Arts
Supper club singers
Robert Cushman
Mabel Mercer sings with an English accent, standard English at that. Since she wag born in Burton-on-Trent this may not-Seem surprising but since her repertoire consists of popular songs (though hardly of pops) it certainly sounds surprising. The first time you hear her it is likely to absorb most of your attention, especially if you are aware that since the beginning of world war two she has worked consistently in America. Her current engagement, at the Playboy Club in London, is her first outside the United States since then; she has indeed played very few dates outside New York. There was once an excursion to Chicago, to open the Playboy Club there; Victor Lowndes, who has managed both establishments., is a fan. She is not the most obvious attraction for those temples of mock sophistication; she is the real thing.
Hers is a no-nonsense voice: no embroidering of the lyrics and very little of the tune. She will often sing one chorus of a ballad reflectively, out of tempo, savouring it; then take it through again briskly, rhythmically, tightening up. When she and the century were in their fifties—she was born in 1900 — she sounded maternal (the records show); now she is grandmotherly. She is a caring singer both with her material and her audience. Very occasionally this slips and becomes over-sentimental; singing Fran Landesman's 'Ballad of the Sad Young Men' she was, I felt, too demonstrative in her concern, drowning the sad young men in sympathy. But usually she has an edge, however discreetly cloaked. There is one song she sings, 'Wait Till You're Sixty-Five' by Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane, all about the wonders of social security; she begins it with honeyed, soothing sadness, then turns it to self-mockery. She plays delicately with the fact of her own age: at times feigning oblivion to it but so discreetly that 'Blame it on my Youth' (a lovely tune by Oscar Levant) becomes not an embarraSsment but a jewelled re-creation of a properly distanced experience. At other times she plays the wicked old lady; Bart Howard's 'It Was Worth It' Kan I curse my past gaieties when They were all of them men?) is embellished by deep growls of worldly delight. And in 'Confession', a song of equivocal innocence by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, or in her finely nuanced version of that new classic among songs of experience, Stephen Sondheim's 'Send in the Clowns', the two modes come together, past memory and present enactment.
The apparent incongruity of the accent is one of her greatest assets; it helps her frame the songs. Frank Sinatra once said that Mabel Mercer taught him everything he knew; one lesson must have been the fanatical conscientiousness, cherishing every syllable. There is a strangeness, even a foreignness, in Sinatra's voice, as in those of Billie Holliday and Tony Bennett; they all scrutinise their songs, hold them up to the light. All have declared themselves Mercer disciples; as have dozens of others. Even if most people have never heard of her, they know her well at second hand.
The supper-club empire over which she rules has in recent years woken from its long enforced sleep. There are more singers active in New York and more venues for them thotigh not enough. Cleo's, an attractive restaurant a block away from Lincoln Centre, is Mabel Mercer's usual home these nights. While she prepared for her London date, it was occupied by a pair of performers: a white-suited purveyor of jazz joke songs (an American George Melly) and, far more felicitously, a softly assured southern lady called Dardanelle, singing at the piano rather in the Blossom Deane manner only more sober, less skittish. In other rooms two gentlemen who might be Miss Mercer's professional godsons hold court: Bobby Short and Hugh Shannon. They, like her, draw their repertoire from the mainstream of American popular music -= songs which either come from shows or try to sound as if they did, ranging from the invaluable to the merely precious. Everything she sings is, in a sense, special material; it drapes itself around her personality. In this she oddly resembles Judy Garland; the wonder is that she can still go into every song fresh, without signalling her audience that this is the one they have been waiting for. Short and Shannon are more eclectic, more concerned to show the songs off to us. Short, like Miss Mercer, is black, compact and elegant, but where she is 'serene' (uniquely among singers she delivers every number from an armchair, limiting movement to graceful illustrative sweeps of her hand) Short is 'bouncy'. (Those were the categories once used for clubs by the New Yorker, the right bible to quote in these circumstances.) His movement is limited by his being his own pianist; even so he is liable to end a number standing, bathed in a spotlight, arms triumphantly upraised. And often in the course of a song — especially a comedy song —he will lift his hands from the keyboard to point (in every sense) the lyric. He is the most flamboyantly witty of singers; he has a wily bassist, a vigorous drummer, and a percussive piano style on his own account. His stamping-ground for the last decade has been the Café Carlyle, set in a posh hotel and the nearest thing in today's Manhattan to the supper-club of one's imaginings: looks subfusc, noise cheerful and abundant. Hugh Shannon by contrast hangs out in the lounge bar of a good Chinese restaurant called David Kay's; he is a loner, and your dream of a singing piano-man. He has no structured act, he merely sings and plays at his own will or yours, until closing-time. (I counted forty-one consecutive numbers and I came in late.) By two a.m. his audience, if depleted, is happy and harmonious. Sonletimes he will brush off a request with a quick 'I don't do that'; I was lucky, asking for 'You Came a Long Way from St Louis', a marvellously disdainful song, and getting it complete with verse. (I didn't know it had a verse.) The composer, now as always, is Cole Porter; he mythologised the supper-club world, maybe even created it, and it is still trying to live up to him. His most popular song seems at the moment to be the 1930 'Experiment' (vb., imp.) which I have heard in the last three weeks from Mercer, Short, Shannon, and in a delightful off-Broadway revue Unsung C'ole, which wipes the floor with the current entertainment at the Mermaid. Audiences were knowledgeable, and mostly young. This was not'nostalgia'; you can't remember what you never knew, 'Nostalgia' is Fats Domino or maybe the Beatles. This is musical appreciation.
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