Barbara Carroll: A Birthday Gift
Today is the birthday of the late pianist and singer Barbara Carroll, the pioneering jazz musician remembered by the New York Times’ music critic Stephen Holden as “a beloved fixture of Manhattan nightlife” whose style and unfailing sense of swing “embodied a timeless bohemian elegance and artistic grace.[i]”
Barbara Carroll was born on January 25, 1925 in Worcester, MA. She studied piano as a child, and by the age of seventeen was enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. But despite her talent as a classical pianist, her musical passion was for jazz —a passion that she developed listening to the recordings and remote radio broadcasts of the great swing players of the 1930s and 1940s. According to Carroll, “As soon as I heard Nat Cole and Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson, I was hooked. Totally hooked.[ii]” She formed her first band at the age of fifteen, and began playing dances and other events in Worcester and, eventually, in Boston. But by the mid-1940s, the lure of the dynamic bebop jazz revolution taking place in Manhattan was too strong to resist. She withdrew from the conservatory, left Massachusetts, and set out for New York.
Barbara Carroll’s aspiration to be a professional pianist came about in an era when the deck was unambiguously stacked against her, or any woman instrumentalist trying to make it in jazz. In 1990, she spoke with WNYC’s Steve Ross about some of the obstacles that she encountered in the 1940s:
You were pre-judged then, you know, because you were a woman. You were pre-judged before they ever heard you play.
I knew one pianist from Boston, he was established a little bit here [in New York], so sometimes when he’d get called for two engagements on a Saturday night, and if he was already booked for one, he’d try to send me for the other one. But he couldn’t tell them that I was a girl because then the bandleader wouldn’t have hired me. So he would say, “I’m going to send Bob Carroll. Bob Carroll will be your pianist. Or Bobby Carroll.” And of course then I would arrive, and I'd say “I’m your pianist for the evening!” Well, they had no choice…[iii]
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Listen to Barbara speaking with Steve Ross about how she got started, the New York club scene, and the challenges for women in the 1940s. (from New York Cabaret Nights, WNYC, 18 June 1990)
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Undeterred, Barbara Carroll put together a trio and, in 1947, within a year of arriving in Manhattan, she landed her first major gig on 52nd Street —the epicenter of jazz in New York, where she appeared on a bill at the Downbeat Club with Dizzy Gillespie, one of bebop's most influential artists.
Other bookings followed quickly in New York, and around the country. By the early 1950s Ms. Carroll had become a frequent headliner at The Embers, the preeminent super club on East 54th Street. Working at The Embers was among the first of her major long-term night club engagements, and one that helped establish Barbara Carroll as mainstay of New York’s jazz and cabaret scene.
Ms. Carroll’s other legendary New York residencies and extended club engagements included those at the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room, the Carlyle Hotel’s Bemelmans Bar (the Upper East Side venue where she was booked for two weeks, and stayed on for twenty-five years[iv]), and at Birdland, the jazz club on West 44th Street where she held forth weekly until just a few weeks before her death in 2017 at the age of 92.
In celebration of her birthday, we have a gift: a recently rediscovered, rarely heard gem of Barbara Carroll in performance on WNYC’s show New York Cabaret Nights. This episode of New York Cabaret Nights, which aired on June 18th, 1990, was recorded at Rainbow and Stars, the Art Deco cabaret room on the 65th floor of 30 Rockefeller Center. Ms. Carroll is joined by her friend and frequent collaborator, the bassist Jay Leonhart. Highlights from the broadcast, found in the audio player at the top of this page, include joyous renditions of Mercer Ellington’s "Things Ain’t What They Used to Be," and the Jerome Kern songs "Nobody Else but Me" and "I’m Old Fashioned." As you might expect, and as she had done for more than seven decades, Barbara Carroll swings.
The complete June 18th, 1990 episode of WNYC’s New York Cabaret Nights is available here. All extant episodes of the entire series are available here, and are part of the New York Public Radio Archives collection.
[i] Stephen Holden, “Barbara Carroll, Pioneering Jazz Pianist and Singer, Dies at 92” The New York Times, 14 February 2017
[ii] Live from Rainbow and Stars, New York Cabaret Nights, 18 June 1990, WNYC
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Jazz Legend Barbara Carroll, www.barbaracarrolljazz.com/biography
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