Johnny Carisi
b. 23 February 1922, Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, USA, d. 3 October 1992. A jazz trumpeter turned composer, Carisi began arranging while in Glenn Miller's US Air Force Band at Yale between 1938 and 1943. ‘I'd run and find out who wasn't going into New York for the weekend and write for whoever was left—whether it was a cello and a French horn, or a piano and a tuba. Two people and we had a band’, he commented. Carisi's use of non-jazz instrumentation was celebrated for Israel, one of the stand-out pieces on Miles Davis's BIRTH OF THE COOL sessions. Influenced by his time with Claude Thornhill, Carisi's small number of compositions are nearly all masterpieces. He arranged for Gil Evans in 1960 and for trumpeter Marvin Stamm in 1968. Moon Taj, released in 1960 on INTO THE HOT (on album presented by Gil Evans and featuring tracks by Carisi and Cecil Taylor), was a gem of tremulous Third Stream enchantment. Although his subsequent involvement in jazz has been minimal, Carisi continued to work in music, both as a pop arranger and a composer of highly individual classical pieces that included a saxophone quartet and a tuba concerto.