Ron Carter stands tall - literally and figuratively - as jazz's most respected, sought after and sensitive bassist. A consummate musician, composer and band leader, he has graced thousands of timeless recordings across musical boundaries and has even been reverently sampled in hip hop. This month he releases a new album on the Blue Note label titled Dear Miles with his quartet of pianist Stephen Scott, drummer Payton Crossley and percussionist Roger Squitero. Mr. Carter and company waxed interpretations of songs such as "Seven Steps to Heaven," "My Funny Valentine," "Stella By Starlight" and "Bye Bye Blackbird" associated with trumpeter Miles Davis, a man with whom Carter spent pivotal years in the '60s in what is considered one of the greatest jazz ensembles of all time: the second Miles Davis Quintet (Miles, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, drummer Tony Williams and Carter).In the interview that follows, Ron Carter speaks thoughtfully about what Miles, that band and that period means to him four decades later, and how his current group interpreted new and classic material in his honor.

Q: What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Miles the man and musician today?

A: To this day I've never understood why critics - whoever they are - got on Miles' case about him not being (accommodating) to them - giving interviews, playing facing them, or whatever they expected someone of his stature to do. They'd get bent out of shape and take it out on him in their reviews. They never got that his responsibility to the music was his primary focus. When a set ends, the audience may think it's over, but it clearly wasn't for Miles. I can appreciate his mindset that had him more focused on the band, the last set or the coming set would require his immediate attention. I never saw him come to a gig not prepared to play.

Q: You titled this album Dear Miles. Do you consider it a musical letter to Miles?

A: The company came up with three or four choices. That one best suited my view at the time. Dear Miles is a pretty poignant opening...Given the American view of what a man is supposed to be like, you don't sign many letters to a man that say Dear Miles unless he was your son or a relative. I just think that my relationship with him made it o.k. for me to say "Dear Miles," and not care what anyone else felt about it (chuckles). It just puts him in a category where few others belong. I would have a hard time telling you how I felt when my father passed away...and he's been gone longer than Miles. Miles was not my father or a father figure, but you understand that the emotions involved can get quite complicated when you're talking about someone you worked with for five years.

Q: This album dually documents your regular working band which has been together for several years, and music associated with Miles that you've been playing for decades.

A: All of the songs we chose are in my current band's book. They were not spur of the moment ideas. I was on the original recordings of most of them with Miles, but that didn't enter into why I chose those songs. They were all nice tunes that this band had been developing its own concepts. Most bands focus on the (5 song) library from Kind of Blue. There's nothing wrong with that - they're great songs that still work today, though guys still haven't learned how to play them...at least to my satisfaction. The songs I chose just happened to sit right with the band at the moment I picked them.

I've always liked the Gil Evans version of "Gone." That was really slick! It's a piece you don't hear other than maybe a big band out in ‘East Jesus Missouri' that has an arrangement of it. But it's one of the bypassed pieces of Miles' band because it was on Porgy & Bess (a classic album otherwise devoted exclusively to music from the Gershwin opera). I wanted something to feature the drummer on without writing a piece to do so. It's a song that works well for this quartet. It's a nice challenge every night as long as the interest and the effort are there.

Q: What inspired the two new pieces you wrote for this album?

A: "Cut and Paste" is one of my first efforts where I tried using my computer. I'd written the piece out in long hand. I got frustrated because I couldn't figure out how to put it on the computer to manipulate it. So I took one long sheet of paper and cut up the piece by hand, then pasted it together to see how it looked. By the time I would have figured out how to do it in the computer, I ended up doing it by hand.
"595" is a piece we use to close most of our programs to take the edge off of everything else we played. A lot of bands like to end up with something high, loud and fast. That's just not my view. I want them to go out with some semblance of a melody we played that evening. It seems to me that the higher and louder the last tune is, the less they're going to take away with them because there's so much going on, it's complicated and going by at lightning speed. I prefer to have a nice closer to bring everybody back down to earth. It's just like a workout - at the end you have a 10-minute cool down period so the muscles don't cramp and your heart rate slows down to a normal pulse.

Q: Is "595" to your quartet what "The Theme" was to Miles' quintet?

A: I hadn't written that piece with that kind of closing theme in mind. I just liked the way it worked. When my nonet closes, we end with a spiritual every night like "Abide With Me" or "Just A Closer Walk With Thee." Not that people don't think we know those songs, but to hear a jazz band play spirituals as part of their library takes some people by surprise. I like that.

Q: In '94 you took part in the ultimate Miles Davis Tribute Band in a reunion with Herbie, Wayne and Tony, plus Wallace Roney on trumpet. This year when that band convenes again, another man will be missing, drummer Tony Williams. Can you speak about your symbiotic relationship with him as a player and your friendship?

A: That's really personal...something I can't answer out loud. Some guys are comfortable to open up their inner spirit and share those views but I'm not there yet, man. People may think I'm being selfish, and to an extent they're right. I'm just not ready to share those feelings. I played with Tony at his last gig in Birdland, and I'm still enjoying that moment. I'm afraid an interview that makes me describe my feelings might make that moment less poignant.

Q: You turned 70 this year (May 4th). Yet those five years with Miles are looked upon by many as above anything you did or will do. How do you view those years in the context of your career?

A: I just retired from teaching school three years ago. Up until that time I seldom listened to those records because I was busy with other things - my family, a wife and two sons and working all the time. I never stopped to listen unless I heard them on the radio. I think at that moment we were just playing music. That those performances would become important in someone's eyes was not our reason for playing like that. We weren't playing that way to get attention. It was where we thought the music should go at that point. We had a pretty small library. I think we were just trying to figure out what can we do with this music. We'd gone as far as we could with it in its current state. No one expected it would have the kind of impact that it had.

You know, I don't look at us as some famous band. Those guys were my friends. I haven't really moved passed that in my head because I love those guys, man. We would go to the mat for each other. I guess it's the historians' role to make determinations about what is important in each era or what an era is all about. But I never look at that band and say, "We did this for history." I look at us as five guys who went to the laboratory every night to explore where we felt the music should be going.