For the love of George

George Avakian, Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Rollins
Newport Jazz Festival, July 6, 1963
©Burt Goldblatt/CTS Images

George Avakian has died. He was 98. He lived a long, good life. For us, music lovers, the important bit is that he was a record producer, and a pioneer at that. Trying to give a fair overview of his whole career is almost impossible, and you will notice that, more often than not, the focus is on less than a decade, from 1950—when he produced Benny Goodmanʼs Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert—till 1958, when he left Columbia Records. Not all eras deserve the same attention, and those years were very intense for Avakian: he signed Dave Brubeck, Erroll Garner and a certain Miles Davis into the big time, and relaunched the careers of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. But before that, he established, or helped establish, the concepts of the jazz album and the reissues of older recordings, a paradigm still extant. After those heady times at Columbia, he produced Sonny Rollinsʼs comeback in the sixties, beginning with The Bridge, all the studio recordings of Paul Desmond with Jim Hall—one LP for Warner Bros., the rest for RCA—and launched the careers of Charles Lloyd and Keith Jarrett. And still, this doesnʼt make him justice (Discogs.com, as good as it is, barely scratches the surface).

Barbara Carroll's first gig in NYC

(All the photos below are by William P. Gottlieb, and are available at the Library of Congress website.—click on them for a larger view.)

Pianist and singer Barbara Carroll passed away on February 12. She was 92, and hadn't quite retired. She was a two-handed pianist, as Hank Jones and Billy Taylor were, with big ears, and was active throughout her life, with a pause in the 1960s to raise a child. She has plenty of music available, much of it in trio format. Her "repertory" recordings for SESAC from 1959 (available as a download or via streaming through the "... And More Bears" label) are well worth a listen.

Carroll had piano lessons from a very early age, and attended the New England Conservatory, although her enthusiasm was aimed at jazz. During World War II, she toured her all-fermale trio around army camps in that part of the country, and after that, when she was just 22 years old, she landed her first gig in the Big Apple, almost by chance...

"When I came to New York, I knew nobody there except one musician, who introduced me to an agent, and immediately he was fortunate enough to get me a job opposite Dizzy Gillespie’s big band. I had a trio of my own, which consisted of Chuck Wayne on guitar, Clyde Lombardi on bass, and myself. Needless to say, I was so impressed with these two marvellous musicians I was working with that I was practically overwhelmed. Plus sharing the engagement with Dizzy’s band, which at that time included some great players like Ray Brown on bass, John Lewis on piano. Really fantastic."

Carroll interviewed by Les Tomkins in 1973

Barbara Carroll, Clyde Lombardi, Chuck Wayne
Downbeat Club, c. 14-20 August 1947