Ian Carey: Biography

Ian Carey almost got arrested once for blowing his trumpet in public.

In the mid-1990s, during New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s infamous “quality of life” crackdown, Carey, a bassist, and a drummer were playing acoustic jazz in Sheridan Square in the West Village when they were approached by an undercover cop who asked them for identification and issued them tickets for making “unreasonable noise.” Carey, who had already purchased a plane ticket to California, missed his court date.

“I was gonna take care of it when I got back, but I never got around to it,” the trumpeter-composer explains. “I moved to California and forgot about it. And then I saw a cop show where a guy got busted on an old summons. I called the NYPD, and they said, ‘Yeah, there’s a warrant out for your arrest.’ The next time I came back to New York, which was in 2003, I went and sat in court for like six hours before the judge dismissed the case.”

No longer a “jazz fugitive,” as he puts it, Carey stepped out of the shadows in 2006 with his first CD, Sink/Swim on his own Oakland-based Kabocha Records label. The disc, featuring mostly original Carey compositions performed by himself, saxophonist Evan Francis, pianist Adam Shulman, bassist Fred Randolph, and drummer Jon Arkin, received considerable airplay on KCSM-FM, the San Francisco Bay Area’s primary radio outlet for uncompromising jazz such as that played by the Ian Carey Quintet.

This same “heavy-hitting lineup of musicians,” as KCSM deejay Greg Bridges characterized the combo, is now back on Kabocha Records with another, even more challenging set of music titled Contextualizin’. Carey plays open horn throughout the CD, alternating between trumpet and flugelhorn. Francis plays alto saxophone on every track except “No You,” on which he shows his prowess on flute, and Shulman switches between acoustic piano and Fender Rhodes.

The CD’s title, Carey says, “is a play on the high-concept, analytical stuff that people come up with to talk about their music. Dropping the ‘g’ from the end of ‘contextualizing’ sort of takes the seriousness off of it a little bit and adds a folksy element.”

That tune and seven more of the disc’s nine tracks are Carey compositions. “Tom/Tom” is a straight-ahead burner dedicated to Carey’s onetime teacher, Sacramento trumpeter Tom Peron, and to one of his trumpet heroes, Tom Harrell. (Other influences on the horn include Miles Davis, Art Farmer, Clifford Brown, and Kenny Wheeler.) “Questions” is a mysterious mood piece, and “Leap Year,” written in 5/4 time, features the leader’s warm-toned flugelhorn. “Disinvited” is Carey’s radical deconstruction of a well-known standard, the name of which the trumpeter implies in his title. The ballad “No You,” on which Carey again plays flugelhorn, was written for Linda, his recent bride. The hard-driving blues “Sockdolager” is aptly titled, having taken its name from a boxing term for knockdown blow. “Shake & Joe,” featuring darting interplay between Carey’s trumpet and Francis’s alto, salutes trumpeter Shake Keane and saxophonist Joe Harriott, whose innovations in England during the late 1950s were parallel to yet independent from those of Ornette Coleman in the U.S.

The only standard of the bunch is “Just Friends,” a John Klenner/Samuel M. Lewis composition first popularized by crooner Russ Columbo in 1932. “It’s incredibly fun to play on,” Carey says of the tune. “It has so much forward motion.”

The Ian Carey Quintet is a remarkably cohesive unit that has performed at such Bay Area venues as Coda, the Jazzschool, the Make Out Room, the Octavia Lounge, and Anna’s Jazz Island. The leader describes saxophonist-flutist Francis as “a serious individualist who doesn’t sound like anybody else in the world.” Pianist Shulman, Carey says, “has an understated virtuosity.” The trumpeter calls bassist Randolph “the rock” of the group and says that drummer Arkin is “incredibly sensitive and can go from loud to very quiet and still maintain the same intensity.”

Carey was born on July 24, 1974, in Binghamton, New York. His mother, the late Judi Carey, was an illustrator and arts fundraiser. His father Philip is a museum exhibit designer who, during the 1960s, performed with the Gregg Smith Singers, a chorus that frequently worked with Igor Stravinsky and won a Grammy in 1966 for the Columbia LP Ives: Music for Chorus.

“My dad was mainly into classical stuff, but he also had a lot of jazz records like Miles, Dave Brubeck, and the Modern Jazz Quartet,” Ian says. “I had grown up hearing those but hadn’t really paid that much attention. Once I started playing trumpet, I started listening to more of that.”

As a child, Ian loved singing works by J.S. Bach and other baroque composers at the Episcopal church his family attended in Binghamton. “A couple times a year,” he remembers, “they would have a brass quartet come in and play with us, which was what really got me interested in the trumpet.”

He took up cornet in junior high, and after the family relocated to Folsom, California, near Sacramento, he began playing French horn in high school. One day while in the tenth grade, he picked up a friend’s trumpet in the band room and began blowing.

“I played a high C,” Carey recalls, “and the band director said, ‘Who did that?’ I said, ‘I did.’ He said, ‘I want you to play in jazz band.’ I was playing lead trumpet right away, which was exciting. I improved real fast at that.”

Carey studied classical trumpet for two years at the University of Nevada in Reno, performing with visiting artists Eddie Daniels and Ernie Watts, then enrolled at the New School in New York City. There, he studied trumpet with Cecil Bridgewater, Vincent Penzarella, and Charles Tolliver and composition with Bill Kirchner and Maria Schneider, as well as taking small group classes with Joanne Brackeen, Andrew Cyrille, Billy Harper, and Reggie Workman, and performing with musicians like Ravi Coltrane and Eddie Bert. He and other students sometimes played for tips on the street, making as much as $5 apiece on a good day. “That was sort of comparable to what we would make in a coffee shop or bar,” he quips.

Following his graduation from the New School with a B.A. in Jazz and Contemporary Music, he stayed in New York City for five years. He worked as a proofreader in the evening, which prevented him from playing much or attending clubs around the town. “There was all this amazing music going on, but I felt like I was on the outside looking in,” he reflects.

After subletting a friend’s apartment in San Francisco for three months, Carey decided nine years ago to move permanently to the Bay Area. “I was immediately playing a lot more here than I had been there,” he says.

Carey has played around the Bay Area with the Contemporary Jazz Orchestra, 8 Legged Monster, the Realistic Orchestra, Circus Bella, vocalist Betty Fu, and pianists Ben Stolorow and the late B.J. Papa. His main music focus, however, has been on composing original music and performing with his own forward-thinking quintet, formed in 2003 and so magnificently documented on the Kabocha CDs Sink/Swim and the new Contextualizin’, recorded on May 9, 2009, at Bay Records’ studio in Berkeley.

“Sometime when I was in my twenties,” Carey says, “I realized that there are so many great, amazing players out there that the context in which I do what I’m doing is going to be how I differentiate myself, and for me that’s writing my own tunes and doing my own things within them. I really love learning old jazz tunes and learning all the things you’re supposed to know, but I feel like you can do that forever and never catch up to the greats. You have to say at some point, ‘This is my thing, and I’m gonna do my thing.’”

–Lee Hildebrand