Benny Carter (August 8, 1907 – July 12, 2003) was an American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, trumpeter, composer, arranger, and bandleader. With Johnny Hodges, he was a pioneer on the alto saxophone. From the beginning of his career in the 1920s, he worked as an arranger including written charts for Fletcher Henderson’s big band that shaped the swing style. He had an unusually long career that lasted into the 1990s. During the 1980s and 1990s, he was nominated for eight Grammy Awards, which included receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award.
He was inducted into the DownBeat Jazz Hall of Fame in 1977. In 1978, he was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame.[10] In 1980, he received the Golden Score award of the American Society of Music Arrangers and Composers. His 75th birthday was commemorated by a radio station in New York that played his music nonstop for over a week.[1] The National Endowment for the Arts gave him the NEA Jazz Masters Award for 1986.[11]
He was given a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987. In 1994 he won a Grammy Award for his solo on “Prelude to a Kiss” and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
In 1989, Lincoln Center celebrated Carter’s 82nd birthday with a set of his songs sung by Ernestine Anderson and Sylvia Syms. In 1990, he was named Jazz Artist of the Year in the DownBeat and JazzTimes polls. He was a Kennedy Center Honoree in 1996 and received honorary doctorates from Princeton (1974),[12] Rutgers (1991),[13] Harvard (1994), and the New England Conservatory of Music (1998).[14] In 2016, the National Museum of American History made Carter the subject of its Jazz Appreciation Month poster.[15]
In 2000, he was given the National Medal of Arts by President Bill Clinton.[16][17]
