and black music than either.
Some of this is an accident of birth. Now in his early 30s, Carter comes from Detroit, home of the first great generation of bop consolidators like pianist Tommy Flanagan and guitarist Kenny Burrell; in fact, his mother was in school with Burrell. Add to that Chicago, home of the Art Ensemble and Sun Ra's iconoclastic Arkestra, and St Louis, where the avant-garde Black Artists Group originated, and you have a geographical triangle significant in the development of black music in general and jazz in particular.
Back in his home town for a brief visit, warm and relaxed, unfailingly courteous, Carter acknowledges this and its influence on him. "I had a private teacher, Donald Washington, who had a group comprised of peers of my age, like seven to 17, called "Bird-Trane-Sco-Now"," he says. As the title suggests, they embraced not only bop, but also subsequent developments spearheaded by John Coltrane and the brilliant Chicago avantgardist Roscoe Mitchell, as well as other things happening at that time. Such inclusiveness was unusual, especially in the 1980s, when trumpeter Wynton Marsalis was about to set out his neo-classicist stall and try to corral jazz history. That, says Carter, "seemed like - I don't want to say a throwback to the 1960s, but that's pretty much what comes to mind. And with Bird-Trane-Sco-Now, we were just all over the place. I mean, we listened to the Art Ensemble of Chicago with the same intensity as anybody else would listen to Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Everything was valid and instilled the seeds of what our one-time continuum is within the music".
Continuum is a word that keeps cropping up. It's the essence of his approach, "not necessarily thinking that everything has to be separated, or that one doesn't logically extend from the other. I really think of everything as out of one continuum". Including the way jazz is rooted in church and gospel music? "It's all there, man," he affirms. "In Carterian Fashion \his 1998 Atlantic album\ was a total reminder of that, with the Hammond B-3 organ at the helm, which shows how omnipotent it has been in the black music experience per se - I mean going to church - to some of the combos of the early 1940s, into the tenor-organ combos of the 1950s, the psychedelic funk things and the pure fusion funk things of the 1960s and 1970s, on up to today with the revivalist thing, and to see how these facets pretty much relate, particularly within the gospel-jazz tradition."
It's ironic, but not surprising, that his prodigious talents and historical awareness and openness enabled him to work successfully for both Marsalis and the restlessly probing trumpeter, Lester Bowie, from the old Art Ensemble. Another form of that mixture of structure and freedom was also part of Griot Galaxy, another Detroit group he was in.
"Being able to play what one desired and also to have structure, and when to come in and out of that structure seemed so liberating to us," he explains. "It's like throwing a cat up in the air and watching him go through all the different contortions to maintain his balance, and then he'd land square on his feet. It's still rooted in that tradition."
Starting in 1993, his recording career as leader epitomises this ability to look forward and back, with fine young players like pianists Craig Taborn and Cyrus Chestnut, and veterans such as mainstreamers Harry Edison and Buddy Tate, as well as using music by Sun Ra, Ellington and even a little-known old, earthy Texas tenor, John Hardee. From albums such as JC On The Set, through Jurassic Classics, The Real Quietstorm, Conversin' With The Elders, In Carterian Fashion and last year's Chasin' The Gypsy, he has continued to bear witness to the continuum.
That last album, with its digging into the music of the great Belgian-born gypsy jazz guitarist, Django Reinhardt, is perhaps Carter's most surprising venture so far. It happened by accident. During a sound set-up/rehearsal in Tampa while touring with opera singer Kathleen Battle, he began playing Reinhardt's Nuages on tenor; guitarist Romero Lubambo and percussionist Cyro Baptista joined in. The rapport was such that they forgot about everything else. Expanded later, the result was Chasin' The Gypsy. He says, however, that it's not a straightforward tribute. "I think the only thing that was really acquired from that whole thing was a hybrid between Django's pre- and post-war set-ups, in which on one he has violin and after the occupation he started using clarinets and stuff. So I kind of represent the post-occupation thing, and violinist Marlene Rice represents the original. The repertoire is pretty much some Django material, but also some Cab Calloway, some Adrian Rollini-inspired stuff and originals."
Where Carter will go musically after this is anybody's guess. "It's been early instilled in me that music and life don't separate. That was always one of my teacher's favourite credos. He always mentioned that Bird interview from the late 1940s where he said 'if you don't live it, it won't come out your axe'. To be able to constructively put any angers, fears, doubts, anxieties, joys, triumphs, jubilations . . . anything that life at large allows you to savour and to mentally masticate and assimilate into an experience that you can deal with musically, by all means take advantage of it."
James Carter's sextet shares the bill at the Everyman Palace Theatre tonight at 8.30 p.m., with the Jim Hall Quartet featuring Greg Osby. Call central box office at 021-4543210