As she neared her tenth decade, Barbara Carroll could look back on more than eighty-five years at the keyboard. Born Barbara Carole Coppersmith, she first touched the keys at age five, began classical lessons three years later, and completed her studies at the New England Conservatory.
Her earliest professional work came during World War II on a USO circuit, where she appeared in an all-female trio. Soon afterward she assembled her own group along 52nd Street in New York, adopting a slight alteration of her middle name, Carole, for the stage. Associations with guitarist Chuck Wayne and bassist Clyde Lombardi followed, yet her recorded legacy opened in 1949 when she accompanied multi-instrumentalist Eddie Shu on the Rainbow label.
Among women pianists she stood out as the first to explore the progressive bebop idiom identified with Bud Powell. Unlike Billy Tipton, she saw no reason to mask her identity as a woman in jazz, though her milieu was Manhattan rather than Oklahoma or Washington state. Acceptance nevertheless proved difficult in a male-dominated arena. “People tended to put you down before they ever heard you,” she remarked. “If you were a girl piano player, the tendency was to say: ‘Oh, how could she possibly play?’ You never even got a chance to present what you could do. But then, if you did prove yourself, it almost became a commercial asset, in a sense; you were regarded as unique.”
High-society listeners took to her during a long residency at the fashionable Embers supper club. The bassist in that ensemble was Joe Shulman, whom she married in 1954. Later decades found her incorporating pop material while preserving a clear jazz character in her playing. Sessions for Verve and Atlantic documented her work, and club and cabaret engagements continued into her nineties, including a steady run at Manhattan’s Birdland that lasted until December 2016. Occasional stage appearances included a role in the Broadway musical Me and Juliet. She died in February 2017 at the age of ninety-two.
