Benny Carter Entertains Packed Sanders Crowd

Feet tapped and heads swayed to the rhythm of legendary jazz musician Benny Carter's saxophone in Sanders Theatre last night.

Nearly 900 people gathered to listen as he joined the Harvard Jazz Band and jazz greats James Williams, Gray Sargent, Whit Browne and Alan Dawson in a two-hour concert in his honor. The 80-year-old Carter's musical career spans 65 years, and includes a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement.

The show opened with a performance by members of the Rhythm Section Project, a group of undergraduate musicians who had studied one-on-one over the last two months with the four professional musicians honoring Carter.

Carter then played numbers with Williams, Sargent, Browne and Dawson, and finished the show by joining with the Jazz Band for the last seven pieces.

During the performance, Carter occasionally entertained the audience with bits of humor. After announcing that the song he was to play, "Summer Serenade," had just been recorded by another musician, Carter remarked, "At a few cents an album, that's always good news for me."

After Jazz Band director Tom Everett remarked that Carter was "80 years young," Carter told the audience, "These are the glory days. The good old days--they are now."

In the past, Carter has played with such luminaries as Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson and Coleman Hawkins. His musical style influenced such great performers as Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, who played in Carter's band at the beginning of their careers, according to Cathleen McCormick, assistant director at the Office for the Arts.