BENNY CARTER: Legends

In the course of his extraordinary career, Benny Carter has managed to record with nearly all of the greatest pianists in jazz history: Fats Waller, Willie "The Lion" Smith, Earl Hines, Teddy Wilson (whom Carter first brought into the limelight), Art Tatum, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Nat Cole, Oscar Peterson, Tommy Flanagan (and others a listener might see fit to add). Conspicuously absent from this distinguished roster, however, was Hank Jones, a keyboard master who has often been described in terms similar to those applied to Carter himself: "elegant," "urbane," and "impeccable." This oversight is hereby remedied and, to coin a phrase, the results were worth waiting for. (To be absolutely discographically correct, there is a Carter­Jones performance on record prior to this, but it can best be described as subliminal; it's a single chorus featuring Carter on "Cocktails for Two" from a ballad medley at a 1952 Jazz at the Philharmonic concert.) Of course these two have played together many times before, notable at two splendid 1973 concerts at Princeton University, where Carter was then in residence. Among the happy results of this long-overdue pairing are five duets, something new in the annals of recorded Carter. Intimate and revealing (there's no place to hide}, duets are a very special kind of music, and these conversations are olympian.