[BITList] Central to the Nucleus

[John Feltham]

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Carr,  Ian Henry Randell  (1933-2009), jazz trumpeter and author, was born at Charnwood Maternity Home, Dumfries, on 21 April 1933, the son of Thomas Randell Carr, tea salesman, later company director, and his wife, Phyllis Harriet, nee Carr. At the time of his birth registration his parents lived at 2 Balmoral Road, Dumfries, but he grew up in the north-east of England. He took up the piano at the age of twelve and the trumpet at Barnard Castle School (in 1950), and in a duo with his brother, the pianist Mike Carr (b. 1937), was a finalist in the Carroll Levis Discoveries talent show in 1952, winning the regional heat in Darlington before moving on to the national finals in London. He chose, for the time being, to study English literature at King's College, Newcastle (where he became literary editor of the Northerner magazine while playing jazz meantime), graduating in 1955. He then did his national service with the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers (1956-8) before returning to the north-east in 1960 to join his brother in the Emcee Five, a group which rapidly gained a national reputation via a handful of outstanding recordings for the record producer Denis Preston.

In 1962 Carr moved to London and (amid a variety of ongoing freelance activities and recordings) began a full-time, seven-year musical partnership with the tenor saxophonist Don Rendell. From 1963 this took the form of the Rendell/Carr Quintet, a groundbreaking group whose albums (produced by Preston and including Shades of Blue, Dusk Fire, and Phase Three) set international standards of performance and immediately established themselves as landmarks of British jazz discography. On 28 June 1963, at Newcastle register office, he married Margaret Blackburn Bell (1941-1967), daughter of Jim Lowery Bell, insurance official. They had one daughter, Selina. In 1969 Carr-motivated by the technical restrictions of acoustic jazz performance in Britain, the burgeoning new directions of the rock revolution, and the influence of a lifelong inspiration, Miles Davis, whose electric-based recording In a Silent Way (1969) transformed the international landscape of jazz-dramatically changed musical direction. In November that year he formed the electric-based jazz-rock band Nucleus, which won the 1970 Montreux Jazz Festival competition and as a result appeared at America's Newport Jazz Festival in the same year. Nucleus, which Carr continued to lead in various forms for most of the rest of his life, achieved widespread international success thereafter via albums including Elastic Rock (1970), We'll Talk About it Later (1971), and Live in Bremen (1971), and collections which expanded the group's six-piece line-up for extended works including Solar Plexus (1971), Labyrinth (1973), and Neil Ardley's Kaleidoscope of Rainbows (1976). From 1977 (with fellow Europeans including Kenny Wheeler, Barbara Thompson, and Jon Hiseman) Carr also became a member of the German-based United Jazz + Rock Ensemble, led by the pianist Wolfgang Dauner, which toured and recorded for more than twenty years; its first album, Live in Schutzenhaus (1977), became Germany's best-selling jazz recording of all time.

Carr's writing career began in earnest with the publication of Music Outside (1973), a vivid portrait of contemporary jazz in Britain, admirably combined with interview-based portraits of significant contemporaries including Hiseman, Mike Westbrook, Chris McGregor, and Mike Gibbs. It was, however, his biography of his lifelong hero Miles Davis (1982; revised and expanded in 1998) which firmly established him both as Davis's most visible British champion and as a dedicated literary commentator, a polymathic image amplified by his major contribution to Jazz: the Essential Companion (1987, with Brian Priestley and Digby Fairweather, subsequently republished as Jazz: the Rough Guide in three editions, 1995-2004) and his study Keith Jarrett: the Man and his Music (1991).

Carr presented several BBC series, including documentaries on Davis, Jarrett, and George Russell, but his crowning glories in this alternative role were two Channel 4 documentaries (produced by Mike Dibb), on Jarrett (The Art of Improvisation, 2005) and Davis (The Miles Davis Story, 2001). The latter was a definitive portrait of Carr's hero. During his later years it was possible to overlook Carr's undiminished qualities as a trumpeter but he continued to teach at the Guildhall School of Music (as associate professor of jazz), at residential courses, and at jazz workshops. Later albums (including the very moving Old Heartland, 1988, recorded with Carr's latter-day musical partner, the saxophonist Phil Todd, and the Kreisler String Orchestra directed by Michael Thomas) attested both to his unfailing abilities as a musician and to his enduring creative gifts as a composer.

Away from professional successes, however, Carr's personal life had regularly been troubled: by the death of his first wife, Margaret, in childbirth; bowel cancer (contracted in 1983 but defeated after several operations); bouts of depression during his career; the dissolution in 1993 of his marriage to his second wife, Sandy 
   (Sandra Louise Major; b. 1945)
 , a research assistant whom he had married on 9 December 1972 at Hampstead register office; and in his last years a series of strokes which were accompanied by the onset of Alzheimer's disease. In 2006 he won the BBC jazz award for services to jazz, but by the time he appeared at the ceremony was visibly suffering from the disease which finally confined him to life in a care home. The dual legacies of his music and commentary had none the less left an indelible mark on British jazz history. He died at Lennox House care home, Islington on 25 February 2009, of aspiration pneumonia, and was survived by his daughter, Selina.

Digby Fairweather 

Sources  T. Lord, The jazz discography, 3 (1992); 16 (1997); 18 (1997) + The Times (27 Feb 2009) + The Independent (27 Feb 2009) + Daily Telegraph (28 Feb 2009) + The Guardian (28 Feb 2009) + New York Times (12 March 2009) + iancarrsnucleus.net/,  accessed on 8 Feb 2012 + WW (2009) + personal knowledge (2013) + private information (2013) + b. cert. + m. certs. + d. cert.
Archives  FILM BFI NFTVA, performance footage SOUND BL NSA, documentary recording + BL NSA, interview recordings + BL NSA, light entertainment recordings + BL NSA, performance recordings
Likenesses  D. Redfern, photographs, 1960-84, Getty Images · group portrait, 1962 (with Norman Sherry and Gerald Laing), repro. in Gerald Laing : a retrospective 1963-1993 (Fruitmarket Gallery, 1993) · K. Morris, photograph, 1970, Getty Images · photograph, 1970, Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library [see illus.] · J. Kilby, photographs, 1972-9, Photoshot, London · M. Goddard, photographs, Rex Features, London · obituary photographs
Wealth at death  under £260,000: probate, 15 June 2009, CGPLA Eng. & Wales




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