"So he shows up at this college -- solo," Clifford continues. "Just him and his guitar. And he had sandals on, with these real colorful socks underneath. He was singing outdoors in this alcove on this little makeshift stage, about six inches high. He was sitting on a chair, just playing solo. And I'm this high school kid watching him, just standing there like everybody else, enjoying his music."

Flash forward thirty years, and keyboardist Clifford Carter is STILL enjoying James Taylor's music. Today, however, he's a part of JT's band and has been for ten years. Initially he complemented JT music director Don Grolnick's piano work by playing mainly synthesizer and organ. Since Grolnick's untimely death in 1996, however, Clifford has handled all the keyboards.

By the time he started working regularly with James Taylor in 1990, Clifford was already a highly regarded sideman, as well as an artist who had performed and recorded over the years on his own and with a group called the 24th Street Band.

Music played a starring role in Clifford's life from the very beginning. Born and raised in New York, he began taking piano lessons at six and formed his first band at twelve. It's a little known fact that he first performed in public as a singer rather than as a keyboardist, a role that lasted until he got his first electronic organ when he was 13.

While attending the University of Miami's School of Music, Clifford started working professionally. An offer to tour with Motown's legendary Four Tops took him on the road for the first time. After a year, he went back to Miami, joining jazz/R&B artist Phyllis Hyman's band.

Returning to New York in the mid-1970s, he continued to perform with Hyman's band, then began doing studio work and playing with other groups. Among the friends he made around this time were Don Grolnick and future James Taylor drummer Steve Jordan. With Jordan, Hiram Bullock, and Will Lee, Clifford formed the 24th Street Band. Clifford was one of the principal songwriters in the band, which made three records, played regularly in New York City clubs and embarked on a successful series of tours in Japan.

After the band broke up in the early 1980s, Clifford continued to write music and perform both on his own and with singer/songwriter Michael Franks. He also free-lanced, working with artists ranging from Patti Scialfa to Brian Ferry. Through engineer/producer Frank Filipetti and his friend Don Grolnick, he played for the first time with James Taylor on a few songs from JT's 1985 recording That's Why I'm Here.

The 1990s began with two milestones for Clifford. He began work on Walkin' Into the Sun, his only solo recording to date, which was described as "one of the most engaging surprises of the year" by Jazziz Magazine and "a showcase for the keyboardist's excellent musicianship" by Jazz Times. He also joined James Taylor's band. Since then, in addition to recording, performing and touring with JT, Clifford remains a sought-after sideman, working with Paul Simon, Rod Stewart, Brian Ferry, Natalie Cole, Nancy Wilson, George Benson, Martin Sexton and Roseanne Cash, among others. He's performed on television programs ranging from Late Night with David Letterman to Rosie O'Donnell's 1999 Christmas special, and at star-studded music events such as the 1985 reopening of the Apollo Theater ("Motown at the Apollo"), the tribute to Bob Dylan at the 1997 Kennedy Center Honors, the tribute to Willie Nelson at the 1998 Kennedy Center Honors, and Sting's annual Rainforest Benefit.

Clifford and I talked for several hours over a period of time that began in October 1999 and concluded in early December of that year. We began by focusing on James Taylor's symphony tour, which was "half-way home" at that time.

LAURA STEGMAN: I have a few questions about the symphony shows. Who did the arrangements of the songs?

CLIFFORD CARTER: Tunes we played during the concert as a quartet without the orchestra had already been arranged over the years by James and Don Grolnick and, to some degree, the rest of us in the rhythm section. The tunes we performed with the orchestra were mostly arranged by Stanley Silverman. It was great meeting Stanley, and he was gracious enough to include me in some of his arranging process. For example, "They Can't Take That Away From Me" was one of Stanley's arrangements that I worked with him on a bit in terms of what chords we would use, and even some little New Orleans-y piano licks which I showed him that he'd voice out for woodwinds.

CC: Yeah, the reaction has been good. James sounds wonderful, and for ME as a fan, it's refreshing to hear these standards sung by somebody who gives it the type of treatment that James does, so understated with his beautiful voice.

LS: It was interesting seeing him move differently when he was singing those songs.

CC: Yeah. YEAH, because of the different rhythms, the different histories. The world went at a different pace back then, in the 30s, 40s and 50s, so the music would do that to you. For me it's a real treat to do the symphony shows. And I wish my father were alive, because he was a singer, and this was his thing. He was like a Bing Crosby kind of crooner.

Clifford Carter

LS: Was he a professional singer?

CC: Yeah. He had a radio show called "A Date with Jerry" where he'd sing all the tunes we're doing in these symphony shows.

LS: So it would have been good if he could have seen this.

CC: Yeah. He died in 1993, so although he heard me play with James, he never heard the orchestra stuff. But I think about him all the time when we play it.

LS: Tell me about how you got started as a musician.

CC: Well, in addition to my father being a singer, we had a piano in the house, and my mother played. She says that when I was five, I asked if I could take piano lessons. Apparently I kept bugging her, and when I was six I started taking lessons.

At that point, my father had taken up the upright bass, and he had a steady gig on the weekends at this country club. And even though he was doing a lot of standards, he would do a few things to try to be contemporary, like Chubby Checker's "The Twist," so we had these 45s around the house. When I was sick and stayed home from school, I would be sitting there playing these records over and over and over, dancing around by myself.

But my real inspiration was the Beatles. I was mesmerized by them, so when I was in 6th grade I put a little band together. It was very embarrassing (laughs). We had about two or three tunes, and basically they were Beatles tunes, but I guess it was like a Weird Al Yankovic kind of group where we would take the songs and put stupid lyrics to them.

LS and CC: (laughter)

CC: And we actually performed in the elementary school gym. That's my first memory of performing as a "rock band" in front of people.

LS: Did you have a name for the band?

CC: The Insecticides.

LS and CC: (more laughter).

CC: That's RE-barrassing. That's beyond embarrassing, it's being embarrassed again, so its re-barrassing, you know. Anyway, the drummer just had a snare drum, and I just sang. I fronted the band because I didn't have an electric instrument. And that band evolved. I don't know what we called ourselves after that, but we started performing at dances and stuff, and we'd have like a whole night of music, early Stones and Paul Revere and the Raiders and early Beatles. And then, with the money I got from my Bar Mitzvah we bought this Ace Tone Organ. That was my first electric instrument, so then I had an instrument to play with the band.

LS: But you still sang too?

CC: Yeah, I was the lead singer (laughs heartily).

LS: I've never heard you sing, so I'm not sure why you laughed.

CC: Well, picture this 13-year-old kid singing (sings) "But don't play with me 'cause you're playing with fire." Little 13-year-old, you know, doing "19th Nervous Breakdown."

LS and CC: (laughter)

LS: That's hilarious! And did you compose back then? Did you think that's what you wanted to do, or were you just into the performing?

CC: I started writing some songs. The first stuff was that Al Yankovic approach (laughs). Then the songs that I started to write were like early Dion and the Belmonts. "Had a girl and her name was Joan, I called her on the telephone." That kind of thing. That never went anywhere. But in high school, I started playing in bands with guys who were older, and the bands started getting better and more adventurous. I was in a band called the Weeds, and then there was one called Psychosis...

LS and CC: (laughter)

CC: And Electric Abraham, real '60s kind of vibes. We started writing and doing gigs. I was always attracted to bands that improvised and played what was called progressive rock music, meaning freer music that had a lot of improvising. We would rehearse, and we'd always be jamming.

When I was a senior in high school, I was in this band called Wild Field, and it was just keyboards, bass, drums and a woman who sang and played flute. We wrote original stuff, and then we would take other people's stuff and arrange it for ourselves.

LS: And what happened after high school?

CC: I'm reading a local advertising magazine, summer of '69, before my last year of high school, and it says, "Jazz Piano Instruction, Mitch Farber." And I was always into learning new things. At the time I wasn't taking any lessons. I really didn't know what I was getting into, but I was curious. So I called this guy up, started studying with him, and it was a huge turnaround in my life. We're still really good friends now. He was the best man at my wedding, and he became a friend and a mentor. He was a professional musician and arranger, and he turned me on to Chick Corea, Miles Davis, Coltrane, a lot of jazz stuff. And he started prepping me for what it would be like to go to college and study music. He's responsible for me going to the School of Music at the University of Miami. I didn't even know it existed.

I wasn't excited about the idea of going to college and doing anything but music. I was expected to go to college, and I had good grades, and I knew I was going to go... that was just what my life was going to be. But I remember having a key conversation with my mother, and I said, "I can't see going to college to study science, math, blah, blah, blah." That was my naive view of what college could have been. And she said, "What do you want to do?" And I said, "I want to play music." So she said, "Well then, you have to go to a music school or a university that's got a music department." Which was an amazing thing for a mother to say to a kid, because we all know that a lot of kids that want to go into the arts don't get that kind of support.

LS: True.

CC: So, in the spring of 1970 when I was still in high school, I decided to check out the University of Miami just to see what it was about. I went down there, and I walked into a room, and the director of the jazz program was conducting a band. They were playing and improvising over this kind of South American-influenced piece. And I'm going, "This is school??? This is college??? OK, I'm going here." I just connected what I heard to the music that I'd been jamming on for years in my basement and doing on gigs.

And that was just the greatest, most intense four years. Every day we were either playing music, practicing, eating or sleeping. Up until then, I had been serious about music in a certain way. It was a big, big part of my life, and it had been for a long time. But being in college is when I learned what it was like to really get serious about practicing. I realized I had work to do. Music is about communication, and your spirit and your emotions, and I felt I belonged on that level as much as anybody else but I didn't have the chops. So I said, "I gotta get the chops."

I eventually made the transition from being a student to being a full-time musician, paying my own bills, while I was in college.

LS: So you worked while you were in school?

CC: Yeah, and it was great because there was a professional scene in Miami, so a lot of my teachers were the guys that were doing gigs in town at the nightclubs. When they started seeing that I was developing into a good player, they would recommend me to the contractors. There was a club in Ft. Lauderdale called Bachelors Three where all the acts would perform when they'd come through town, James Brown, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Bobby Vinton, Mel Torme, the Four Tops, on and on and on. So you would get called to play the shows, and when you showed up, you'd do a rehearsal and you'd do like a week or two of a run. One day, this contractor, Peter Graves, called and said, "Are you available to play the Four Tops show?"

LS: Wow!

CC: And I was like, YEAH, this is great! Because in high school, we were dancing to the Four Tops. Their keyboard player had just quit, so after I played the gig, they asked if I wanted to come on the road with them. And from where I was at that time in my life, and what I thought I'd be doing, that sounded like Japanese to me. So I called my folks, and I remember telling my mom what the money was, and it wasn't amazing money but you could live on it back then. So my mother said, "You've got to do it." It was like a mother knowing that her kid, who she had put through college, could take care of himself. And so I told them "Yeah."

I met them in L.A., and we played Disneyland for a week. On my nights off I would hitchhike down to this jazz club, and I was like...

LS: ... in heaven?

CC: Yeah, I was 22 years old and I was hanging. It was so great! We went to Japan and England, and we played Vegas. I spent a year with them. I also started writing a bunch of tunes, and I wrote some for them. They dug them and recorded two of my tunes. One of them, called "Let Me Know the Truth," made it to their album Night Life Harmony on ABC Dunhill. And that was exciting.

CC: In the summer of '76, I was living in New York City, and I felt so good because it was the first time in my life that I wasn't in school, and I had no commitments to anything. I was excited to be in New York, and I knew all these great players. I started doing studio work along with live stuff and played with different bands. One night I walked into a club, and there was this drummer, a young kid who just turned 19, named Steve Jordan, who ended up working with me again as the drummer in James' band for half of the 1998 tour. Anyway, I met him and we became real good friends.

A year later, in 1977, I became part of a band of four guys -- myself, Steve Jordan on drums, Hiram Bullock on guitar, and Will Lee on bass. It was known as the 24th Street Band, and we started playing clubs around New York, original music, and we all sang and wrote. That was a period when Japan became really interested in what was going on in New York City, so people from a Japanese label approached us, and we started making records for Nippon Columbia. We actually made three, and we toured over there a couple of times. We were packing 1,500- to 2000-seat theatres, and it was a great time, really exciting. We also did really well in clubs in New York City.

LS: Did you meet Don Grolnick around this time?

CC: I met Don in early ’76 at a club called Russ Brown’s on 96^th Street. He walked in one night with bassist Will Lee and their respective girlfriends. Little did I know that that was the start of a long-term personal and musical friendship. You play the same instrument, and you don't end up on the same gig a lot, unless it's a two keyboard kind of thing, but on any given night I'd see Don hanging out at the clubs. He wasn't into the electronic and the synthesizer thing so much -- and I was -- so when he was doing his own music and he wanted to use those things he would call me, and I would work on some of his solo projects. I just loved Don. I'd go hear him play, and I even played in his band once when he played clubs because he needed a second keyboard player.

Clifford Carter "Walkin' Into the Sun"

CC: In 1989, after I had finished a tour with Brian Ferry, I went into the studio on my own and just recorded a bunch of stuff. Originally it was instrumental music. I used my voice, but for melodies not words, and it was very eclectic, with some Brazilian influences. I shopped this tape for a long time and got nowhere, but eventually I met this guy named Tim Weston who was starting a label. He liked my tape and said he'd like to do something with it, but he asked if I'd agree to trash some of it, keep some of it, remix, and add new tunes. And, he said, "Would you consider singing on the new tunes?" And the thing that was interesting was that when I started out, I wanted to sing, but I didn't have a bunch of tunes that I really felt good about. But they wanted me to sing, so I said, "Sure," and I wrote these new tunes, one of which was called "Walkin' Into the Sun," which became the title tune. The album became a real eclectic mix of five vocals and five, six instrumentals. It came out in Japan first, and was released in the United States in '93. You can probably still order it. The label's called Soul Coast.

CC: In 1979, the 24th Street Band was playing at the Hot Tin Roof on Martha's Vineyard, and we were invited to a barbecue at James and Carly's house, because Carly was a co-owner of the Hot Tin Roof. So I show up there, and James is there, and he had just dented his car on a wooden carport beam. He was trying to reenact the accident by going the other way to undent it -- to move it back in the opposite direction. To right this wrong, you know (laughs).

LS: Did you talk to him?

CC: Yeah, a little bit.

LS: Did you really like his music?

CC: Oh yeah. Steve Jordan and I, not only were we in the 24th Street Band together, but we lived on the same floor. We had adjoining lofts where we rehearsed, so, yeah, we used to listen to James' music. I remember that Steve, at the time, was trying to orchestrate us getting a chance to play with James.

LS: Oh, really?

LS and CC: (laughter)

LS: Did you guys hit it off? Or was it just business?

CC: Well, it's never just business with James. Whether he's known you for 20 minutes or 20 years, he'll treat you the same, with patience and respect. And he's humble, and you just make music. That left a big impression on me.

But as far as the work we did together, he said, "I have this tune, 'Turn Away,' and we're not sure if we're going to keep it for the record, so we want you to try some stuff." Basically the vibe was that they needed a keyboard part to anchor it and pull it together. If it was going to work they would keep it, and if it wasn't going to work they'd have to re-cut it. But it turns out that it worked, and they kept it.

Years later I found out that James hated that song anyway, but at least it worked enough at that time to go on the record. I always love hearing artists who write such great music talking about something they did that they hate. It's a good thing to know that people as good as that don't like certain things, but they don't let it stop them from keeping on.

CC: The next year, 1986, Don calls and wants to know if I want to audition for James' band. And I said, "Cool." James came over to my house, and we played together, just the two of us. Then we went out to dinner, and lo and behold -- or maybe it's just lo and lo -- I didn't get the gig.

LS: Oh no!

CC: And Don said to me -- this was SO prophetic -- "Don't take it personally. There are a lot of different spheres of influences that go into making this decision. It's not about your playing." Even though it was, like, how can you not take that personally, it was nice hearing that from Don. And then he said, "You never know what could happen in the future."

I could cry when I think about that, because in 1990, Don calls again and says, "Would you like to do James' summer tour with me? We'll have two keyboard players, you'd be playing a supportive role." And he explained that although James traditionally had two electric guitar players, one of them doubling on pedal steel, this summer they wanted to try just one electric guitar and two keyboards.

LS: You didn't have to audition again?

CC: Right. So I'm sitting on this couch, I know EXACTLY where I was, and James calls. And in his incredible style, he said, "Well, you know, is this something that you think maybe you have time for?"

LS and CC: (laughter)

LS: Because of the personal loss, obviously, but also the artistic loss?

CC: Yeah. And there's been a series of different drummers. Again, they're all great. I feel blessed to be playing with them. But Carlos was dedicated to it and had done it for so long. He was a rare, rare blend of so many different histories -- his Cuban background and his experiences in Los Angeles and his love of jazz and Latin music. He was a teacher, as Don was. These guys taught us how to play music by showing up and playing amazingly every day and setting an incredible example that we were forever changed by.

Also, special things happen with musicians that play together over a long period of time. It doesn't matter how great you are. Of course, wonderful things can happen with people that just sit down and have never played together before. Every situation is special in its own way. But when you play with the same people over a long period of time, things happen that can only happen over a period of time.

LS: That makes sense.

CC: Carlos was in some ways an unspoken leader. He was amazingly consistent. After Don passed away, he was the person who had been in the band the longest. He was constantly growing as a player, whether it was studying different types of music or taking lessons. When a drummer's accompanying a singer, the goal is to give the singer the space to sing and to give the song an identity. Carlos was a master of that. He always had a "less is more" approach, and with that approach, what he played suggested so much more than what he was actually playing. Yes, he was playing drums, but it was as if he was another harmonic instrument in the band. His work ethic, the way he warmed up every night before the show, and his consistency were amazing.

On the bus during our tour, we had some Latin percussion instruments, and Carlos had us start this little Latin group. He taught us how to play Latin music on percussion instruments. I think it started in '94. It was called (laughs) "Grupo Wa-Wa."

LS: What???

CC: Grupo Wa-Wa. I don't know how you spell that, but I think in some kind of Cuban or Spanish, it means "bus group."

LS: It sounds like Baba Wawa.

LS and CC: (laughter)

CC: Basically we were listening and playing along with Latin music, and Carlos would be teaching us what to play on each instrument. One person would play the bongo, another would play cowbells, another would play clave, another would play congas. You'd play for a little while, and you'd switch, so each person would play each instrument.

LS: Wow.

CC: In the last year that he toured, 1997, he was learning to play bass, and he had bought a four-string electric bass. So while we were on the bus riding to the next town, he would be in the back playing along with a Bob Marley CD and old Bob Dylan stuff. Then we'd get to the next town, and you'd see him carrying the bass and the amp up to his room so he could practice. He was always learning new things. He had a very specific practice routine before every gig to warm up on his drum pad, and he was a leader. (pauses). It's just a huge loss. It's very, very different since Carlos is gone.

And the reality is that other people have stepped in and done a great job, and the music lives on. But there are certain things that only happen in a band due to playing together over a long period of time. Any musician will tell you that. No matter how great the players are, certain things only happen by playing together over a long period of time.

LS: And you had that with him?

CC: And we had that with him.