Regina Carter – Swing States: Harmony in the Battleground (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 49:26 minutes | 955 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Tiger Turn

Violinist Regina Carter is a highly original soloist whose sophisticated technique and rich, lush tone took the jazz world by pleasant surprise when she arrived in New York from her native Detroit. And jazz fans weren’t the only people who heard that mercurial quality in her playing: artists as diverse as Faith Evans, Elliot Sharp, and Mary J. Blige have employed her talents on their recordings, as has filmmaker Ken Burns on his soundtrack for The Civil War. Add this to an extremely long list of jazzers who include Tom Harrell, Wynton Marsalis, and Oliver Lake. Carter began playing her instrument at age four and attended Detroit’s prestigious Cass Technical High School. Upon graduating, she departed for the new England Conservatory of Music, only to return to Michigan to join the all-female jazz quartet Straight Ahead. After two recordings for the Atlantic label, Carter left the band in 1994 in search of a solo career. She had already been doing session work in the city and sought to make the move permanent. Carter found herself working with Max Roach, the String Trio of New York, and the Uptown String Quartet before recording her self-titled debut recording on Atlantic in 1995. Its mixture of R&B, pop, and jazz confused jazz fans and delighted pop critics. It sold well enough for her to record Something for Grace, which leaned in a jazz direction though it featured an R&B sheen in its production. Carter left Atlantic for Verve in 1998 and recorded two more outings under her own name, the last of which, Motor City Moments, is her finest session. In 2001, Carter recorded a duet session with Kenny Barron that has been universally acclaimed for its lyrical qualities and stunning range of dynamics and harmonic invention. She has since released the classically influenced Paganini: After a Dream in 2003 and the American songbook album I’ll Be Seeing You: A Sentimental Journey in 2006 as a tribute to her late mother. She won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in September of that year. After much time spent touring and a sojourn in Africa, Carter emerged with Reverse Thread in 2010 on the E1 imprint. The album is comprised mainly of African folk tunes from countries as diverse as Mali, Uganda, and Senegal, among others. Her sidemen on this recording include accordionists Will Holshouser and Gary Versace, guitarist Adam Rogers, acoustic bassist Chris Lightcap, electric bassist Mamadou Ba, kora master Yocouba Sissoko, and drummer Alvester Garnett. Using many of the same musicians, Carter furthered her investigation of earlier musics on Southern Comfort, which explored in detail as well as in concept the roots of American music. It was released in March of 2014. The following year, she stayed busy contributing to a stylistically varied set of projects, including albums by Terri Lyne Carrington, Joe Jackson and Will Downing. In 2017, Carter returned to her solo work with her second album for Okeh Records, the Ella Fitzgerald-inspired Ella: Accentuate the Positive. Along with featuring Fitzgerald’s former pianist and musical director Mike Wofford, the album also included guest appearances from bassist Ben Williams, vocalist Charenee Wade, and vocalist Carla Cook. – Thom Jurek

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Regina Carter – Southern Comfort (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 56:19 minutes | 1,06 GB | Genre: Jazz, Blues
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Masterworks

On Regina Carter’s Southern Comfort, her Sony Masterworks debut, the Detroit-born violinist continues the musical journey of self-discovery that began with 2006’s I’ll Be Seeing You: A Sentimental Journey, a collection of her mother’s favorite jazz standards. She followed it with 2010’s Reverse Thread, a brilliant collection of traditional and modern African songs. Southern Comfort traces her father’s side of history through the music of America’s Deep South. Assisted in performing and arranging by her own band and some helpful studio aces, Carter delivers a program that weds the America’s Southern heritage in folks songs gospel, spirituals, child ballads, blues through to its cultural evolution in the mid-20th century’s country music, jazz, and R&B. She and her collaborators spent months researching material from the Smithsonian collections to more mercurial and familial sources. Opener “Miner’s Child” (adapted from Dock Boggs’ “Prayer of a Miner’s Child,” itself an adaptation) relates directly to her grandfather a coal miner she never met. Her violin rides atop Will Holhouser’s accordion, Marvin Sewell’s blues- and bluegrass-inflected guitar picking, Alvester Garnett’s rumbling tom-toms, and rolling bassline from Jesse Murphy. The modern arrangement keeps the raw grain of the original in context. Gram Parsons’ “Hickory Wind” is rendered with heartbreaking tenderness as violin and accordion sing directly to one another and the electric guitar functions like a weeping pedal steel. This is Carter at her most economical, though she omits nothing of the song’s melodic power. “Shoo-Rye” is an Appalachian children’s song that reveals its Cajun fiddle roots and further evolves into modern jazz. “I’m Goin’ Home,” a traditional spiritual arranged by guitarist Adam Rogers, is spacious and contemplative as guitar and accordion reflect reverence and longing. Hank Williams’ “Honky Tonkin’ weds jazz, country, and R&B in this Rogers arrangement with stellar soloing by Carter, Holhouser, and the guitarist, with killer breaks by Garnett. “Cornbread Crumbled in Gravy” arranged by Xavier Davis, is rife with classical counterpoint and flamenco cadences yet never loses its root melody. The earthy reading of “See See Rider” here is not inspired by Wayne Cochran’s classic take, but an earlier version by a rural, all-girl school chorus. Stefon Harris arranged the album-closing medley of “Death Have Mercy/Breakaway.” Led by handclaps, and electric and acoustic guitars, they meld blues, singalong work songs, and pre-WWII African gospel, and are infused with highlife-like rhythms, and link directly and effectively to Reverse Thread. “Trampin'” is an old blues tune where the sampled field recording vocal is floated over a greasy, funky, NOLA-inspired second-line rhythm as Carter digs in and bridges the gap with grit and fire. Southern Comfort is classic Carter. She approaches this material with personal and historical curiosity as well as emotional honesty. For her, musical sophistication and lineage traditions are inseparable.

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