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.