Something to Live For

Barbara Caroll Trio

Featuring Barbara Carroll, piano and vocals; Ken Peplowski, tenor saxophone and clarinet; Jay Leonhart, bass; Alvin Atkinson, drums

Recorded December 27, 2008 at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, Jazz at Lincoln Center, New York City

Track

All I Need is the Girl
Lonely Town
I Wanna Be Yours
How Could You Do a Thing Like That to Me?
Single Petal of a Rose
In a Sentimental Mood
Mood Indigo
Things Ain’t What They Used to Be
How About You?
Something to Live For
Lotus Blossom
A Night in Tunisia

Music has long been “something to live for” for Barbara Carroll, who has been playing the piano for the better part of 80 of her 85 years. This great lady of American song burst onto the world jazz scene in 1947, opening with her trio featuring guitarist Chuck Wayne and bassist Clyde Lombardi for the groundbreaking Dizzy Gillespie big band at the Downbeat Club on New York’s famed 52nd Street.

Sixty years later, Carroll is still going strong, regularly headlining at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s intimate jazz room named for the iconic trumpeter, located just blocks from the very spot where the young pianist once shared the bill with the beloved jazzman.

The honored recipient of the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Award of the Kennedy Arts Center and the National Arts Club’s Award of Distinction, Barbara Carroll has come a long way since those early days on Swing Street when Leonard Feather called her “the first girl to play be-bop piano.” Through the years she has merged myriad musical influences into her own distinctively personal style, to become unequivocally – in the words of Duke Ellington – “beyond category.”