Home » Jazz Articles » Profile » Barbara Carroll: Barbara’s Piano
Barbara Carroll: Barbara’s Piano
Courtesy William Gottlieb
Barbara Carroll
piano1925 - 2017
Joe Shulman
b.1923Born January 25, 1925, in Worcester, Massachusetts, Barbara Carole Coppersmith started playing the piano when she was five years old, and she went on to get classical training and eventually attended the New England Conservatory in Boston for a year. Carroll got practical experience when she played with an all-female trio on a USO tour during the Second World War. After the war, she made a name for herself in New York as one of the female pioneers of bop. Early on, she had fallen in love with the jazz she heard on the radio, including pianists
Art Tatum
piano1909 - 1956
Teddy Wilson
piano1912 - 1986
Nat King Cole
piano and vocals1919 - 1965
Leonard Feather
b.1914"All my life, though, I've been plagued with two things. One is people saying to me: 'You really play well for a girl.' The second 'compliment' is: 'You play just like a man.' Now, I know that when people say the latter they mean it with great sincerity, and they consider it the highest form of praise. However, if you really think about it a minute, it is rather a matter of male chauvinism, isn't it? I mean, it's incredible to them that you can play well and be a woman."
Carroll wasn't only limited from the outside by perceptions of gender, but also by genre conventions that tied her to the bop idiom, something she told Les Tomkins she was quite relaxed about:
"As for my bebop influence—who's playing today, who was playing in the 1950s who hasn't been influenced by bebop? I don't mind being termed a bebop player—I consider it a high compliment. I haven't heard the term used too much in reference to me, or to most people recently. But bebop has invaded every sphere of music, you know: I don't think you can be any kind of a jazz player today, and not have been influenced by Charlie Parker, and by Dizzy, and by Thelonious Monk, etcetera—right? I mean, that was the revolution, and we have all learned from the bebop era. We have all absorbed that kind of thing, and it's a part of what we do now."
While it's undeniable that Carroll's sound is influenced by bop, it's also a very personal sound that can't be pigeonholed, and it embraces different stylistic devices and moods. On Barbara, bop is just one ingredient among others.
The album starts with "The Trolley Song," the theme carried by knotty chords and playful piano jumps reminiscent of
Thelonious Monk
piano1917 - 1982
"It Might As Well Be Spring" is another personal take on a standard. The slightly modernistic nature of the piece is pinpointed in television personality Dave Garroway's liner notes: "(It) reminds me of Cezanne, with tangential, prismatic sounds, just on, just off." There are also classical flourishes in Carroll's embellishments, and a sense of space.
It's the tension between bop and swing, fast and slow, the abstract and melodic, and humor and seriousness that characterizes Barbara. Carroll can outswing anyone, but she also boils the tempo down into a quiet simmer on the ballad "Easy Living," which has an undercurrent of melancholy. Life is not merely easy. The moods have as many shades as the music which develops from the daylight frolic of "The Trolley Song" to the nocturnal closer, "Blues for Blue-Eyes," an original penned by Carroll. It finds her exploring a midnight mood with slow runs on the piano and Shulman's bass whispering in the background.
While she certainly was a pioneer of bop, the piano of Barbara Carroll displays much more than just that style. Just as you need to talk to someone to learn about their personality, you need to listen to the music to understand the artist. Barbara and the RCA recordings that came before the album is a good place to start, but they document only the early stage of what would be a long and distinguished career. It might be that Barbara was the end of an era and the relationship with Shulman, but Carroll, who also sang, had plenty more to say and continued to play and record for several decades until she died at 92 in 2017. She was justly remembered by The New York Times not as pioneering female bop pianist, but as a "pioneering jazz pianist and singer."
Acknowledgement:
Les Tomkins' interview with Barbara Carroll is available at The National Jazz Archive: Interview with Barbara Carroll at The National Jazz Archive.Tags
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