By DAN ARMONAITIS
When James Carter was growing up in the 1970s, there was a brief period in which one of his older brother’s bandmates came to stay at the Carter home in Detroit.
Charles “Chazzy” Green, who would later play with Ray Parker Jr., brought with him a few instruments, including a gold-plated Selmer Mark VI saxophone, which instantly drew the attention of the young Carter.
“I started sneaking into his room and started checking out his horns,” Carter said. “I couldn’t blow on them because I’d bust myself, but I would pantomime with them.”
Carter eventually got caught with his hands on the saxophone, and it was evident then that he needed to have one of his own.
“This was, of course, pre-eBay and Craigslist and all that stuff,” Carter recalled, “so you had to go to the classified ads in the paper and look at the small black-and-white entries that said how much they cost.”
Carter found one to his liking and thus began a lifelong musical journey that led to his current status as one of the contemporary jazz world’s most renowned saxophone players.
Carter will visit the Upstate for a quintet performance on Thursday, Feb. 27 at The Wheel Sessions in Greenville and as a guest soloist for the Spartanburg Jazz Ensemble’s big band concert on Friday, Feb. 28 at Leonard Auditorium in Wofford College’s Main Building.
“I’m looking forward to it because the last time I was in that neck of the woods I was at Claflin (University) in Orangeburg and had a great time over there,” Carter said, referring to a 2016 performance in the Palmetto State.
Carter, now 51 and the youngest of five children, grew up surrounded by music.
His brother Robert was a member of the R&B band Nature’s Divine, which scored a national hit in 1979 with “I Just Can’t Control Myself,” while his brother Kevin played with such groups as Parliament-Funkadelic, The Floaters, Five Special and the Gap Band. He’s also the cousin of acclaimed jazz violinist Regina Carter.
But it was the vocal jazz records his mother would play while doing household chores that had the biggest impact on Carter.
“She had a penchant for singers and, of course, those singers would have instrumentalists behind them,” Carter said. “And in a lot of instances, there was this sound I kept hearing, which turned out to be the saxophone, and I always dug it. So, that was the catalyst for me in terms of hearing the saxophone.”
Carter soon began collecting jazz records of his own.
“Even before Bird (aka Charlie Parker) came along in my listening, I was checking out the sax section in Duke Ellington’s band from the ’70th Birthday Concert’ album that they did in Manchester (England) in 1969 with all those individuals like (Johnny) Hodges,” Carter said. “And I had the album, ‘Basie Jam 3,’ which, of course, had Benny Carter and Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis on it, and that was the first time I heard an earful of them.
“And then there was Eddie Harris’ ‘Playin’ with Myself’ album in which he’s playing tenor sax and electric saxophone, reed trumpet and piano overdubbed.”
Over the past three decades, Carter has released numerous albums of his own, including a handful for Atlantic Records in the mid to late 1990s and early 2000s.
His latest effort, “Live From Newport Jazz,” is an organ trio recording released last summer on the Blue Note Records label in which Carter reinterprets the music of the 1930s and ’40s gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and places it in a contemporary urban context.
Carter said he considers it an honor to be associated with a label as prestigious as Blue Note, which celebrated its 80th anniversary last year.
Noting his appearances in South Carolina this week, Carter couldn’t help but be reminded of the state’s most famous jazz export, the late trumpet icon Dizzy Gillespie.
“I met Dizzy one time,” Carter said. “It was during his 70th birthday celebration in ’87, and I have a couple of of pictures with him that turned out to be underdeveloped.
“But, anyway, he came to the Montreaux-Detroit Festival back in ’87. … And to see someone who played with Bird. I mean, not many people have that connection. Bird was gone before we were here, so to be able to at least have some of that Dizzy aura in your system and to see him play in front of you, you can just imagine what Bird would have been like playing in front of you.”