Cabaret isn’t easy to define except in terms of geographical imperatives. If something happens in Carnegie Hall, it’s not necessarily classical music, and if an artist performs at Birdland, he’s not automatically a jazz musician. The major cabaret rooms feature everyone from Broadway leading ladies and men doing one-person shows to jazz vocalists to vintage pop stars working the circuit to traditional cabaret singers and singer-pianists, yet anyone who works in any of the major cabaret rooms (the four principal joints currently in New York are the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel, Feinstein’s at the Regency Hotel, the Café Carlyle, and the leading room for more reasonably priced talent, the Metropolitan) is unquestionably, ipso facto, a cabaret performer.
The reader will forgive my unabashed Gotham-centrism here: Like jazz and, even more so, the Broadway musical, cabaret happens primarily in New York. Other cities have their own cabaret scenes, but they’re ultimately not much more than the equivalent of road companies or local bands.
Just how many kinds of cabaret are there? The classic image of the genre is a heavy-duty diva like Mabel Mercer, perched like a statue on her famous, thronelike singing stool, transforming Cole Porter into a soliloquy as serious as anything uttered by Hamlet, only with rolled “R”s. Then there’s Bobby Short, who brought the traditions of African American showbiz to cabaret, with overtones of jazz and blues, of ladies like Ethel Waters and Ivie Anderson, even as he shakes the sand from his shoes. Some cabaret divas are essentially opera singers, superannuated sopranos straining for a high F. These in turn are in contrast to all those young showbiz hopefuls putting on their own shows—the topic of which is generally what it’s like to be a young showbiz hopeful—all with carefully scripted patter that gives credit to their directors and refers to their piano players as “musical directors.” (Sometimes it seems that the major difference between cabaret singing and jazz singing is that jazz people never announce their light and sound guys; cabaret singers always do.) Cabaret is also notable for having its share of late starters, late bloomers, and even more late non-bloomers such as Miriam Passman, protégée of play-wright Charles Busch, who waited until her kids were in college before mounting her show, If We Only Have Love: Songs of Sondheim, Brel, and Weill, at the Tuesday 3:45 a.m. slot at Danny’s.
Cabaret also means French singers from New Jersey, the chanteurettes and chantootsies doing the music of Jacques Strappe or Charles Hasnovoice. There are evenings of music by every imaginable songwriter, encompassing, as the 2000-Year-Old Man would say, “the great and the near-great.” There are tributes to legendary entertainers who are either living or dead, or perhaps dead but don’t know it: Americans doing Edith Piaf or Marlene Dietrich, men who do Streisand and women who do Sinatra. (I’d like to see the various concepts combined—someone doing a whole evening of Ethel Merman singing Burt Bacharach, or maybe somebody recreating Sammy Davis Jr. doing his impression of Frankie Laine.) When someone like Bette Midler becomes a superstar (and, more recently, when big sellers like Michael Feinstein, Diana Krall, and Peter Cincotti have played the Algonquin on their way to the top), then cabaret briefly penetrates the mainstream. Conversely, when some TV actress like Cybill Shepherd or Dixie Carter turns up at Fein-stein’s or the Carlyle, then the mainstream penetrates cabaret.
In the Broadway musical A Class Act, the songwriter Ed Kleban defined musical comedy as a big theater where a lot of people have paid a lot of money to see a big show; cabaret, on the other hand, is more like a small room where a privileged few people have paid a lot of money to see a performance that’s intimate. It’s not a coincidence that most cabaret venues are situated in hotels—hotel rooms are traditionally where intimate things happen.
In jazz the dividing categories are more obvious—swing versus bebop, saxes versus pianos—but the concept of cabaret is such a polyglot, a mishmash of divergent styles, that it doesn’t pay to look for subgenres. Cabaret is roughly half-jazz, half-musical theater, and half-pop. In fact, the whole concept of the form is dependent on a mathematical equation derived from that great economist Max Bialystock: For it to work, you have to sell at least 150 percent of it.
When we say cabaret is partially pop, we generally mean the Cole Porter-Frank Sinatra kind, but sometimes also the Leiber and Stoller-Elvis kind, or even the Barry Manilow-Bette Midler kind, and perhaps someday the N’Sync—Backstreet Boys—Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle kind. The two living legends who could most positively be considered the leading icons of the music, the goddess-divas who do the most to inspire younger talent, could not be further apart career-wise. Margaret Whiting came out of the pop mainstream, where she enjoyed hit singles and multimedia stardom, whereas you would never find Julie Wilson on a jukebox; she was always an artist on the fringe, appealing to the cognoscenti rather than the masses. Yet both work in cabaret because they choose to.
One of the main factors that distinguish living legends from others is a serene knowledge that they themselves are the show. Among younger performers, even those in their fifties, there’s a consensus that what makes cabaret different from other forms of theater and music is that it’s always about something, there’s always a show. Jazz singers can reel off one tune after another without saying anything other than “Give it up for So-and-So on bass!” (No white person should ever be allowed to utter the phrases “give it up” or “put your hands together.”) Even Blossom Dearie rarely said anything unless the song she was about to sing was written either by her or one of her dearest chums. Yet generally speaking, cabaret singers have to have patter that helps fit their songs into a concept and a show. With all four of the central performers of this section, the patter is often just as entertaining—and perhaps even more central to the overall experience—as the singing itself.
In jazz, you have to be able to play or sing, and be on intimate terms with every chord progression ever devised. In cabaret, you have to know not only the words and music to a billion standard songs, but the entire history behind each one; in fact, knowing the name of the composer, lyricist, and who introduced it in whatever film or show (plus who wrote the book, designed the costumes, or sold the tickets in the box office) is far more important than knowing how to improvise on the changes. If you throw in an incorrect chord change somewhere, chances are that no one but a few musicians will notice; however if you confuse George White’s Scandals of 1926 with Ziegfeld Follies of 1922, a dozen geniuses in the audience will be all over you.
Which brings us to another primary difference between jazz and cabaret. When you listen to jazz, you’re supposed to feel hip. In contrast, when you experience a cabaret show, you’re supposed to feel smart. Andrea Marcovicci has a way of interspersing bits of knowledge in her show that are ingeniously designed to make the listener say to himself, “Aren’t I smart for coming here?” And with European performers who spell “cabaret” with a “K,” such as Ute Lemper, you’re not only supposed to feel cultured, you’re supposed to walk out of the Kafé Karlyle feeling cultured and continental. Mary Cleere Haran is the master of incorporating her songs into a larger context of narrative and comedy; no one is better than she at interweaving the songs as well as the accompanying history into a seamless dramatic narrative. She addresses her audiences as “New York Sophisticates,” and, though she may be getting a laugh with the phrase, that’s exactly what she makes us feel like.
Michael Feinstein has the rare gift of being able to spiel reams of factoids in such a way that you say to yourself, “Oh yes, of course I knew that,” and you really think you did—he’s mastered the trick of imparting information without coming off as smug or superior. By contrast, the pianist and singer Mark Nadler can make almost any piece of information seem funny; he’s the incarnation of what the master Looney Tuneist Chuck Jones once distinguished as the difference between “someone who opens a funny door” and “someone who opens a door funny.” KT Sullivan, who is also a superlative soprano, can get laughs on lines even when the author failed to provide any. Eric Comstock, like Feinstein and like the late, underappreciated Charles DeForest, has a knack for sharing both songs and the data concerning them like a collector friend (be it wine, songs, or stamps) talking to another, taking you on a tour of his house and pulling out rarities that will amaze and astound you—yet never coming across as an “expert,” always keeping everything on a friend-to-friend level.
No matter what you sing like, cabaret is about context—the whole show rather than the individual song. (It’s a rare artist like Sandy Stewart who gets through an entire show at the Algonquin without dropping one name or mentioning one fact.) There’s no artist who illustrates this point better than Andrea Marcovicci, who was probably the most successful leading lady of the cabaret world in the first decade of the new millennium.
The actor Jimmy Stewart told a story about how, early in his career, MGM pictures cast him in a Cole Porter musical to be called Born to Dance. Stewart suffered no illusions about his singing ability—he knew he couldn’t carry a tune across the street without breaking both legs—so he went to the composer and pleaded for a song that required more acting than singing, something with “a lot of lyrics” and not a lot of high notes. In other words, something that Stewart (not yet a Hollywood legend) could talk his way through, rather than actually have to sing.
I kept thinking about that story when I heard Andrea Marcovicci for the first time in person, after years of knowing her singing, such as it is, only from records. This was at New Year’s Eve 2003–2004 at the Oak Room. I confess that I had never been to hear her in person for many years because I had only heard her on records—and it’s impossible to get the point of Marcovicci from records alone. Her medium is the live show, preferably in a small room; records seem only to expose her shortcomings. No chops. No voice. No ability to hit notes, much less sustain them.
But voice is a funny thing in the cabaret world: It isn’t synonymous with talent. In cabaret, you can be a great performer without a great voice or musical chops, much as you can be a great dramatic actor in the theater without a great, commanding voice. Cabaret is not like opera or baseball where you need a lot of physical ability to get the job done; cabaret is much more dependent on brainpower. If you have virtuoso pipes, like Ann Hampton Callaway, so much the better, but it’s not an absolute prerequisite. (The rest of the pop music world has gone in the opposite direction, where performers in the post-American Idol world have determined that all there is to singing is hitting notes.)
I also knew from Marcovicci’s records like Live from London (1998) how compelling she can be with what may be the most minimal set of pipes ever to belong to a substantial singer of the Great American Songbook. Even Mabel Mercer, minimal as her voice was, especially in her twilight years, was considerably more musical, more capable of conveying a sense of melody and rhythm. What’s especially interesting is that Marcovicci doesn’t fake it—she doesn’t try to talk her way through a lyric.
Instead, she uses her acting ability to put the words and the stories over, while her accompanist—in this case it was the talented Shelly Markham—handles the melody. It’s a theatrical illusion, comparable to the way that the trick of persistence of vision creates the illusion of moving pictures. The movies don’t actually move, but when you see a sequence of slightly different still pictures flashing forward fast enough, your brain fills in the gaps, and the figures in the image appear to move. Likewise, when you hear words and music together, your ears and your mind conspire to trick you into thinking there must be some kind of singing going on.
And Marcovicci is full of tricks—she’s the only singer I have ever heard who can sustain a word without sustaining a note. The word will start out on a certain pitch, and she’ll give every impression of holding it, yet the note itself will often trail away while the sound of the syllable lingers on. Similarly, she’ll fly into what sounds like a classical trill—she’ll hit a brief scale of a couple of notes, rendered coloratura-style. These trills are completely random, having nothing to do with words or music—she seems to be throwing them in to further create the illusion that the audience is hearing a voice hitting pitches. But she more than compensates for a shortage of vocal power with a surplus of brainpower.
Marcovicci is so smart and so canny about herself that I can’t help wondering if she’s deliberately misleading us about one salient point: She describes herself as a “torch singer.” In a sense, that’s refreshing: That phrase was retired years ago, just as too many singers, following the example of Sinatra and Kay Starr, proclaimed themselves “saloon singers.” It’s a self-categorization that obliterates the difference between self-deprecation and self-aggrandizement. “Saloon singer” implies “My art means so much to me that I am willing to do it in a tacky dive for next to no money.” Torch singing is a more positive term, mainly because it’s the one that was actually used in the music industry in the prewar era.
Far be it from me to deny that Marcovicci is sufficiently torchy—she puts over her songs of “unrequited and requited love” in a way that’s often quite moving. Sometimes the sad songs are a little heavy-handed, as on “Springtime” (on Live from London), but more often, she uses the power of suggestion, perhaps to make her sad songs seem both touching and torching. Her best ballads have the quality of restraint—a natural asset for her to employ; a refusal to indulge in oversentimentalizing.
But the real highlights for me are those songs by Cole Porter that Jimmy Stewart referred to, the list songs and the big patter comedy tours de force with, as Stewart suggests, the more lyrics, the better. When a song becomes a standout comic monologue, then the articulation, the timing, the phrasing, and the delivery of the text becomes far more important than intonation or notes. At the 2003–2004 New Year’s Eve show at the Algonquin, Marcovicci achieved this over and over, most notably with Frank Loesser’s “Hamlet,” a showstopper he wrote for Betty Grable in the 1949 film Red, Hot and Blue (no connection to the Cole Porter musical) that hysterically reduces Shakespeare’s tragedy to forties jive lingo. Porter’s “Let’s Not Talk About Love” seems to have been inspired by the agile tongues of Danny Kaye and Eve Arden; here he was moved to compete with what Ira Gershwin and Kurt Weill had wrought with Kaye in “Tchaikovsky.” Porter succeeded in devising the twistiest and turniest and most complexly rhyming tongue-twister of them all, and made it somewhat spicier than Gershwin and Weill’s opus in his choice of subject matter. Marcovicci convulsed us all, despite omitting the song’s most extreme line (quoted elsewhere in this book, it rhymes “Pennsylvania” with “nymphomania.”)
With her rail-thin form and angular, modelesque cheekbones, Marcovicci looks the very essence of what a cabaret singer should be, using her arms and posture as much as she does notes and words to convey a narrative. Her home base is extremely upscale joints like the Oak Room and London’s Pizza on the Park (where she recorded Live from London), and her primary audience is the well-heeled who frequent such joints. She knows the value of a song like Sondheim’s “Finishing the Hat” (from Sunday in the Park with George), which makes us feel nothing less than righteous and justified—perhaps even noble—in our self-centered, preoccupied way. Her performances are a musical comfort food that reaches the heart by way of the brain; she makes us feel good about ourselves.
Marcovicci, who with typical cunning celebrated her sixtieth birthday six months after the fact in May 2009 in a special concert at Town Hall (her mother was on hand to celebrate her ninetieth), continually outsmarts us and makes us love her for it. She appeals to the collective cerebellum; she sings offbeat songs that only a true specialist would know; and she drops little bits of trivia—at times she’s almost like Jonathan Schwartz set to piano accompaniment (with perhaps a little more of a sense of humor). Even when I think I’m a step ahead of her, she’ll trot out a piece of ancient esoterica like “Umbrella Man,” a screwball novelty waltz from 1939, and appeal to everybody’s inner music nerd. (Admittedly, in my case it’s an outer nerd.) Yet nothing that she does is truly obscure, and that’s the genius of it: She knows how to light the spark of vague, distant recognition to make a listening crowd feel on top of things. She knows well that we’re not as sophisticated as she makes us think we are. We file out of her shows thinking, “My, aren’t I intelligent to have come here, listening to this sophisticated woman sing these sophisticated songs?” And we’re right.
Many performers resent the term “cabaret” in the same way that most traditional jazz players resent the word “Dixieland.” Yet Mary Cleere Haran is fiercely proud to call herself a cabaret artist—she celebrates the medium for its intimacy, its directness, and, in her hands, its emotional honesty. Her strength is that she takes full advantage of the form’s potential: A Mary Cleere Haran show is not just a bunch of songs tied together with a theme and patter, but a thoroughly written and directed one-woman production. The amount of perseverance and preparation that go into one of her productions is the same as for any off-Broadway show. The difference is not in the scope of Haran’s ambitions, but that she prefers the basic conceit of cabaret: One-person shows on Broadway generally have one famous person pretending to be another. (In a fairly recent season, George Burns, Katharine Hepburn, and Golda Meir were all impersonated on the Great White Way.) In contrast, Ms. Haran always plays herself in one of her one-woman shows, addressing the audience in her dual role as scholar and interpreter of the Great American Songbook. She may play another character for a brief scene or two here and there, but she specializes in being herself. In fact, rather than subsume herself in some legendary figure, she weaves whatever topic happens to be under discussion into the context of her own life and experience. If you’ve seen enough of her shows, you know that sooner or later everything will wind up in a discussion of her traditional Catholic upbringing and the nuns who served as instructors and would-be role models for her childhood in San Francisco.
Haran is also an outstanding singer, with a sweetly beautiful, honey-flavored voice. You’d pay money just to hear the voice even without the rest of the package that goes with it—she can hit notes and even sustain them. Where Marcovicci sounds as if she’s been listening to Mabel Mercer, the sound of Haran’s voice and her approach to a song is obviously more closely informed by close contact with such superior pop singers as Doris Day, Jo Stafford, Margaret Whiting, and Rosemary Clooney. If Marcovicci had been around in the fifties, she would have been at the Blue Angel, whereas Haran would have worked at the Waldorf or the Copa. She’s played almost exclusively in cabaret settings—even on her half dozen or so albums (such as Pennies from Heaven, 1998, and Crazy Rhythm, 2000)—meaning at most a trio, piano, bass, and drums. While this is hardly cause for regret, Haran has sufficient chops to make us want to hear her in other contexts as well: with a big band, maybe, or a full string orchestra, or a Dixieland band. Her voice is a major attraction unto itself; it’s not merely part of a bigger picture.
Yet singing is only part of what she does. Just to hear Haran on a recording means getting only half of the experience. Watching a video of her in performance wouldn’t help. It’s not a question of seeing her rather than just hearing her; it’s a question of being there rather than not being there: Her brand of ultra-polished, scripted, directed, and acted performance is somehow not reproducible by electronic media. Even a YouTube of Haran in action is akin to listening to an early stereo album like Sinatra’s Come Swing with Me and only getting one of the channels. Unless you’re right there in the same room with her live and in person, just as it’s happening, then you’re not getting the full experience.
Like Michael Feinstein, Haran grew up infatuated with old songs and old movies. Classic musical comedy shows, experienced via cast albums, have also exerted a significant influence on their work. But there’s something much more vital and immediate about a classic film that Haran and Feinstein respond to which makes old Broadway productions seem academic by comparison. It’s clear from CDs like Feinstein’s MGM Album and Haran’s This Heart of Mine: Classic Movie Songs of the Forties that they’re as interested in the films themselves as in the songs. When Haran was asked to host a concert in the Lyrics and Lyricists series (somewhat inaccurately named, since it often salutes composers as well as lyricists) at the 92nd Street Y, it was no surprise that she put together an evening of Harry Warren, who was, overall, Hollywood’s most celebrated songwriter.
One of the main differences between Haran and Feinstein is that while he can also be funny, Haran is much more of a pundit. She can also be far more sarcastic and caustic than Marcovicci or Feinstein; she’s just as likely to dwell on the mediocrity and tackiness of old Hollywood as she is to celebrate its triumphs.
Her cinemacentric outlook (she’s also worked as a researcher and interviewer for numerous PBS documentaries, which are usually also movie-oriented) has led to my favorite of her albums, the aforementioned This Heart of Mine. She’s worked with plenty of fine pianists, including Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, but Fred Hersch is probably the finest, serving also as musical director and producer here. The music nerd in me responds to the scholar in her and appreciates the chance to hear wonderful but rarely performed songs that just missed becoming standards. In several cases, these are title songs from classic films that had to play second fiddle to other numbers from the same scores. For instance, “Swinging on a Star” from Going My Way won the Oscar and is familiar enough to contemporary audiences that Gary Larson could build a cartoon joke around it (husband pig says to wife pig, “I never wanted to carry moonbeams home in a jar”), yet nobody remembers the even more beautiful title song from that film, in spite of marvelous performances at the time by Bing Crosby and by Johnny Desmond with Glenn Miller’s Army Air Force Band. The same applies to “You Were Never Lovelier,” the title of the second of the two Fred Astaire-Rita Hay-worth vehicles. Everybody knows its “I’m Old Fashioned,” but the title tune languished unheard for decades until an astute interpreter-scholar brought it the attention it deserved.
Feinstein and Haran are both partial to film-oriented writers—who but Feinstein would salute Livingston and Evans?—and likewise Haran leans not only toward Warren but Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Mercer, who’s by far the best represented writer on This Heart of Mine, having supplied the lyrics for half the songs here. “Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” is hardly obscure; it earned Mercer the first of his four Academy Awards, and is well known to anyone who owns a Judy Garland album. Haran, though, gives it a whole new face, slowing it down and accentuating unfamiliar lyrics. Her purpose is not novelty in and for itself, but to give the song new resonance. She reveals that “Atchison, Topeka” doesn’t merely belong to the great tradition of train songs (or even movie train songs, like “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” and “Chattanooga Choo-Choo”) but, thanks to Mercer’s lyrical brilliance, uses the railroad as a metaphor for far-flung dreams. In Haran’s interpretation, “Atchison, Topeka” is nothing less than a spiritual predecessor of the songwriter’s more mature “Moon River.”
Using Garland’s classic interpretation as a point of departure—every train ride needs a starting point—Haran unveils level upon level of meaning. She shows how Mercer contrasts the glamour and the mundanity of the A, T & SF—the locals are excited by the arrival of the train, but it’s just a job to those who work on it. For the song’s protagonist, who travels from the comfort, but also the limitations, of home to the new frontier, the train represents a new life and a fresh start.
In the picture, “Atchison” is sung by Susan Bradley of Ohio (Garland) as she steps off the train, and Mercer’s lyric has her both reflecting on her past (“Back in Ohio, where I come from …”) and speculating about her future. Even though he wrote chorus after chorus of lyrics for the production number built around the song in The Harvey Girls, he was smart enough to leave a lot unsaid. The lyrics talk about dreams in the abstract, not the specific—a career, a family, a room of one’s own—which makes them somehow seem more meaningful. The most arresting description of the future is that it includes a built-in reminiscence of the past: “When I’m old and gray and settled down …” As great as Garland is, every time I hear Haran sing “Atchison” (and it’s one of her perennials) she makes me hear all kinds of things that I never heard in the song before.
Which is precisely the place where the duties of a good scholar and a good interpreter intersect. Haran finds that spot and builds all her individual songs and entire shows there. To my dismay, her career has been somewhat downsized recently. She hasn’t released a new album since 2000, and there have only been a few major room appearances this decade (notably a memorable tribute to Doris Day at Fein-stein’s in the fall of 2007). Even so, she remains one of the very finest artists working the field of contemporary cabaret today, because she never fails to stimulate, inspire, and move us.
Feinstein’s singing sounds neither like a pop singer who came out of a band context, like Crosby or Sinatra, or one who emerged from a Broadway background, like John Raitt. Nor does he sound like what I would consider a classic-traditional male cabaret singer—Philip Officer, with his pleasantly nasal high notes, is a good example of the genre. Feinstein sings with a wide and rapid vibrato in a high baritone (sometimes so high it sounds like a low tenor) that draws upon all these traditions without restricting itself to any one of them. It’s a beautiful voice—he does indeed have chops—but as with the other major cabarateurs, what he does with it is far more important.
Significantly, the two singers he’s most often compared to are Barry Manilow and Johnny Mathis, which some might regard as an insult, but which strikes me more as confirmation that not every aspect of the music of Mathis or even Manilow is dreadful. For starters, both have sweet, genuinely pretty voices that are pleasing to listen to. This doesn’t necessarily a great singer make (think of Andy Williams), but in this age of rap and grunge, to be able to start with a sound that attractive is nothing to take for granted.
It’s an oversimplification to say that Feinstein sounds the way Manilow and Mathis might sound were they given a sudden infusion of class. Mathis’s albums with Ralph Burns, such as The Rhythms and Ballads of Broadway, are certainly proto-Feinsteinian, but Feinstein’s vibrato is not nearly as carnivorous as that of Mathis (who might be described as a vibrato in search of a voice), and he doesn’t have the preening, self-glorifying stance of Manilow (who most often seems like a male equivalent of such ego-driven divas as Streisand, Midler, or Cher). Unlike Manilow, Feinstein sounds as if he loves the songs more than he loves the sound of his own voice.
His specialty is slow ballads; Rodgers and Hart’s “Isn’t It Romantic” isn’t just a piece of material to him, it’s a motto. When he does a tune that goes faster, it’s just that—a faster love song, like “Something’s Gotta Give.” He’s also made efforts to do out-and-out big band-style swing, and while this isn’t his forte, he is, infact, very credible when singing fast-moving, Broadway-style numbers in double time or even faster—plenty of these are on The MGM Album. While singing fast isn’t the same as swinging, Feinstein makes you feel pedantic for bothering about the difference.
The Gershwins are at the center of Feinstein’s musical universe. He launched his career not as player or scholar but essentially as Ira Gershwin’s assistant. Born in 1956, Feinstein first worked in local spots around his native Columbus before moving to Los Angeles in 1976. He entered the Gershwin inner circle a few months later when he met the widow of pianist-raconteur Oscar Levant, famous as a leading Gershwin interpreter, sidekick, and psychotic alter ego. From there, Feinstein met Ira Gershwin and his wife, Lenore (even people who normally never have a bad word to say about anybody, like Feinstein and Rosemary Clooney, can’t think of anything positive to say about Mrs. Gershwin).
Feinstein worked as Gershwin’s lieutenant until the lyricist’s death six years later; he also served as Liza Minnelli’s accompanist for a time. When he went for broke with his career as a singer-pianist, he already had her support, as well as Clooney’s. In 1986, he officially made the big time when he opened at the Algonquin—within a few years they could no longer afford him. More remarkably, he went where no younger singer of the Great American Songbook had gone for many years when he began recording standards for a major label, the Warner Bros. conglomerate (various releases came out on Asylum and Elektra/Atlantic), beginning with Live at the Algonquin and Pure Gershwin, both from 1986. The latter was the first of several albums devoted to the songwriting team that represents the North Star in Feinstein’s constellation, as well the first of his continuing series of songwriter-driven projects.
As a player-scholar, Feinstein has done a remarkable job of balancing the familiar and the obscure, carefully alternating between standards everybody knows (like “I Got Rhythm”) and worthy esoterica. Apart from his Gershwin and Irving Berlin collections, he’s also made a point of honoring songwriters who are both living (at least at the time) and who rarely get entire albums devoted to them, such as Burton Lane, Jule Styne, Jerry Herman, and the team of Jay Livingston and Ray Evans.
In 1996, he was in the vanguard again when he switched from the Warners conglomerate to the midsize corporation Concord Records (within a few years, every creative artist of note was recording for such midsize operations as Concord, Telarc, and Fantasy, which are now all under the same corporate umbrella), which allowed him to create Feinery, a boutique label of his own, for which he makes traditional Michael Feinstein albums and also produces historical projects, such as reissues of rare music by such icons of class pop singing as Clooney and Jo Stafford.
All in all, Feinstein has made more than two dozen albums over the last twenty years, enough to warrant The Very Best of Michael Feinstein, which actually came out at the time of the WEA-Concord transition, and thus covers only the first dozen years of his career. It seems somewhat premature to examine his output disc by disc when he’s still so prolific—there were two albums in 2003 alone. But there are obvious highlights one can point to. In general, I prefer the more recent offerings on Concord to the earlier releases from the WEA group.
Of his more recent collections of slow, romantic treatments of classic love songs, Michael Feinstein with the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra is the most successful. It was recorded in early 2001 but anticipates the kind of reaffirmation of traditional values—not to mention an outreach to America’s reliable allies in the Middle East—that everybody would be doing immediately after 9/11. Whereas he often celebrates neglected tunesmiths, the Israeli Philharmonic set features some of the most classic of all standards: “Laura,” “Stormy Weather,” and “Love Is Here to Stay.” The only connecting link between the twelve tunes is that they’re all the work of Jewish Americans (no Harry Warren or Duke Ellington here). Along with Berlin and Gershwin, he sings Jerry Herman’s “I Won’t Send Roses” (from Mack and Mabel), and proves that, with this song, perhaps Mr. Herman’s finest work, Herman does indeed deserve to be ranked alongside the canonical songwriters.
The later albums show Feinstein with an increasing confidence in singing at faster tempos. Without trying to be Ella Fitzgerald he’s grown more comfortable at jazz tempos and in jazz settings, abetted by jazz solos and obbligatos—“I’ve Never Been in Love Before” is a strong example of this. That cut can be found on Romance on Film, Romance on Broadway, a very solid, workmanlike two-disc set from 2000. Feinstein employs fast tempos in the Broadway-cabaret tradition, which is normally reserved for Noel Coward-style patter songs (or Cole Porter list songs)—here, rhythm is an integral element of comedy, and makes all punch lines possible. “The Mating Season” on the Livingston and Evans Songbook is one of his most appealing faster numbers: He certainly knows how to be funny in tempo.
Livingston and Evans represents a model of how good these scholarly projects can be. One of the main risks of cabaret is that it takes the concept of context too far, as if it were more important to talk about the music than to sing it; as if the performers identify less with Bobby Short than with Jonathan Schwartz. But Feinstein has mastered the knack of making his scholarship accessible to the majority of people who hear him, who probably know that Ira Gershwin was not George Gershwin’s “lovely wife” but in all likelihood have never heard “In the Mandarin’s Orchid Garden.” When Feinstein sings the verse to “Laura” or an early prototype of the lyric to “Long Ago and Far Away” no one feels left out, or that he’s going over anyone’s head. At the same time, he makes his point—that writers like Herman and the Livingston-Evans team are among the top songwriters, whose work deserves to be kept alive, preserved, and heard.
One obvious place for Feinstein to go has been as a presenter of other talent; Feinery Records, his imprint label at Concord Records, features other singers, such B.J. Ward Sings Marshall Barer. In 1999, the Regency Hotel opened a cabaret room named Feinstein’s at the Regency—and it must be a source of major satisfaction to him that Feinstein’s was the final club that Rosemary Clooney played in New York. He doesn’t own it or manage it, but he appears there several times a year (usually in September, June, and at the beginning and end of each season, as well as a holiday show) and gives his seal of approval to everyone who performs there. In addition, he produces a series of four somewhat-scholarly songwriter-driven concerts each year at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel space (mounted in conjunction with ASCAP), which features other performers, as well as a big one-man show at Carnegie’s main space every year or so. As if that wasn’t enough, he played in a two-person Broadway show in the spring of 2010 with Dame Edna (set to play London and Australia), and he has announced an ongoing radio series and a three-part documentary on PBS (scheduled for the fall of 2010) on the history of the American popular song. In early 2010, it was announced that Feinstein would also be producing and starring in a series of concerts for Jazz at Lincoln Center. The project with Lincoln Center is an appropriate one, since Feinstein occupies a position analogous to the role of Wynton Marsalis in the jazz world. He has even founded the Michael Feinstein Foundation, devoted to the preservation and future of classic American popular music (and, in the interest of full disclosure, it’s actually the recipient of the Herb and Will Friedwald Collection of several thousand vocal and pop LPs). In general, it seems that if the city of New York ever brings back the dreaded New York City Cabaret Identification Card law, in which singers and musicians were, in essence, licensed and approved by the government, that Feinstein would very likely be the guy issuing the cabaret cards. He has become the spokesmodel for the whole of the songbook.
Not that he takes that position for granted—he continues to find new things to do with the great songs, new angles, new approaches. His most recent album as of this writing is The Sinatra Project, released in late 2008. Where a lot of so-called “tribute” albums are actually rip-offs, or mere imitations, Feinstein’s Sinatra set resonates as the work of one diehard Sinatra junkie for the express benefit of the rest of us diehard Sinatra junkies, a master’s thesis in more tangibly enjoyable form. He looks at songs written for Sinatra that he never actually sang, like “The Same Hello, the Same Goodbye,” and he considers different aspects of the Sinatra legacy. The singer and the highly creative arranger-conductor Bill Elliott also explore the lesser-traveled but no less brilliant corners of the Sinatra canon, sort of like an alternate universe in a science-fiction movie: What if, they postulate, Sinatra had done “Exactly Like You” with Billy May circa 1957, and thus they dress up that venerable standard with slurping saxophones that are very warm for May. Likewise, they come up with a treatment of “Begin the Beguine” that suggests the way Nelson Riddle would have arranged it using the “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” template—the resultant chartis a Cole Porter fantasia that could be titled either “Begin the Skin” or “I’ve Got You Under My Beguine,” incorporating Riddle’s signature baritone sax and trombone vamps and flute filigrees. Feinstein isn’t afraid of the faster numbers, although that isn’t his specialty; he works hard to do justice to Sinatra’s effortless rhythmic style (and certainly doesn’t embarrass himself). Still, obviously he’s much more comfortable showcasing his trademark intimacy with his own piano on “The Same Hello, the Same Goodbye,” an almost frighteningly autobiographical ballad written for the aging Blue Eyes by Alan and Marilyn Bergman.
Every time pundits advocate moving beyond the Great American Songbook, they inevitably employ the standard argument line, “How many more versions of ‘My Funny Valentine’ do we need?” In the light of Michael Feinstein’s career, the question is immaterial. Given his brave exploration of the further recesses of the songbook, he continues to do things that no one else is doing; Michael Feinstein is as worthy an avant-gardist as American music currently has.
Writing about Eric Comstock poses a particular problem. While I consider myself a friend of Feinstein and Haran, Eric is the only person in the book whose wedding I attended (believe it or not, I actually played “Long Before I Knew You” on a C-melody saxophone during the reception), and he’s the only person in this book who would possibly lend me money should I ever need it.
So, as I say, Eric poses a unique problem. Even though he hasn’t recorded prolifically enough, he has certainly achieved enough of a career to warrant inclusion in any survey of contemporary artists who contribute to our enjoyment of the Great American Songbook. (I think enough experts on the subject, such as Gary Giddins, Rex Reed, Stephen Holden, and Jonathan Schwartz, who rarely agree with one another, would give me a consensus on that one.) But at the same time, because he’s been so close a friend for twenty-five years, writing about him means risking a conflict of interest. My solution has been to quote from liner notes I wrote for Eric’s first album, the 1997 Young Man of Manhattan. I had the same problem then, and I dealt with it by offering what I hoped was an entertaining description of Eric Comstock at work.
Incident number one: Last night we were going to hear Eric at the Supper Club (Midtown’s favorite home of the five-dollar Coke), when a novice and newcomer to the group asked no one in particular just who exactly was this Eric Comstock. The woman sitting next to me pipes up, “Oh he’s mahvelous, he’s a little like Noel Coward or Bobby Short.” By this she meant that Mr. Comstock was a very sophisticated entertainer indeed, you know. And he certainly is, but—buttinski that I am—I had to add my own two cents. “Coward and Short, yes but he’s also like Nat Cole. Eric is much enamored of that certain kind of harmony line that’s strictly from the early King Cole Trio sides, hey.” “True, true,” said a face for which I could not supply a name at a neighboring table, “but don’t forget Fred Astaire. Not only does he know every song Astaire ever introduced, but when it’s appropriate he favors those clipped, staccato lines so reminiscent of Astaire’s own singing.” “Ah,” chimed in a stranger from across a crowded room, “leave us not neglect Melvin.” “Melvin?” I stammered, sounding for all the world like Jerry Lewis. “Yes,” answered the stranger. “How can you miss it? Those Tormé-style medleys, piling up song after song in such a witty and musically sound fashion.” “Au contraire,” spoke up a decidedly jejune Kelsey Grammer look-alike ambling through the doorway, “I think that the great influence on Eric is the late Charles DeForest—he has that directness and sincerity that was Charles’s exclusive province.” “If I may just interject a notion at this juncture,” interjected a thin drone with stringy hair and glasses escorting an underage Asian lass, “Eric’s great strength is his sense of humor. Can’t you hear it in ‘A Rainy Day’? Obviously, he has carefully studied the canonical works of the legendary Shecky Greene.” By now, even the wait staff wanted a piece of this action: “Bobby Darin!” shouted one waitress, while Raoul, our busboy, insistently offered, “Charles Trenet!”
Wondering how it was that everybody in the club talked like a critic, it gradually dawned on me how remarkable Eric’s accomplishment is. If he had done nothing but synthesize those myriad and diverse influences into a cohesive whole, that would be accomplishment enough. But Eric has forged a piano and voice style that not only draws on the strengths of his predecessors, but is a thing of beauty unto itself. And fun. Did I forget to mention fun?
Incident number two: When I introduce someone to Eric’s work, our point of reference pivots on the tastes of the inductee. If my friend is a Sinatra fan, for instance, I describe Eric as the sole pianist-singer in captivity who does “Not as a Stranger,” which might be described as a substandard nonstandard by the short-lived team of Jimmy Van Heusen and lyricist Buddy Kaye. As inferior as the song is, Sinatra and Riddle elevated it into something wonderful in 1955, and Eric also made it memorable in his own way in a live performance forty years later, simply by shaking his head on the word “not.”
If my friend happens to like Astaire (and who doesn’t?), I describe Eric as the only person besides myself who figured out that the lyricist who wrote the most texts for Astaire (aside from Irving Berlin) was, surprisingly, Johnny Mercer. Then Eric will indulge us in a medley of Mercer-Astaire songs, and it becomes a challenge for me to anticipate what the next one will be before he gets to it. If my friend likes show tunes, then he really will be in seventh heaven, because there’s no one who knows more great songs (I’m a sucker for any lyric that can rhyme “Jack the Ripper” with “Yom Kippur”) from more forgotten shows, playing them with such endearing elegance and energy that it makes you question their obscurity.
Curriculum vitae: I confess I had the inside track on Eric, having first heard him in the very early eighties (he doesn’t like me telling people that he’s actually half a year older than I am), but it’s hard to think of a major Manhattan room that Comstock hasn’t played—even including a few that don’t have pianos. He’s been at the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room, the Supper Club, “21,” and Maxim’s (not to mention Danny’s Skylight Room, Five and Ten, the Townhouse, and many more that, having run out of room, we shan’t mention). He’s also done concerts in New York, like 1996’s Tribute to Billy Strayhorn and the 2005 Harold Arlen Centennial show at Carnegie Hall, and is a regular participant in Donald Smith’s Town Hall cabaret series. Comstock is also a true citizen of the world musically, basing his career in New York (logging lots of time at the Maidstone Arms and Starr Boggs in the Hamptons) and having played everywhere from Chicago (Toulouse on the Park), San Francisco (the Plush Room), and Los Angeles (the Gardenia) to Vietnam, and all points in between. He also led a full band of his own on an extended tour for the Peter Duchin Organization, a shipboard ensemble that I christened “King Comstock and His Dusky Stevedores.”
And foidermore: It’s easy to see that Eric is a Comstock lode of valuable scholarship on the subject of the great songs. Philip Elwood of the San Francisco Examiner was speaking for all of us when he described him as a “walking encyclopedia of show songs.” But that’s only the beginning. The same term has also been applied to know-it-all types like Jonathan Schwartz (and your humble servant). Yet all of us nerdy types, who know all the words and none of the music, would do well to eat those words in the company of Comstock. It’s not enough to know every song ever written, from “Miss Otis Regrets” to “Pistol Packin’ Mama” (come to think of it, they’re both arias of femme fatales who come to rather violent ends). Nor is it enough to be able to sing and play them. But Eric has the apparent ability to make any tune sound good. Far from sounding scholarly, he stresses the bundle of joy that the Great American Songbook is—this isn’t some kind of music museum, but an art form that’s fresh and vital. And fun. Did I forget to mention fun?
Comstock is another artist who, unfortunately, got caught up in the downturn of the CD business: After twenty-five years, he’s only had the chance to record a fraction of his repertoire, on Young Man of Manhattan (1997), All Hart: Songs of Lorenz Hart (2000), and No One Knows (2004), the last representing his jazziest effort. Yet he continues to appear in virtually every room in the city; two of his revues, Our Sinatra and Made for the Movies, were launched at the Algonquin, and a third, Singing Astaire, at Birdland. His is the most conversational style of the four cabarateurs listed, with the singing voice closest to his speaking voice, the one who communicates the most directly.
In addition to the upscale rooms, Comstock was a regular for over a dozen years at the late and lamented Danny’s Skylight Room, which was a New York cabaret institution, presenting the ridiculous and the sublime, the good, the bad, and the ugly, from 1985 to 2006. Eric and his wife, Barbara Fasano (who wed in 2004), may be the only heterosexual married couple who met there. They gave one of their most memorable performances ever in the club’s final weeks in December 2006, showing why they’re one of the top teams in contemporary cabaret. (More recently, they’ve been fixtures at the Metropolitan Room.)
Mrs. Comstock is a charismatic stylist who effectively channels the living spirits of the divas Lena Horne and Barbra Streisand. Accordingly, her 2006 Written in the Stars is a collection of songs by Harold Arlen, who was closely associated with both divas. Yet her standout number at Danny’s was a song recorded by neither: Kurt Weill’s “It Never Was You,” which she made seem urgent and important while yet at the same time keeping the pace unhurried—as if she were so sure she would find what she was looking for that she wasn’t in a rush to get there.
At Danny’s, Comstock’s climactic song was one of his all-time perennials. “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” is one he’s been doing since the earliest days of his career, though he sings it now with greater depth and understanding than a younger man could manage. Eric Maschwitz’s lyric describes how time seems to stand still for lovers, so much so that a tiny country bird can be heard chirping amid a bustling metropolis. Comstock sings it slowly and tenderly, demonstrating an absolute belief in the idea that the state of being in love is the equivalent of being raised to an exalted plane, where you make yourself at once vulnerable and invincible. I know, ’cause I was there.
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Closing paragraphs are generally for drawing tidy conclusions, yet it’s just occurred to me that after examining a handful of artists who can be considered the crème de la crème of contemporary cabaret, we’re no closer to coming up with a working definition of the genre than we were at the beginning. In their classic Broadway musical, John Kander and Fred Ebb mused that “life is a cabaret.” Could be, old chum. But to the millions—well, the dozens anyway—who make cabaret a part of their daily existence, it’s more like the other way around.