John Carter stood among the scant free-jazz practitioners who devoted themselves solely to clarinet while also foregrounding composed structures within the idiom. Early training centered on both alto saxophone and clarinet. During the late 1940s he shared bandstands in Fort Worth with fellow native Ornette Coleman. Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, conferred his bachelor’s degree in 1949, and the University of Colorado awarded him a master’s degree in 1956. Between 1949 and 1961 he instructed students in the Fort Worth Public Schools; from 1961 to 1982 he continued that work inside the Los Angeles school system.
After settling in Los Angeles he assembled the New Art Jazz Ensemble in 1964 alongside trumpeter Bobby Bradford, another Coleman associate. The following year Carter directed a concert program devoted to Coleman’s music at U.C.L.A. Late in the decade he performed and recorded with pianist Horace Tapscott and saxophonist Arthur Blythe. In 1974 he abandoned every instrument except clarinet. Leader dates appeared on Flying Dutchman, Moers Music, and Revelation during the closing years of the 1960s and the opening years of the 1970s.
Throughout the 1970s Carter served as an informal mentor to a younger cohort of Los Angeles free-jazz players that included multi-instrumentalist Vinny Golia. In 1983 he established the Wind College, an improvisation school, together with flutist James Newton, bassist/tubaist Red Callender, and saxophonist Charles Owens. Clarinet Summit, a cross-generational quartet completed by David Murray, Alvin Baptiste, and Jimmy Hamilton, occupied much of his attention during the eighties; the ensemble documented its work for India Navigation and Black Saint. The dominant undertaking of his final ten years, however, remained the five-part cycle Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music. Black Saint released the opening suite, while Gramavision issued the remaining four.
Carter’s improvising descended directly from the melodic lineage traced by Coleman, Bradford, and Dewey Redman. On the notoriously recalcitrant B-flat clarinet he displayed uncommon fluency and precision of attack. A thorough command of the instrument combined with an expansive imagination allowed him, in his own writing, to channel the freedom of collective improvisation while preserving its freshness.
