Birthday Girl: The Miraculous Miss Mercer

As part of my ongoing cheer-up efforts - and in recognition of her 118th birthday - herewith a half-hour with Miss Mabel Mercer.

Birthday Girl: Infinite Joy

Today marks the 113th anniversary of a singularly good thing: the birth of Miss Mabel Mercer, the Queen of Cabaret.  I rarely run sound-only videos, but the combination of this roguish snap and her just about perfect go at Cole Porter's "Experiment" seems a lovely way to mark the day.  The lyric is one of those deceptively simple things that Porter makes seem so easy, while Miss Mercer turns into it as good a credo to live by as any I can think of:

Be curious, though interfering friends may frown;
Get furious at each attempt to hold you down.
If this advice you only employ
The future can offer you infinite joy
And merriment. Experiment -
And you'll see.

Mabel Mercer, did for 84 years.  I was lucky enough to hear her once, and in some ways things never again were the same.  For which I am eternally grateful...

That Combination So Rare

I've only just seen, in the New York Times, the sad news that we've lost Donald Smith, the impresario extraordinaire who did an incredible amount over the past three decades to keep the sputtering flame of cabaret alive.  In his honor, then, let's spend a moment with the woman who inspired him, the immortal Mabel Mercer.

What, exactly, this slippery art form is, remains the subject of much debate.  To purists, it's the kind of intimate, sophisticated singing Mercer personified, one in which interpretation trumps voice - Mercer's style is called, after all, parlando; in France, she would be called a diseuse.  To too many today, it's a kind of over-amplified karaoke, tipsy people singing "Memory" from Cats too late at night.  I think it's just honest singing, to an attentive audience, preferably with cocktails.

If Smith didn't exactly win the battle to keep the cabaret flame bright (the obituary carries another sad piece of, for me, news - that not only is the Algonquin closed, but when it reopens, it will be sans Oak Room), he did start people thinking seriously about this kind of music.  Now it's often called the American Songbook, and if the Oak Room has now gone the way of the Ballroom, Reno Sweeney's, the Rainbow Room, the Ruban Bleu, the Five Oaks, and so many other rooms, we still do have singers like Michael Feinstein, Audra McDonald, Betty Buckley, Andrea Marcovicci, Karen Akers, and many more, some of whom still spend at least some of their performing time in small rooms filled with transfixed listeners.

When it comes to cabaret, I should mention, I got lucky:  my initiation came from Mercer herself, when she was singing in Philadelphia at a place called Café Society, in 1977.  I wish I could say I remember every moment of the performance, which in memory was a brunch concert (something hard to imagine with this most late-night of singers, but I suppose possible).  I don't.  I was just a teenager dragged along to something by his parents, to something that was meant to make Grandmother Muscato, in failing health, happy.  That it did; for me it opened up a world.  My memory isn't the songs, but rather that regal figure, in her armchair, and the incredible warmth that washed across the room when she performed.  I didn't know anything about Cole Porter, or Alec Wilder, or why this music made you feel so good, so much, but somehow, it clicked.  I've heard a lot of singers since, from the sublime (Miss Lee at the Ballroom; Miss Akers at the Rainbow Room) to the ridiculous (late nights at Marie's Crisis, anybody?), but Mercer set the standard.

Many thanks, then, to Donald Smith, for his lifetime in the service of night life.  The obituary does pass on one piece of good news: his great invention, the New York Cabaret Convention, looks set to continue, under the expert eye of the wonderful KT Sullivan.  With any luck at all, that means that there will be more teenagers pulled into the spell of cabaret - even if, for some of them, it does involve "Memory" from Cats...

Merely Mabel

Chez elle, Miss Janey is pondering who, exactly, might best deserve the to be considered The Voice of Rock 'n' Roll.

In my own preferred genre, Cabaret, while there are stars, legends, and heavenly creatures aplenty, there really is only one contender for top spot, a singer equally revered by crooners like Sinatra and art-song singers like Joan Morris and Dawn Upshaw (and pretty much everybody in between).

She, of course, was (is, and evermore shall be) Miss Mabel Mercer, the Empress of all Saloon Singers.

Regal in her stage presence - usually seated, always elegantly gowned, often draped in a shawl put to good use as her only prop - Mercer ruled the rarefied world of club singing with poise, grace, and a voice that was, by the end, a whisper of a soprano combined with the diction of an angel.

My favorite of her songs - and of her albums - sums her up just about perfectly.

With all due respect to mine and everybody's favorites (since I know that TJB is bound to bring up the also fabulous Miss Maye), when it comes to how sing the Great American Song: Mabel Mercer was more than Merely Marvelous. She is The Voice.

And - as is true of all Great Stars - my goodness, couldn't she just rock a turban?