Bass Player: Ron Carter

Ron Carter is arguably one of the most influential double bass players in modern Jazz. Having been the bass player for Miles Davis’s second Classic Quintet, alongside pianist Herbie Hancock, saxophonist Wayne Shorter and drummer Tony Williams, Carter found his voice in one of the most interactive ensembles ever to take the stage. Although he did have a brief flirtation with the electric bass, Carter has remained true to his acoustic routes throughout his career (he started as a classical cellist at the Cass Technical College in Detroit which he attended at the same time as his predecessor in the Davis group, Paul Chambers) and remains one of the most distinctive voices on the instrument to this day. This is Carter’s lines to the pianoless quartet performance of Wynton Marsalis’s ‘Hesitation’, a contrafact to the bebopper’ favourite set of chord changes; ‘I Got Rhythm’.