Ham Carson: Hotter And Hotter Swing -- Steady Gig Keeps Fans Humming

Many years ago, there was a refreshing jazz band called Great Excelsior on the Seattle scene. The group played Dixieland and swing with great abandon and joie de vivre, and without the purist's fidelity to old recordings that can make revivalist music dull.

Great Excelsior's clarinetist, Ham Carson, always gave me shivers, with his liquid sound, easy flow of ideas and ticklish sense of swing.

Carson moved to Los Angeles in 1982, but when he returned to the Northwest six years later, his own quartet got a gig every Thursday night at the New Orleans Restaurant. We tend to take such groups for granted, but it's a mistake. Carson is one of Seattle's finest jazz musicians.

Born in Pennsylvania, the good-natured reed man studied with Jelly Roll Morton's clarinetist, Omer Simeon, in 1950 in a Harlem YMCA, and played on Manhattan's thriving traditional jazz scene throughout that decade, working with J.C. Higginbotham, and gigging on Cape Cod with the highly respected trad-jazz pianist, Bob Pilsbury.

In the mid-1950s, Carson took a day job in the burgeoning computer industry, from which he recently retired, but he never stopped playing jazz. Last year, he put out a CD, recorded live at the New Orleans; now he has followed it up with "Joy of a Gig Vol. II." The Ham Carson Quartet celebrates the release of the new disc, at 7 tonight at the New Orleans.

Carson's group plays unpretentious, joyous "small-band swing" in the tradition of Jack Teagarden and the small groups that recorded with Billie Holiday and Mildred Bailey. The tunes come out of hot jazz, swing and blues - "Blue and Sentimental," "Body and Soul," "Beale Street Blues," "Honeysuckle Rose." The delivery is infectious, friendly and fresh.

In a letter to the trad-jazz magazine, Mississippi Rag, Pilsbury notes, "I shall never forget hearing Ham's first 5-10 notes (on clarinet). His tone was extraordinary, beautiful and lovely then - and still is." Carson has expanded his arsenal to include baritone and tenor saxophones. His light tone and looping phrases on tenor come out of classic, late-'30s Lester Young and Bud Freeman. His baritone approach is hardy and straightforward.

"The saxophones are to let people know that we're not just doing Dixieland," Carson explains. "We play swing, all kinds of things."

Carson's sidemen know the territory: bassist Buddy Catlett, veteran of the bands of Count Basie, Quincy Jones and Louis Armstrong; Dave Stetler, for years Seattle's first-call swing drummer; Bob Hammer, a modernist who has worked with everyone from Elvin Jones to Charles Mingus, but whose piano works through swing modulations like a nimble Teddy Wilson; and guitarist Geoffrey Wilke, who brings a banjo jump to the group when it's called for.

-- Drummer T.S. Monk, immortalized as a toddler in his father Thelonious' song "Little Rootie Tootie," is at Jazz Alley through Sunday. Monk's hard-hitting sextet features a tenor man, Willie Williams (a strong soloist whom I recently caught in New York with the Mingus Big Band), as well as Bobby Porcelli (saxophones), Don Sickler (trumpet), Ronnie Matthews (piano) and Gary Wang (bass).

-- Pianist Marian McPartland's "Piano Jazz" program is one of National Public Radio's finest. McPartland opens at the Alley on Tuesday.

-- Alto saxophonist Briggan Krause, who graduated from Seattle's "downtown" scene, comes home (from New York) to celebrate the release of his debut disc, "Good Kitty" (Knitting Factory Works), Aug. 23 at the Compound, 5310 Ballard Ave. N.W. Krause is a thoughtful experimentalist with a fat tone and postmodern sense of swing influenced by Anthony Braxton, as well as world-beat grooves; his humor is his own. Krause performs with Wayne Horvitz (keyboards) and Andrew Drury (drums).

-- Two other local CDs come to light this month. Seattle drummer Greg Williamson and his Big Bad Groove Society have an enhanced, multimedia CD, "Swing Your Big Head," which they celebrate Monday at Jazz Alley. And the dazzling Brazilian group Jovino Santos Neto Quarteto brings out its long-awaited disc, "Caboclo," at the Nippon Kan Theater, Aug. 22.

Paul de Barros is a Seattle free-lance writer. His Jazz Inside Out column appears every other week in Ticket.