What Are "Ron Carter Drops"? A legendary double bass player explains his technique

On Monday October 28, 2019, renowned double bass player Ron Carter performed at a bass clinic Berklee Music School in Boston, where he "regaled a packed recital hall with stories about playing with Miles Davis and tips about his signature bass style." 

Ron Carter (right) performs with Berklee faculty Steve Bailey (middle, electric bass)
and Ron Savage (left, drums)
(image by Dave Green)

According to a Berklee news post a few days later, 

"With 2,235 recordings to his name as a bassist (he set the world record in 2016 with 2,221), it’s no surprise that Ron Carter drops so many legendary names into his conversations that you need a shovel to scoop them up. During a recent guest lecture on campus, moderated by Steve Bailey, chair of the Bass Department, Carter would reference “Miles, Herbie, Wayne, and Tony” as if he was describing friends he met at a bar, and not his bandmates in Miles Davis’s Second Great Quintet. The group, which Carter was a part of from 1963 to1968, helped teach the bassist one of the most important lessons of his career: trust. “We understood that this music would have a life if we were responsible for it, if we trusted each [other’s choices],” he said."

"Carter went deep into his own process and technique, which vacillated between the technical (“What’s it going to take to make this D-flat on the downbeat of [an F7 chord in a blues] work?”) to the quasi-mystical: “We were four scientists with a head chemist,” he said of the Second Great Quintet. “Our job was to recognize the chemicals [Davis] laid out for us, and manipulate them so there’d be a different kind of explosion every night.”

"Much of the talk centered on Carter’s ability to play seemingly “wrong” notes at the top of a tune—that aforementioned D-flat-over-F7 choice, instead of playing the traditional root note of F—but with a laser-precise view of what notes he’ll then need to play throughout the song to bring the band into harmonic alignment. “I don’t play root [notes] anymore,” he said early on, drawing laughs from the audience, before going on to make a broader point about the important role the bassist plays in creating a shared “language” for a song, saying, “Why would I put an exclamation point before the first word? The last root I played was…1978. It was the right one, too.”

In this video from June 3, 2022, Carter explains bass drops, fall offs, pull-offs and glissandos and how he uses them to make interesting or unusual connections between notes. 

I began listening to Miles Davis (and hence, Ron Carter) as a freshman in college while I was taking a jazz appreciation course. At the time, I was very impressed by Miles' late 1960's and early '70s electric jazz fusion music. I had been listening to prog rock all through high school and this phase of Davis's reinvention of himself fed right into my tastes at the time. 

But I have to be in the right mood for that stuff now. Mostly I listen to Miles' acoustic recordings these days. I enjoy his forays in bebop and hardbop in the 1940s and 1950s, and his modal phase -- which was just the one album, Kind Of Blue  -- but what a phenomenal one album! But in particular I love his postbop recordings with the "Second Great Quintet," which was Miles Davis band from 1964 to 1968. 

This lineup was composed of Miles Davis on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on saxophone, Herbie Hancock, piano, Tony Williams on drums and Ron Carter on bass. According to Richard Cook's It's About That Time: Miles Davis On and Off Record,

"The performance style of the Second Great Quintet was often referred to by Davis as "time, no changes", incorporating elements of free jazz without completely surrendering to the approach. This allowed the five musicians to simultaneously contribute to the group as equals at times, rather than to always follow the established pattern of having the group leader and then the backing musicians perform unrelated solos" (Cook, 168). 

Miles Davis Second Great Quintet recorded six studio albums E.S.P., Miles Smiles, Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky, and Filles de Kilimanjaro, and the live set The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965. Below is an example of their style, the first track from 1967's Sorcerer, "Prince of Darkness"

Numerous other live performances were recorded or filmed, such as this one recorded on Halloween, 1967 at the Konserthuset in Stockholm, Sweden.

Setlist: 

- Agitation (Miles Davis)

- Footprints (Wayne Shorter)

- ‘Round Midnight (Thelonious Monk)

- Gingerbread Boy (Jimmy Heath)

- Theme (Miles Davis)

Guardian jazz critic John Fordham argues "that the second great quintet was Davis’s best group ever"

“Their solos were fresh and original, and their individual styles fused with a spontaneous fluency that was simply astonishing, The quintet’s method came to be dubbed ‘time, no changes’ because of their emphasis on strong rhythmic grooves without the dictatorial patterns of song-form chords. At times they veered close to free-improvisation, but the pieces were as thrilling and hypnotically sensuous as anything the band’s open-minded leader had recorded before.”

I am inclined to agree with John Fordham. Whether I am listening to the Second Great Quintet's studio work or anything they recorded live, I am constantly astonished by what they achieve. I also find the recordings by the other members of the Second Quartet, as leaders of their own projects from the same time period, to be of a similar high quality. Wayne Shorter's JuJu, Speak No Evil, The Soothsayer, Et Cetera, The All Seeing Eye, Adam's Apple, and Schizophrenia (all recorded between 1964 and 1968) and Herbie Hancock's Empyrean Isles, Maiden Voyage, and Speak Like a Child (recorded during the same 4-year timespan) are all excellent explorations free jazz/postbop, and most of them include Ron Carter on bass.  

I never saw Miles Davis live. I was too young to have seen him before his mid-1970s hiatus, and I have to admit I was not a fan of his 1980s work when he came out of retirement (it's still not high on my list). So I didn't take advantage of several opportunities to have seen Miles Davis play in Newport, Boston or at other area appearances before his untimely death in 1991. But I have seen Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock, both separately and together at the Newport Jazz Festival over the years, and I saw Ron Carter play at Waterplace Park in Providence almost 20 years ago. 

Here is Ron Carter from around the time that I saw him at Waterplace Park. They're playing "All Blues," a song from Miles Davis Kind Of Blue, which starts at 50:34.

And here is Ron Carter playing in May 2022 for the NPR Tiny Desk Concert series, with Donald Vega on piano and Russell Malone on guitar. I especially like his "Blues for Tiny Desk" (3:34).

The Ron Carter Quartet is playing Sunday July 31, 2022 at Newport Jazz. When I was deciding which day to go this year, that Ron Carter is playing Sunday featured greatly in my decision to go then. 

The current lineup for the Ron Carter Quartet is Renee Rosnes on piano, Payton Crossley on drums, Jimmy Greene on saxophone and of course, Ron Carter on bass, which is the line-up in the "Foursight" video below.

I leave you now with this recording Ron Carter made with Gil Scott-Heron in 1971, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." Enjoy!

The cultural references in Gil Scott-Heron's poem can be read here.