Betty Carter; Jazz Grammy Winner

NEW YORK —  Betty Carter, a Grammy-winning singer who worked with greats such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and later became known as the godmother of jazz for nurturing young musical talent, died at home Saturday of pancreatic cancer. She was 69.

Carter was best known to fans for her signature singing style--daring improvisations and unusual approaches to songs that included scat-singing around every tune and bouncing syncopations against every offbeat but the expected one.

It is the style that helped catapult her 1960 duet with Ray Charles, “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” to a jazz classic.

“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,” Carter once said in an interview.

Carter also was known as a nurturing but demanding godmother to successive jazz generations. She once said she tried to teach young musicians to respond to their audience and keep their music original.

Her graduates included pianists John Hicks and Mulgrew Miller, bassists Buster Williams and Dave Holland, and drummers Jack DeJohnette and Lewis Nash.

In 1993, Carter founded “Jazz Ahead,” a music program that brings about 20 young musicians from across the country to New York every spring. It is capped by a weekend of concerts.

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

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, Verve released the Grammy-winning “Look What I’ve Got” and reissued her four Bet-Car albums on CD.

She won a best female jazz vocalist Grammy award in 1988. President Clinton gave her a National Medal of Arts award in 1997.

She is survived by two sons, Myles and Kagle Redding.