Carter Fine-Tunes Violin’s Jazz Voice

What do you do when you play an instrument that is usually categorized as “miscellaneous” in the jazz polls? When you’re a jazz artist trying to carve a career with an ax that is one of the principal working tools of classical music?

Violinist Regina Carter knows the answer: Find your own path. And on Wednesday at the Jazz Bakery, in the opening set of a five-night run, she provided some additional details, delivering an entertaining collection of bravura performances for a nearly full house of enthusiastic listeners.

Immediately evident in Carter’s playing is that she is amply informed about her jazz antecedents. Violin may not have been a prominent instrument in the music’s history, but it has been handled with skill and innovation by a list of performers ranging from Stuff Smith and Joe Venuti to Stephane Grappelli and Jean-Luc Ponty. And, in driving, straight-ahead improvisations on tunes such as “Lady Be Good,” Carter illuminated her capacity to understand, and be inspired by, that historical tradition.

But there was another, more expansive aspect to Carter’s performance. Well-trained as a classical violinist, she has used her virtuosic technique to begin shaping a style of her own--a kind of postmodern approach to jazz improvising that deconstructs traditional elements into a personal musical mosaic. On solo after solo, she combined fragmentary ideas--numerous quotes from every imaginable source, jazz riffs, sudden technical flights of fancy, passages in which she blended her voice with her violin lines--to produce a kind of rigorous, inside-out look at the process of improvisation.

All of this worked as well as it did in part because Carter was joined by a first-rate group of players: Werner “Vana” Gierig, piano; Adam Rogers, guitar; Darryl Hall, bass; Alvester Garnett, drums; and Mayra Casales, percussion. Although the sound reproduction tended to muddy some of the ensemble work, the playing was filled with intriguing passages--most notably during a playful but insistently creative exchange between Hall and Garnett.

The evening was, in short, a revelatory appearance by an artist whose talent reaches well beyond her chosen instrument. Carter’s abilities are still in a process of development, but she has already made a case for the violin as one of the contributory jazz voices for the new century.

* The Regina Carter Sextet at the Jazz Bakery through Sunday. 3233 Helms Ave., Culver City. (310) 271-9039. $20 admission today and Saturday at 8 and 9:30 p.m., and $18 Sunday at 7 and 8:30 p.m..