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Jazz fans may perhaps have known
Jimmy Carroll as the arranger behind the Bird with Strings sessions, although since some bebop listeners regard this as the death of jazz, it might be more advisable to skip mentioning it. There are listeners who adore it, however, and it does represent this artist's hippest jazz credits. On the pop side of the equation, some of his best material comes from the '50s, when he was an arranger for class acts such as
Marlene Dietrich and
Rosemary Clooney. Although less well-known, brilliant cabaret singer
Ruth Wallis was a performer who allowed the young
Carroll plenty of room to both experiment and grow as an arranging talent. At the outset of the '60s, he was one of the lead arrangers for
Mitch Miller, whose tenure at
Columbia represents to some an absolute depth to which American music descended. Ironically, the sessions with
Parker were the contact point for
Carroll and
Miller, and there are jazz fans who have remained catatonic ever since finding out that the latter bearded singalong maven did indeed play oboe with the mighty
Bird on these same strings sessions, although he didn't get to solo.
Yet one credit never tells an artist's whole story, and fans of exotic or strange hi-fi recordings from the same era will know that
Carroll sat on both sides of the fence, whipping up smooth drivel for bossman
Mitch while experimenting in sound on his own time. He gathered together a group of eight percussionists, including
Terry Snyder and
Harry Breuer, and created what was definitely one of the first stereo all-percussion recordings. The entire series of all percussion works were
Carroll's own compositions, and were eventually cited as an influence on at least one modern percussion composition,
Roscoe Mitchell's "The Maze." While he may have worked in luxury conditions at the big labels, in this case the players had to listen to the playbacks one person at a time through headphones. Soon after completing an LP entitled The Jimmy Carroll Computer Music Maker,
Carroll died in Los Angeles in March of 1972 at the age of 59. ~ Eugene Chadbourne