“Stop. Listen. Look,” John Brown, a musician and friend of Regina Carter, said during the jazz discussion before the acclaimed jazz violinist’s performance on Saturday.
Stop, listen, look. As Brown said that night, these are actions that are essential to the appreciation of jazz. They should be performed in that order, because music is not meant to be enjoyed with the eyes, but with the ears.
“When it comes to music, music is actually not something you see, it’s something you hear,” Brown said. “[If] somebody would hand you a piece of sheet music, ‘Oh yeah, here’s the music’. No, that’s a piece of paper with notes on it. Music is what you’re going to hear. Music is what you’re going to feel.”
According to Brown, fluidity, vibrato, improvisation, double stops and col legno are techniques that hold power. They are impossible to capture with words, but were elements of the music to listen for in Carter’s performance.
Carter’s performance delivered these techniques. In addition to the amazing technical skill, her music aimed to bring unity and help spread understanding. This is just one of the many powers jazz can hold.
This is Carter’s fourth time at N.C. State, and she was also able to give a round table discussion on behalf of the Women’s Center before her performance. Later, she also signed copies of her albums.
“[The band and I] are excited to be back here [at N.C. State]. We love playing at this venue,” Carter said.
Using her training in the Suzuki method, a method that relies on a musician’s hearing to play desired notes, and her innate desire to listen, Carter believes she has been specially equipped to create music that unites. She creates a unique fusion of music that can break down the barriers people develop.
“For me [creating music that uses influences from many different traditions] is a natural part of what I do and it’s a natural process,” Carter said. “I think a lot of it comes from the way I was trained, from the Suzuki method, so hearing and imitating [is natural]. Every sound that has come to me since I was a child is still in [me]. It’s like watching children that come from a household that speaks multiple languages, and they don’t speak for a long time and when they do, they put all the different languages together as one.”
Playing music from her latest album, Reverse Threads, as well as music from her previous projects, Carter and her Reverse Threads band combined musical traditions from Africa, Latin America, and Detroit. This allowed audience members to recognize the common humanity in different traditions, something Carter values.
“I think it’s important because it helps to promote tolerance,” Carter said. “It helps to knock down some of the ignorant barriers that we put in place sometimes.”
For many audience members, it was this unifying effect of the music they found the most exciting.
“I loved that aspect of being able to bring music from all different areas together.” Jessica Lucas, a junior in communications and Spanish, said. “It really made for an exciting concert. It flowed, but you didn’t get bored because there were new elements introduced in every song.”
