Doug Carn Jazz Tour

About

The Legendary Doug Carn’s bio is ACTUALLY his eclectic body of work which comprises of 11 albums, a few singles/EP’s, a number of compilations and over 30 appearances on projects of fellow musicians and over 85 credits for contributions to projects of other artist.

Albums
• INFANT EYES released in 1971 Black Jazz Label
• DOUG CARN featuring the vocals of JEAN CARN – SPIRIT of a NEW LAND released in 1972
Black Jazz label
• DOUG CARN featuring the vocals of JEAN CARN - REVELATION released in 1973 Black Jazz label
• DOUG CARN’s – ADAM’s APPLE released 1974 Black Jazz label
• ABDUL RAHIM IBRAHIM (formerly Doug Carn) released in 1977 Tablighi Records
• DOUG CARN with vocals by TERRI DAVIS released in 1990 Monument Records
• WHAT HAPPENED to JR? Obie Jessie, Oscar Brashear, DOUG CARN, Billy Higgins, Bennie Maupin
The Hines Co/Solar released in 1993
• IN A MELLOW TONE released 1995 Lighthouse Records
• A NEW INCENTIVE “FIRM ROOTS” released in 2001 Black Jazz label
• MY SPIRIT released in 2015 Doodin Records
• DOUG CARN, Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad – Jazz is Dead 5 released in 2020 Jazz Is Dead label

Singles/EP’s
• MOONCHILD released in 1971
• SURATAL IHKLAS/ TROPICAL SONS released in 1990 Heavenly Sweetness label

Compilations
• DOUG & JEAN CARN – HIGHER GROUND released in 1976 Ovations Records
• THE BEST of DOUG CARN Universal Sound released 1976
• IN THE MIDNIGHT HOUR COMPILATION 1 - Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Roy Aryes, Gary Bartz, Brian
Jackson, Joao Donato, DOUG CARN, Azymuth, Marcos Valle release in 2020 Jazz Is Dead Label

Appearances
* EARTH, WIND & FIRE (Debut) issued in 1970 Warner Brother's Records
* THE NEED FOR LOVE (EW&F) issued in 1971 Warner Brother's Records
* SERIOUS AS A HEART ATTACK. issued in 1974 A&M Records
MELVIN VAN PEEBLES
* BONGO BOP DR LONNIE SMITH, DOUG CARN, JOEY DEFRANSICO, RUBEN WILSON issued in 1996 HIP-BOP LABEL
(ESSENCE ALL-STARS)
* CURTIS FULLER-KEEP IT SIMPLE issued in 2005 Savant

and actually this is just the tip of the Creative Iceberg known as Doug Carn but for those who enjoy a more
traditional bio …… read on;


Doug Carn is a Legendary Jazz Musician, multi-instrumentalist, lyricist, composer/arranger, and producer. He is best known for his recordings on the Black Jazz label between 1971 and 1973, which includes Infant Eyes, Spirit of the New Land, and Revelation.
These recordings, and 1974's Adam's Apple, are considered classics for their signature meld of spiritual jazz, progressive soul, post-bop, and improvisation. He converted to Islam, and in 1977 issued the jazz-funk outing Al Rahman! Cry of the Floridian Tropic Son, on which he mixed his African American musical roots in soul and jazz with facets of Muslim culture.

In 1990, he resumed recording as a leader on Virgo with vocalist Terri Davis.
In 2001, he issued A New Incentive: Firm Roots on the reinvigorated Black Jazz label. Carn formed the West Coast Organ Band and issued the live My Spirit and Free for All in 2015 and 2019, respectively.
In 2020, he teamed with producer/instrumentalists Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge to release the collaborative Doug Carn JID005.
also inspired by three legendary African-Americans – Dr. Martin Luther King, John Coltrane and Muhammad Ali – Carn had written lyrics for music composed by Coltrane, McCoy Tyner and Wayne Shorter.

Carn was born in Harlem Hospital, Harlem, NY in 1948 but raised in St Augustine, Florida. His earliest musical influences included his mother, who taught music in the St Augustine, FL area’s public school and was a formidable pianist and organist who had gigged with Dizzy Gillespie and was close to Stanley Turrentine and Shirley Scott. Further influencing him was an uncle who was a jazz DJ and an aunt who taught him to play boogie woogie on the piano's black keys when he was three.
As a child and young teen, he was deeply influenced by the hard-swinging sounds of blues-based jump bands from the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind that followed in the wake of Ray Charles' student tenure there. Carn studied winds, reeds, organ, and piano in high school and played in the band. He led a group called the Nu-Tones, who played a variety of dances, proms, and club dates during high school. And on occasion they would back traveling acts such as Little Willie John or open for groups including the "5" Royales and the Chantels. After graduation, Carn furthered his music studies at Jacksonville State University for two years, majoring in oboe and composition. He completed his degree at Georgia State College in 1969.

Over the next few years, Carn's ability on the Hammond B-3 organ grew exponentially, since he literally sat at the feet of virtually every traveling jazz organ master who toured Florida.
Deeply influenced by the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and the Black cultural revolution, his music took on political and spiritual characteristics without forsaking soul.
Carn was an in-demand sideman at home and signed to Savoy before he was 18. His debut album, The Doug Carn Trio, was issued in 1969. Doug’s inspirations included Horace Silver, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, and others thus inspiring his move to Southern California in 1970 and into an apartment building that also housed Earth Wind & Fire, Mandrill, the Chambers Brothers, and Janis Joplin.
In time a collaboration developed with Earth, Wind & Fire, with Doug contributing to the band's first two albums for Warner Bros. in 1971.
That same year, Carn signed a deal with Gene Russell's Black Jazz label and issued Infant Eyes with a sextet that included bassist Henry Franklin, drummer Michael Carvin, and saxophonist George Harper. The set was an underground hit that reached the lower rungs of the charts. They followed with the more expansive Spirit of the New Land in 1972, which featured flugelhornist Charles Tolliver, drummer Alphonse Mouzon, and trombonist Garnett Brown.
While Carn wrote four of the set's six tracks, the album also included innovative readings of Miles Davis' "Blue in Green" and Lee Morgan's "Search for the New Land." It charted even higher, placing in the upper rungs of the jazz charts at Cashbox, and expanded the Carn’s' fan base overseas.
The 1973's Revelation release featured six of Carn's compositions and well-received covers of Coltrane's "Naima," McCoy Tyner's "Contemplation," and Rene McClean's "Jihad." McClean also played saxophone on the set alongside trumpeter/vocalist Olu Dara, bassist Walter Booker, guitarist Nathan Page, and others. By the time Carn released the seminal, internationally charting Adam's Apple in 1974,he had already made his debut at Carnegie Hall and played a gig at the Village Vanguard that boasted its largest audience up to that point.
That same year, he played on Melvin Van Peebles' A&M album As Serious as a Heart-Attack.

In 1990, in association with vocalist Terri Davis and a jazz quartet, Carn independently issued Virgo, recorded by Jacquire King. Carn toured with Davis and continued working and collaborating with a variety of artist. In 1995, he re-emerged with, “In a Mellow Tone”, a collection of standards done in his inimitable style. 1996 saw his profile rise again with the Soul Jazz/Universal Sound compilations Higher Ground: The Best of Black Jazz Records 1971-1976 and The Best of Doug Carn. He then toured the U.K. and Europe with his own band. In 1997, he was one of four organists on the Essence All Stars' Bongo bop; the others included Joey DeFrancesco, Lonnie Smith, and Reuben Wilson. Idris Muhammad, Jorge Sylvester, and Michael Urbaniak.

In 2001, Carn released A New Incentive: Firm Roots on the briefly reinvigorated Black Jazz label; the set drew rave reviews from across the global jazz community. He also continued to work in the studio and on the road with a wide range of artists. In 2003, he was recruited for producer/DJ Carl Craig's Detroit Experiment. The following year, he contributed two compositions to Intuit's self-titled debut and played on it. He played piano on trombonist Curtis Fuller's Savant 2005 release “Keep It Simple”. In 2010, he was the organist on drummer Cindy Blackman Santana’s, “Another Lifetime”, a tribute to the Tony Williams Lifetime and worked in Wallace Roney's electric Davis tribute band. That year, he and Jean began working together again. They started playing small U.S.-based dates, but by 2012 were headlining weekend dates at Ronnie Scott's in London, Jazz at the Lincoln Center, The Iridium in N.Y.C., and the Savannah Jazz Festival. Carn also found time to play on Roney's modal fusion date Home.

In addition to his occasional touring dates with Jean, Carn formed a new quartet called Doug Carn & the West Coast Organ Band with saxophonists Teodross Avery and Howard Wiley, and drummer Deszon Claiborne. They issued the acclaimed live album “My Spirit” in 2015. Carn performed at the Aretha Franklin Memorial Concert in 2018 in Detroit where he led Franklin's band in a reading of her 1973 hit "Until You Come Back to Me." The following year, his West Coast Organ Band issued “Free for All”; their second outing on Doodlin', the set garnered some of the most complimentary reviews of his career.
In 2020, Carn teamed with producer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalists Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad. Though they were toddlers when the pianist issued his seminal Black Jazz sides, the two were nonetheless deeply influenced by those recordings when creating their jazz-funk/noir/hip-hop hybrid. They co-wrote and cut 11 original tracks with a cast of studio players at Linear Labs Studios. It was issued as Doug Carn JID005 in December.

Press

DOUG CARN “ IS JAZZ DEAD?”

Among the heroes and innovators of 70s spiritual/progressive/funk/jazz, Doug Carn has always flown a little under the radar. He has long plied his trade with patience and dedication, releasing absolutely stunning albums that are cherished by cognoscenti but lesser known even to the jazz mainstream, even as his influence can be detected among his colleagues.


Emerging out of Florida at the end of the ‘60s he made his debut on record as perhaps the key member of the Black Jazz roster, releasing four albums for the label between 1971-75 that stand as all-time classics of Black Consciousness expressed through jazz. A key aspect of the success was the haunting and powerful vocal contributions of his then-wife Jean Carn, whose five-octave vocal range made for memorable renditions of classics like “Peace” (Horace Silver), “Little B’s Poem” (Bobby Hutcherson), “Blue And Green” (Miles Davis) and Doug’s own “Power And Glory.”

Carn’s own luminous work on acoustic and electric piano on all these albums placed him firmly in the realm of contemporaries like Lonnie Liston Smith, Herbie Hancock and George Duke. His albums were elevated even further by the exquisite sideman work of a number of luminaries including Olu Dara (aka Nas Sr.), Charles Tolliver, Alphonse Mouzon and legendary Cannonball Adderley bassist Walter Booker.

Following this classic era, Doug and Jean continued to chart their own paths separately, Jean as a solo R&B star with a number of successful albums and singles for Philadelphia International Records and Doug as the same brilliant and creatively restless spiritual-jazz avatar he’s always been. Happily, for the last decade Doug and Jean’s orbits have intersected anew, and they can often be found performing together once again.

Carn's newest project, his entry in the Jazz Is Dead album series helmed by Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, takes his unique and timeless art and places it within the context of a musical culture that has always taken cues from his ‘70s classics

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Doug Carn Band MoonChild Live @ Emory University Performing Arts Center (external link)

This live video is the current lineup and stage setting during performance.

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PACE REPORTS with DOUG CARN

Welcome to another edition of @ThePaceReport featuring organist, pianist, and composer Doug Carn.

In a career spanning 60 years, Doug Carn is considered one of the "Fathers of Afrocentric Jazz." During the early 1960's he recorded music that incorporated Afrocentric ideas in music influenced by Black men at the time that resonated change and moving forward. His four albums "Infant Eyes", "Revelation", "Spirit Of The New Land", and "Adam's Apple" have become iconic in that his Soul Jazz was incorporating lyrics to jazz classics and compositions while reintroducing the music to a new generation of music fans. Black Jazz Records was a new independent label that not only released Doug's records but other new progressive artists like Henry Franklin, Walter Bishop Jr., and Cleveland Eaton.

Doug was influenced by Muhammad Ali and Dr. Martin Luther King and musicians Jimmy Smith and John Coltrane.

When he left Atlanta and moved to Los Angeles with his wife Jean in the late 1960s they interacted with a generation of musicians that were changing the direction of music. The Carns lived in the same apartment complex with Earth, Wind and Fire founder Maurice White, Janis Joplin, members of Mandrill, and The Chamber Brothers. Both Jean and Doug were members of the first incarnation of EWF and worked on the soundtrack for director Melvin Van Peebles iconic independent film "Sweet Sweetback's Badddasss Song."

Recently Doug played the famed Dizzy's in New York City with featured vocalist Kathryn Farmer. I had the chance to sit down with Doug and talk about the Black Jazz Records legacy, reflect on the late Maurice White and Melvin Van Peebles, and how his music is still relevant in 2023.

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DOUG CARN’s BIG MOMENT

After almost 50 years, organist Doug Carn is having one of his biggest moments. A series of albums he recorded in the early 1970s laid the groundwork for the spiritual jazz movement that young musicians around the world are pursuing today. Those LPs are being reissued now, and Carn recently recorded with two collaborators who brought in their experiences from funk and hip-hop. Now 72, Carn dropped hints about his influence while adding advice about how to endure.

“Never use all your strength,” Carn said over the phone from his home in St. Augustine, Florida. “You don’t have to blow up everything to prove a point. Don’t overdo it, man. Just go for the purity. You have to realize that your personality is you, whatever you do is going to be special, anyway.”

This calm determination pervades those albums that Carn recorded for the Black Jazz company (which are being reissued through Real Gone Music). His religiously inspired compositions highlighted the label’s mission of raising consciousness. He also added original lyrics to popular jazz instrumentals. His vocalist wife, Jean Carn, elevated these songs on Infant Eyes (1971), Spirit Of The New Land (1972) and Revelation (1973).

“Jean had a tremendous range,” Carn said. “I didn’t have to not do something because she couldn’t sing it. She could sing as high as a trumpet and lower than a tenor saxophone and way longer.”

Along with the inspirational tone that the couple conveyed throughout these albums, Carn anticipated future musical developments through his harmonic extensions on an array of electric keyboards, including synthesizers that had just been developed. Through it all, he remained anchored to a quintessential Hammond B-3 jazz organ groove.

“When synthesizers came out, it was beautiful,” Carn said. “You could make a lot of noise, but some beautiful stuff, too. All the new keyboards had great practicality. I use them like seasoning. Sometimes people use too much garlic and the seasoning should never overpower the flavor of the main dish. I used to go put to fantasy land in the crib for hours at a time, fooling with the synthesizer for hours. But when you’re making dinner you have to make something that’s digestible to all people.”

After Doug and Jean Carn split up around 1974, he recorded sporadically under his own name or, after his conversion, as Abdul Rahim Ibrahim (on the lively album Al Rahmani! Cry Of The Floridian Tropic Son in 1977). He also served as a sideman for leaders ranging from trumpeter Wallace Roney to provocative filmmaker/composer Melvin Van Peebles. Carn connects this versatility to his high school band days in St. Augustine.

“On Saturday afternoons, I would go to the band room, would lay every instrument on the floor and go down the line until I could play all the major and minor scales in each one of them, then I was satisfied,” Carn said. “Musically speaking, you don’t have to come from a big town, you just have to know music.”

That knowledge extended beyond performing, as Carn ran the Adagio Jazz Club in Savannah, Georgia, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Musicians trusted him because their shared artistic understandings were unlike most other venue owners. But entrepreneurship did not keep him away from stages. About 10 years ago, he started touring with Jean Carn again at their daughter’s urging.

“I didn’t want to be the Grinch to spoil Christmas,” Carn said “The next thing, me and Jean were talking on the phone and it was like none of the bad stuff ever happened and we started playing gigs.”

Meanwhile, younger groups of musicians representing different backgrounds embraced him. These included multi-instrumentalists/producers Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad. Younge and Muhammad collaborated with Carn for the fifth volume of their Jazz Is Dead album series (jazzisdead.co), which was released last December. While their spacious funk blends with Carn’s organ sound, Muhammad connected the cultural awareness expressed on those Black jazz albums with his work in the hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest in the early ’90s.

“Doug felt very comfortable and had an appreciation for what we wanted to do and get out of him,” Muhammad said. “He didn’t come in with any walls. He’s a witty, sparring kind of person so all of that is inside of the music.”

Even though COVID-19 halted his touring, Carn remains active. This year he composed an album currently titled Pandemic Blues and is looking for an opportunity to record and release it.

“My plan is, you better get out of the way, because I’m tired of holding back,” Carn said. “I’m going to tell things I haven’t told, say things I haven’t said. But mostly play things that I haven’t played.” DB

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WAX POETIC “MESSENGER”

Too often we find ourselves listening to posthumously rereleased music, or reading extensive praises in memoriam of artists that were legends in their own time but lacked the commercial success of the heavy-hitting recording stars still played on repeat via corporate iHeartRadio stations. These after-death praises are essential to give these artists the accolades they deserve, but often blind us to the fact that many of these musical treasures are not only still alive but still capable of creating content we erroneously think is locked in an era of the past. Such is the case for Doug Carn, who recently released an album, Doug Carn JID005, with Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge on the Jazz Is Dead label. “I don’t really consider myself a great player, except on the organ; I ain’t no Herbie [Hancock] or no McCoy [Tyner], or no Chick Corea. On the same token though, I am an innovator,” says Carn.
This innovation he’s referencing is the use of deeply spiritual lyrics born from a place of struggle paired with transcendence and liberation, unique to being a Black Southern artist in Los Angeles during the late ’60s and early ’70s. “They had done swinging lyrics to those songs, some of the more modest songs before. Jon Hendricks certainly had done it, and Mel Tormé; you know, people had done it before. I just picked the spiritual ones, and I think it’s the way that I put them together at the time,” says Carn.
Doug Carn recording at the Artform Studio, 2020. Photo courtesy of the Artform Studio.
Doug Carn recording at the Artform Studio, 2020. Photo courtesy of the Artform Studio.
Musician and composer Adrian Younge was elated to work with Carn on the last record. “There are all these legends that we love, that you don’t even know if they’re still playing, you just know that you love the record,” Younge says. “So what was crazy is that [Doug Carn] was in L.A. for something, and our manager told us, ‘Yo, Doug Carn is here.’ So I was like, ‘Holy shit, we got to try to figure something out with that dude.’ So we met up, hit it off, and started recording. It’s dope when you find legends like that, because us being thirty and forty years younger, for him to see that there’s a younger generation of people that really love what he’s doing, and actually want to work with him to continue the conversations that he started back in the day, it’s a big deal… We always want to give flowers when people are alive, and that’s a big part of all this.”
Founding member of A Tribe Called Quest, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, who also played on and helped arrange the JID005 album with Carn and Younge, has similar sentiments: “It’s an interesting journey that both Adrian and I have had, as we both started off as programming musicians, and graduated to playing instruments and obviously writing a great wealth of music on our own. But to be able to sit with the likes of someone like Doug Carn, and to know that we speak his language and he speaks our language, we can present an idea with a legend and [have] it be easily embraced and welcomed, that means a lot to us… He was crazy down-to-earth and warm, and felt like family instantly. He has a lot to say, and hasn’t had enough of a spotlight for his talent and his contribution to the Black conversation. We’re thankful to be blessed to be in a room with

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Doug and Jean Carn: The First Couple of Black Jazz

Doug and Jean Carn: The First Couple of Black Jazz
Willis Perry
Doug and Jean Carn first performed together (again) in Atlanta in 2010.


Doug & Jean Carn Quartet at Jazzy Picnic in the Park
Where: Forsyth Park stage

When: 4:30-11 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 28

Admission: Free

Also performing: Charleston Latin Jazz Collective, Savannah/CJA Hall Of Fame, Joey DeFrancisco Trio, Tom Scott with The Savannah Jazz Orchestra

Remaining Savannah Jazz Festival events

September 25 at Habersham Village

Shops stage (61st & Habersham Street):

6 p.m. Velvet Caravan; 7:30 p.m.: Bob Masteller & The Jazz Corner Allstars



September 26 on Forsyth Park stage: Blues on the Green

6-11 p.m. Savannah State University Gospel Choir, Eric Culberson Band, E.G. Kight, Watermelon Slim & The Workers

September 27 on Forsyth Park stage: Jazz Under the Stars

6-11 p.m. Robin Sherman Quartet, UNF Jazz Ensemble featuring Alon Yavnai, Greg Lewis Trio, Jeremy Davis & Equinox Orchestra

Late Night Jam Sessions: Sept 26, 27, 28 at 11 p.m. at Rancho Alegre Cuban Restaurant, 402 MLK Jr. Blvd

On a small independent label, in the early 1970s, musician Doug Carn made history.

The label was Black Jazz, and through its deep, ebony vinyl grooves the Florida-born Carn — a trained organ and piano player, composer, arranger and bandleader — almost single-handedly created a new form of fusion.

The music on the Black Jazz albums Infant Eyes, Revelation, Spirit of the New Land and Adam's Apple was free jazz, rangy and atmospheric, with cosmically (and politically) charged lyrics. There was funk and R&B in its lengthy, tie-dyed threads. Immaculate stuff that represented the changing playing field for African Americans — both musically and lyrically — in the nascent Age of Aquarius.

He wrote the inspirational lyrics, and the band charts, for pre-existing jazz tunes ("Infant Eyes," for example, began as a Wayne Shorter instrumental).

Although Carn's recording career went on — indeed, it continues to this day — he is still highly regarded for that series of Black Jazz albums, which featured his then-wife Jean on sensual and haunting vocals.

After the couple divorced, Atlanta-born Jean Carn went on to a successful solo career on the Philadelphia International label, scoring a number of R&B hits including "Free Love" and "My Love Don't Come Easy."

The 2013 Savannah Jazz Festival welcomes the Doug and Jean Carn Quartet — professionally reunited, and it feels so good — during its big finale event, Jazzy Picnic in the Park, on Saturday, Sept. 28.

It's free.