Saviors of the American Songbook By STEPHEN HOLDEN

October 26, 2008
Music
Saviors of the American Songbook
By STEPHEN HOLDEN

WHEN the 19th annual Cabaret Convention begins with the first of four concerts at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Wednesday evening, a genre that has struggled for years below the mass-media radar will lift its collective voice in an annual appeal for attention and respect.

“Please listen,” that voice politely implores. “I am in danger of dying of neglect, and I have valuable knowledge gleaned from the American songbook and from show business history about love, memory, art and time. The magic I can conjure in a romantic cubbyhole where the lights are low, the wine flows and loved ones are at hand is like no other kind.”

The Rose Theater, the modern auditorium inside Jazz at Lincoln Center where the convention — part entertainment gala, part trade show for nightclub bookers — takes place, isn’t a candlelit nook, but it must suffice. Each evening, starting at 6, roughly a dozen performers (the roster changes nightly) will sing two songs each. Karen Akers, Paula West, Marilyn Maye, Mary Cleere Haran, Julie Wilson, Barbara Carroll, K T Sullivan, Tommy Tune and Barb Jungr are among this year’s most eagerly anticipated guests.

Most of the genre’s important male stars — Michael Feinstein, Tom Wopat, Jack Jones, Steve Tyrell and Brian Stokes Mitchell, to name five — are absent from the roster. But one of its most promising young male performers, Tony DeSare, a Sinatra acolyte in his early 30s who sings Prince as well as Johnny Mercer, will appear on Friday.

Cabaret venerates maturity more fervently than any other form of entertainment. Ms. Maye, Ms. Wilson and Ms. Carroll are all in their 80s, as are three of the genre’s other godmothers, Barbara Cook, Eartha Kitt and Elaine Stritch, and its unofficial godfather, Tony Bennett. All might be described as sages who take the long view. All are old enough to remember and have participated in the golden age of live entertainment that faded with the incursions of rock ’n’ roll and television. From the late 1940s through the mid-’60s there were several tiers of live entertainment in New York: glamorous hotel supper clubs like the Persian Room at the Plaza Hotel and the Empire Room at the Waldorf-Astoria, high-end nightclubs like the Blue Angel, smaller hole-in-the-wall Midtown jazz clubs , and smaller boîtes and piano bars scattered through Manhattan where one could drop in for the price of a drink.

As the nightclub world has shrunk, that kind of informality is largely a thing of the past. The question also continually nags as to whether there is a young generation to carry on the tradition. The few younger stars, like Harry Connick Jr., Diana Krall and Michael Bublé, who have passed through cabaret and jazz clubs on their way to the national spotlight rarely look back.

Besides Mr. DeSare, the genre’s other most promising younger performers include the sultry Long Island pop-jazz singer Jane Monheit and Maude Maggart, a protégée of Andrea Marcovicci and Michael Feinstein. Ms. Maggart, who comes from a Hollywood show-business family (she is the older sister of Fiona Apple), sings Judy Collins and Joan Baez as well as Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern.

The Cabaret Convention is produced by Donald Smith, executive director of the Mabel Mercer Foundation, an organization named after the great British-born chanteuse who died in 1984. It reflects the refined taste of Mr. Smith,a die-hard champion of the urbane nightclub ethos in which the spirits of Porter, Coward, the Gershwin brothers, Ms. Mercer and Bobby Short hover over concerts that summon fantasies of a long-vanished cafe society.

For all the obstacles Mr. Smith faces, his attitude toward the tradition he nurtures is philosophical and surprisingly upbeat. He said recently that he was encouraged by an increase in the number of cabarets outside New York, which with its proximity to Broadway remains the genre’s unchallenged hub.

But while cabaret has high-profile champions in the media, the dwindling coverage of cabaret in New York’s local newspapers is a bad omen.

“We’ve never had any corporate sponsorship,” Mr. Smith lamented. “And we haven’t gotten a nickel from any government arts program.”

Mr. Smith’s concept of cabaret is only one of many in a genre that also shades into Broadway, traditional jazz, rock and even world music. Because a cabaret is the best place for a theatrically trained Broadway performer to step out of a role, it is a natural adjunct to the musical theater. Where else but in a nightclub could Betty Buckley put aside her signature theater hits and bring her probing Method-style interpretations to jazz, rock and country material?

When the convention vacated its original home at Town Hall for Jazz at Lincoln Center, a new series, the Broadway Cabaret Festival, jumped into the breach. Created by Scott Siegel, who also produces the New York Nightlife Awards (the nightclub world’s equivalent of the Tonys), the festival, which completed its fourth season on Oct. 19, has become a primary showcase for ambitious young Broadway stars to test their wings as soloists.

The long-running Lyrics and Lyricists series at the 92nd St. Y and Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series also dip heavily into the cabaret world.

Some stars, like Mr. Connick, Ms. Krall, John Pizzarelli and Dianne Reeves, blur the lines between cabaret and jazz until they are virtually the same. But most don’t. Performers in Manhattan supper clubs are expected to create conceptually unified shows that follow an arc and include witty patter. Jazz musicians merely have to play sets that can be made up on the spot; talking is not required. The overlap between Manhattan’s high-end jazz clubs and its three major hotel-associated supper clubs, the Café Carlyle, Feinstein’s at Loews Regency and the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel, is infrequent. And instrumental jazz has established almost no footing in cabaret, where a charismatic personality matters as much as musical talent.

Race has something to do with it. Even in multicultural New York, unspoken divisions persist to this day. Ashford and Simpson have triumphed at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency for three years running. But other African-American performers, like the great singing actress Lillias White, have fared disappointingly in the same club. At the Oak Room, Ms. West, an African-American pop-jazz singer, is the only performer of color to have established a loyal following.

The only truly multicultural venue in New York, Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater, has a high turnover of acts from every corner of music. It might more accurately be described as a hip musical clearinghouse than as a cabaret.

Many complain about the prices at Manhattan’s supper clubs, of which the Café Carlyle is the most expensive. There the cost for two tickets plus dinner for two (usually required) can run upwards of $500. Comparatively speaking, however, that is not much more than the price of dinner for two and good seats at a Broadway musical. Although hotel spokesmen, when pressed for details, are vague about the profitability of their cabarets, it is generally acknowledged that their profits are marginal at best.

The peak cabaret experience is a three-way relationship among singer, song (often a standard) and audience in which performers pour their life experiences in thematic shows using the American songbook as a platform; songs are stations in an autobiographical journey shared with the listener.

Cabaret connoisseurs know that a great nightclub show delivers a richer artistic experience than that offered by almost any Broadway musical, Stephen Sondheim’s excepted. A great example is Jessica Molaskey’s version of Billy Joel’s “Summer, Highland Falls.” Her rendition transforms lyrics that sounded peevish and awkwardly verbose on Mr. Joel’s 1976 album, “Turnstiles,” into an acute psychoanalytic dissection of a turbulent relationship that has reached an impasse.

Reinvented as a wistful bossa nova in which Ms. Molaskey’s husband, the scintillating jazz guitarist and crooner John Pizzarelli, inserts quotations from Antonio Carlos Jobím, “Summer, Highland Falls” makes you gasp at its truthfulness about the intractability of clashing personalities in a dissolving partnership. The Pizzarelli-Molasky duo, whose extended engagement at the Café Carlyle ends this Saturday, are as good as it gets in any entertainment medium.

Equally compelling is Ms. Jungr, a 54-year-old Briton with a gregarious music-hall personality and formidable acting skills whose interpretations of Jacques Brel, Nina Simone and Bob Dylan songs (her live version of “Just Like a Woman” can be seen on YouTube) make you hear them as though for the first time.

To coincide with the convention, Ms. Jungr, who is there on Saturday, and Ms. Maye, who appears on Wednesday, are playing return dates (Nov. 3 for Ms. Junger, Nov. 1 and 2 for Ms. Maye) at the Metropolitan Room, a small club in Chelsea where each recently enjoyed a sold-out engagement with cheering audiences.

The two-and-a-half-year-old Metropolitan Room — a former comedy club that seats 110, is reasonably priced and doesn’t serve dinner — has quickly ascended into New York’s leading showcase for talent ready to make the leap into uptown supper clubs or the stage. It is at New York’s lower-echelon clubs where professionalism gives way to vanity shows in which aspiring stars are expected to bring their friends to justify their booking.

But even the most acclaimed cabaret performers must wrestle with the hard economic realities of a field in which doing it for love is often the only reason to do it. After expenses, a midlevel performer who is paid $10,000 a week barely breaks even. The typical cabaret contract requires a performer to be exclusive to that club for at least six months.

For most performers, the usual avenues of publicity and promotion are closed. Morning television shows routinely turn down cabaret singers. If a performer comes from television there is a built-in audience, but with a caveat. Dixie Carter appeared regularly at the Café Carlyle, but when her television show “Designing Women” finished its run, her cabaret audience evaporated.

Most performers rely on reviews and word of mouth. Radio is of limited help. In New York City the disc jockey and author Jonathan Schwartz is the only influential champion of traditional popular music. Erudite and passionate, he has single-handedly boosted the careers of the Los Angeles pop-jazz singer Tierney Sutton, who appears regularly at Birdland, and kept alive the memory of Nancy LaMott, a gifted balladeer who died in 1995.

In the shouting, brawling world of mainstream pop, the essential qualities of a cabaret performance — intimacy, emotional vulnerability and interpretive subtlety — have little place. In many ways cabaret embodies artistic values that are the antithesis of those promoted by that monstrous star-making machine, “American Idol.” In Simon Cowell’s critical lexicon, the words “too cabaret” are a damning indictment.

“American Idol” treats singing as an Olympic-style competitive sport in which songs, edited into fragments, no longer tell stories. Their remains become heavily amplified exhibitions of stamina and ego by performers for whom youth, beauty and novelty matter as much as talent.

For the majority of Americans, live music is now an arena-ready event that exalts raw physical energy and the kind of prowess measurable in athletic terms. The typical concert is an orgiastic rite of communion between the public and celebrity. Demolished to make room for coliseums where blood sports rule, the romantic cubbyhole has become as anachronistic as the notion of privacy itself.