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#1
02.03.2009
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Ian Carr
Ian Carr
He was a freethinking trumpeter who helped change the course of British jazz John Fordham Saturday February 28 2009 The Guardian The trumpeter, composer, bandleader and author Ian Carr, who has died aged 75, was a champion of British jazz independence at a time when few believed that a creative offshoot of the music could grow in any soil but America's. He was a freethinker, a self-taught trumpeter who became an accomplished soloist, biographer, campaigner, journalist and dedicated teacher - and one of a handful, alongside Humphrey Lyttelton, John Dankworth, Michael Garrick, Stan Tracey, Courtney Pine and a few others, who changed the course of jazz in the UK. Carr's sound, on both trumpet and flugelhorn, seemed like a strikingly elegant and unhurried adaptation of the legacies of early Miles Davis and Clifford Brown, but with his own slightly melancholy fire, applied in the late 1960s to the pianist/composer Garrick's subtle and engaging home-grown repertoire. In perhaps the biggest decision of his career, he founded the pioneering jazz-rock band Nucleus in 1969 (to the consternation of some conservative acoustic jazz fans). Carr (and his co-writer Karl Jenkins, later to become a classical composer) had managed to make their repertoire a balance of shapely, long-lined, and rather English romantic lyricism with the new rock-driven electric sounds beginning to be adopted by Davis. Carr could not help making jazz news. He took Nucleus to the Montreux jazz festival (where it won the European Broadcasting Union prize) and then to the Newport jazz festival in the US in 1970, where it became one of the few British bands to make a big impact. But he also found time to research and write a book, Music Outside (1973, republished last year) about the playing and the politics of the contemporary British scene. He also played in fusion bands, big bands and occasionally even free-improv groups, though he was never convinced by the latter idiom. In 1982 Carr wrote the much-acclaimed Miles Davis: A Critical Biography, and became an associate professor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London. In 1991 he published Keith Jarrett: The Man and his Music, a rich profile of the pianist, and collaborated with Digby Fairweather and Brian Priestley on the reference book Jazz: The Rough Guide. He also ran workshops for the younger generation, including the pianists Julian Joseph and Nikki Yeoh, the vocalist Cleveland Watkiss, and the Mondesir brothers. Like Garrick, Carr was able to bring literary awareness to jazz (his early originals raised eyebrows by referring to WB Yeats or François Villon), yet he was the antithesis of a snooty jazz buff. He was steeped in the blues, and some of the bass parts for his compositions are so danceable that Nucleus records have become a source for drum and bass samplers. Carr was born in Dumfries, Scotland, and grew up in the north-east of England. Although first inspired by Louis Armstrong, Harry James and Lyttelton, through his years studying English at Newcastle University and subsequent military service with the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, his interest in the trumpet remained peripheral. After two years of European travels, he returned to Tyneside in 1960 to find his younger brother, Mike, an organist, running a local hard-bop band, the EmCee Five, with John McLaughlin as the occasional guitarist and a superb saxophonist, Gary Cox. Carr then studied the trumpet devotedly for a year while he made a living as a teacher. By late 1961 he was recording with the EmCee Five for Columbia, and though shortlived, the group came to acquire cult status among the cognoscenti. Arriving in London in 1962, he worked with the Caribbean flautist Harold McNair and then with the saxophonist Don Rendell. The Rendell-Carr Quintet, which played from 1963 to 1969, consistently figured in Melody Maker's jazz polls, both for the quality of its improvisation and the distinctiveness of its unflinching, standards-averse repertoire, particularly after Garrick joined in 1965. His close friend Neil Ardley's New Jazz Orchestra was also a regular outlet for Carr as a sideman during the 1960s. But by the end of the decade, he was growing restless and became increasingly attracted to electric jazz-rock possibilities. A personal catastrophe lent momentum to his desire for a new start. In 1967 his wife, Margaret, died in childbirth. Only his responsibilities to his baby daughter, Selina, and his work helped him recover from the shock, though depression stalked him in those years. In the next decade he participated in various Garrick projects as well as helping to found Europe's United Jazz and Rock Ensemble with the bassist Eberhard Weber, the New Jazz Orchestra saxophonist Barbara Thompson, the jazz-rock drum virtuoso Jon Hiseman and others. Carr blossomed as a composer, notably in 1973 with Ban Ban Caliban, commissioned by Sam Wanamaker's Globe Playhouse Trust for a Shakespeare birthday concert. The examples of Garrick and Ardley, mingled with his own personal muses, culminated in the many-layered Out of the Long Dark (1978). Conversations with the Blues (1979), Spirit of Place (1986) and Old Heartland (1988) are also among his compositional landmarks. Nucleus remained active into the 1980s, and Carr also worked with Ardley on the adventurous electronic band Zyklus. He led Orchestra UK in 1989, with a multi-idiomatic line-up including the pianist Stan Tracey and the saxophonists John Surman and Evan Parker, and made a duet album, Songs and Sweet Airs, with the pianist John Taylor playing the Southwark Cathedral organ. In the early 1990s he played with the American composer George Russell's Living Time Orchestra on European tours. He was a consultant for television films about Davis and Jarrett, and fronted a six-part Radio 3 Jazz File on Davis's life in 2006. The same year, the writer and broadcaster Alyn Shipton published a biography of Carr, Out of the Long Dark. A succession of mini-strokes prevented him from playing in Nucleus reunions, but he received citations from both the BBC jazz awards and the Parliamentary jazz awards in 2006. However, Alzheimer's disease had by then turned him into a spectator at other people's celebrations of his achievements. He divorced his second wife, Sandy Major, in the late 1980s and is survived by Selina. ? Ian Henry Randall Carr, jazz trumpeter, composer, writer and broadcaster, born 21 April 1933; died 25 February 2009 Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2009 
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#3
09.03.2009
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AW: Ian Carr
Ich habe ihn immerhin einmal gesehen, 1972, mit Nucleus, in einem kleinen Club in London. Die Band wechselte dann später fast geschlossen zu Soft Machine: John Marshall, Karl Jenkins, Roy Babbington; an den Gitarristen des Konzerts kann ich mich erinnern.
Hat Ian Carr nicht auch regelmäßig im Melody Maker publiziert? Den kaufte ich damals, um mein karges Schulenglisch zu verbessern, vor allem aber, weil's cool aussah, mit einer englischen Zeitung unterm Arm rumzulaufen. Gruß, che
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#4
23.03.2009
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AW: Ian Carr
Es ist immer ein komisches Gefühl wenn man im Zuge
des Todes eines Musikers den selben für sich entdeckt. Ich bin schon irgendwie fan des URAJE. Aber Ian Carr ist ist mir nie explizit aufgefallen. Und jetzt - im internet - bin ich auf seine Band "Nucleus" gestoßen. Ich steh da voll drauf.  Viele Grüße Klaus
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#5
26.03.2009
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AW: Ian Carr
Zitat:
Für Nucleus habe ich mich damals nicht entscheiden können; es kursierten dann Tonbänder (sic!), auf denen ein paar Stücke drauf waren. Später waren die LPs vergriffen; ich habe die zweite, "We'll talk about it later", in den späten 70ern mal bei einem Freund in Berlin entdeckt. Der konnte mit der Musik nix anfangen, aber ich habe mich da taktisch etwas ungeschickt verhalten, weil er mein Interesse gleich mit einem unverschämt hohen Angebot konterte. So, und nachdem ich Dein You Tube-Beispiel gehört habe, musste ich mir die CDs bestellen. Danke und Gruß, che
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Hybrid-Darstellung
