Ian Carr
Trumpeter Ian Carr (1933-2005) was one of the most influential bandleaders of the 1960s and 70s. He was born in Dumfries, but raised in the North East of England. His younger brother, Mike Carr (1937-) would go onto become an important British jazz musician himself. Ian Carr started on piano at the age of 12, switching to trumpet in his late teens. He was already performing modern jazz in the mid-1950s in bands with his brother Mike on piano. The pair played together in the EmCee Five in 1960 after Carr had graduated from Newcastle University and completed National Service. In 1962 he moved to London, and soon began collaborating with saxophonist Don Rendell in the hugely influential Rendell-Carr Quintet which also featured pianist Michael Garrick, Dave Green (bass) and Trevor Tomkins (drums). Among the five albums they recorded for EMI were Shades Of Blue (1964) and Dusk Fire (1966), which are remembered today as some of the finest UK jazz recordings. The group also collaborated with Indian guitarist, Amancio D’Silva on his 1969 album Integration.
Carr’s second group was if anything even more influential. Nucleus was one of the leading jazz-rock bands of the 1970s winning first prize at the Montreux Jazz Festival and performing at Newport Jazz Festival in 1970. Jeff Clyne, John Marshall and Karl Jenkins were among the original line-up, while Gordon Beck, Geoff Castle, Derek Wadsworth, Jim Mullen, Roy Babbington and Kenny Wheeler would also pass through the ranks. While Nucleus would last into the 1980s, and reform again the late 1990s, he also found time to play in George Russell’s Living Time Orchestra, and with the United Jazz and Rock Ensemble, an avant-garde collective with an all-star cast, shepherded by German pianist Wolfgang Dauner. Charlie Mariano, Barbara Thompson, Ack Van Rooyen, Albert Mangelsdorff, Volker Kriegel, Eberhard Weber and Jon Hiseman were core members.
Carr had equally successful careers as a writer and an educator. He was co-editor of the Rough Guide to Jazz, biographer of Miles Davis, and an associate professor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
Key Recordings:
Shades Of Blue (Columbia 1964) with Don Rendell
We’ll Talk About It Later (Vertigo 1979) with Nucleus
Old Heartland (MMC 1988)
