Betty Carter, famed jazz vocalist, dies

Grammy Award-winning jazz vocalist Betty Carter, who worked with musicians Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and later nurtured young musical talent, recently died of pancreatic cancer at her home in New York. She was 69.

Ms. Carter was best known to fans for her signature singing style daring improvisation and unusual approaches to songs that included scat singing and bouncing syncopation against every offbeat but the expected one.

It was a style that made her 1961 album, Ray Charles and Betty Carter, a jazz classic. The album included the smash duet, Baby, It's Cold Outside.

She also was known as a nurturing, but demanding mentor to successive jazz generations. She once said she tried to teach young musicians to respond to their audience and keep their music original. In 1993 she founded "Jazz Ahead," an arts program that showcases young jazz artists.

Ms. Carter grew up in Detroit, where she studied at the Detroit Conservatory of Music. When she was just 16, she was singing in jazz clubs with Parker, Gillespie, Miles Davis and Max Roach. She started to sing professionally at age 18 with Lionel Hampton's orchestra.

In the 1950s, she moved to New York City, and in the late 1960s, she founded her own label, Bet-Car, which produced such classic recordings as the Grammy-nominated The Audience With Betty Carter.

In 1988, she began a business relationship with Verve Records that included the reissue of albums from the Bet-Car label. Her album, Look What I Got! won a Grammy that same year. In 1994, she recorded the hit album Feed the Fire.

Last year, President Clinton presented her with a National Medal of Arts award in recognition of her pioneering career in jazz.

Carter once said of her unique singing style: `The more you do a song, the more you learn about the tune and your concept of the tune. Then I'm free. Then I just go any way I want to go and can go with it musically."

Committed to the perseverance of jazz, she once told The New York Times: "The survival of jazz culture takes priority. The survival of this culture depends on people playing it and living the life."

She is survived by two sons, Myles and Kagle Redding, both of New York City.