Frank Carter

“It’s important to bare my soul the way I have,” Frank Carter tells Apple Music. “I have a platform and a responsibility to use it for good, to ask questions and make statements that I know other people feel but maybe don’t have the bravery or the means to.” End of Suffering, Carter’s third album with The Rattlesnakes, is the product of two years of unflinching self-reflection. Confessional and courageous, it spans moments of both great joy and profound despair. “I’ve constantly validated myself through the opinion of others,” he says. “I’ve looked to fill that void with drugs and alcohol and sex and relationships, and they’ve all fallen short. It can only come from within. We’re human: We’re very complicated, we’re extremely multifaceted. The minute you try and repress any one of those faces, that’s when the problems start.” The music soundtracking these reflections is equally searching and absorbing. “We made sure that everything’s in there, from techno and dance through to Elton John and Black Flag.” This is Frank’s track-by-track guide to his journey.

Carter’s backing band here included young and youngish players like pianist Kenny Barron, drummer Lewis Nash and flute player Hubert Laws, along with four cellists and a harpsichord player. The selections move from the half-expected (Lewis’ stuff, and a couple of Carter originals), to the truly invigorating - like "Vocalise" from Rachmoninoff, "Prelude No. 4 in E Minor" by Chopin and Eric Satie’s "Gymnopedie." Carter, as always, plays with atmosphere, and restaint - though he is never boring. On "Friends," Carter presides over a far more delicate enterprise, and his playing matches that depth: he improvises in ways both impressionistic and intelligent, lyrical yet frank. It makes for one of the more challenging, yet strangely familiar recordings in the Davis-related canon. Jazz devotees will find a smooth passage into the classical genre, yet Carter’s legendary sophistication helps provide a new and invigorating take on these ages-old orchestations.

Benny Carter had already been a major jazz musician for nearly 30 years when he recorded this particularly strong septet session for Contemporary. With notable contributions from tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, trombonist Frank Rosolino and guitarist Barney Kessel, Carter (who plays a bit of trumpet on "How Can You Lose") is in superb form on a set of five standards and two of his originals. This timeless music is beyond the simple categories of "swing" or "bop" and should just be called "classic."

After what seems like years of delay, Mode has released this CD of chamber and vocal music in time for Elliott Carter's 95th birthday, which fell on Dec. 11, 2003. It was worth the wait. The Quintet for Piano and Strings (1997) is one of the two or three pinnacles of Carter's prolific eighties. Though undeniably an example of the his late style, it harks back to the First Quartet (1951!) in its long-lined writing for strings. The music is expansive and concise, light-hearted and dramatic all at once, and it is played to perfection by Ursula Oppens and the Arditti Quartet, the performers for whom it was written.