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Regina Carter goes back to her roots

Musician digs deep into the past for her latest album

On her new album, Southern Comfort, acclaimed jazz violinist Regina Carter travels back in time to the life of her paternal grandfather, a coal miner based in Bradford, Alabama.

While he passed away long before she was born, Carter, a Detroit native who currently lives in Maywood, New Jersey, has many memories of summers spent with her grandmother in their old house. Her father was one of 14 children, including two sets of twins, and cousins aplenty were also always around.

"It was extremely rural living," says Carter. "It was very different than my life in Detroit but (I have) a lot of fond memories (of) being with family. That's so important for me. Especially as an adult, and as a middle-aged adult now, all of that is really important because this is the age where I find that I've lost and am losing several family members and also friends. And so I start not to take life for granted and just to realize all of this information is important for me to help have an impact on me. Who am I? From where do I come? Who are some of the people that helped make me who I am today? What are the struggles they went through so that I can have the things that I have today? "Also, it makes me proud and it gives me an extra push on those days where maybe I don't feel like doing anything or I start to question what it is I'm supposed to be doing while I'm here," she says.

Carter released Southern Comfort last month and it's an exploration of the folk music of the south. The 11 songs range from Cajun fiddle music to early gospel, coal miners' work songs as well as more contemporary works. She's currently touring in support of it and is set to play Capilano University's BlueShore Financial Centre stage Wednesday, April 23. She'll be joined by a backing band comprised of a number of the musicians who played on the record.

Southern Comfort is the third in a series of albums exploring Carter's family roots.

The first was 2006's I'll Be Seeing You: A Sentimental Journey, featuring her mother's favourite early jazz standards.

"That project was really a project of healing because I had just lost my mother and it was a way for me to get through that to honour her by choosing music that she had grown up listening to and it happens to be one of my favourite periods of music, the 20s and 30s," she says.

Reverse Thread, released in 2010, features compositions by artists from Kenya, Mali and Senegal, reimagined for violin, accordion, bass, drums and kora.

The concept for her new album came about naturally.

"I didn't plan on Southern Comfort being a record but I had done my DNA test with Ancestry. com and gotten some really incredible information back with that," she says. "I started just digging in and trying to find out more information about my father's family. Sort of in the midst of that, I had the idea to record this record. Because when I do the research I'm always interested in the music that was going on as well. That tends to help me hold on to the information better, otherwise it's just kind of loose information floating around in my brain," she laughs. "That's probably why I didn't do well in history in school."

Carter conducted extensive research for the project, including at the Library of Congress, listening to Appalachia field recordings.

"Some of them just struck something in me," she says.

Carter eventually came up with 50 songs she wanted to record.

"My manager stopped me then," she says. "He was like, 'You've got to get in the studio.'" While her next record will be something else entirely, her research into her family's southern roots hasn't stopped.

"That's something that will be ongoing," she says.

Carter was playing the Birdland jazz club in New York City a few weeks ago and was discussing her DNA testing results - 73 per cent West African and 13 per cent Finnish with some other European areas listed.

"There seemed to be a lot of Europeans in the audience. .. and a lot from Finland and they said, 'Oh, maybe that will be your next record, you can come over and find your relatives.' So I laugh at that, I doubt it, but who knows?" she says.