BOBBY SHORT: Just In Time
Bobby Short’s centennial commenced this past September on his birthday (the 15th) and I missed it, at least the commencement itself, but I’m ready now to celebrate Bobby for the rest of his centennial year. We all should.
Five nights a week, two sets a night (originally three!), eight months a year (later cut back to six), for over 35 years, Bobby Short peerlessly sang and played piano at the Café Carlyle, a ‘swellegant saloon off the lobby of the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue at 76th Street (it’s still there, though much dimmed without him).
He was 10 years in, when I first caught him there in 1978. I was barely 21 and felt as though I’d been granted access to the most insider shindig in NYC, a Great American Songbook salon hosted by the finest cabaret performer of his generation, the absolute eminence of midnight in Manhattan.
Then I got to know him.
What a kick.
He really was a princely presence, even off the Carlyle stage. Bobby spoke with an airy nonchalance delivered from on high, his words slightly crooned with perfect enunciation, just as he sang, his intonation ever so stately, yet embracing. “Just a kid from the middle west,” he once murmured in my company, with a gleam in his eye that might have been a wink. This sent me scurrying (not Googling, not yet). I found a copy of BLACK AND WHITE BABY, his 1971 memoir of his early years in show business, and discovered that Bobby had indeed been born in Danville, Illinois, the ninth of ten children. Self-taught on the piano, he’d left home at 11 to sing and play for a living in dance halls, saloons, and what was left of vaudeville, working his way to Chicago and, of course, inevitably, New York, billed as “The Miniature King of Swing.”
Lorraine Gordon, the late-owner of the Village Vanguard, told me that sometime after she married her second husband, Max Gordon, founder of the Vanguard and The Blue Angel — then the chicest cabaret in Manhattan — Bobby Short became The Blue Angel’s lounge pianist, priming the patrons for the big show in the main room and serenading them after. No secret to those who were there, I guess, and Bobby later wrote about his time at The Blue Angel in his 1995 full-on autobiography, BOBBY SHORT: The Life and Times of a Saloon Singer, but it was fun learning this from Lorraine.
Bobby and I were supposed to meet in 1979. I was working on my first book, STEPPIN’ OUT: A Guide to Live Music in Manhattan (now long out-of-print, but I hope to reissue it digitally this year, stay tuned). Written in collaboration with my then-boss at Rolling Stone Magazine, Susanne Weil, whose idea the book was, STEPPIN’ OUT demanded we divvy up a city-full of music clubs (Lord, there were so many then), and step into every one, usually also interviewing owners and performers.
I got to cover the Carlyle, but Bobby had already taken off on his summer vacation; I wound up interviewing his sub for the summer, the smashing jazz pianist Marian McPartland (later of “Piano Jazz” on NPR), who was in-house on the keys at Bemelmans Bar next door but sidled over to the Café to cover for Bobby’s vacations.
Think about that for a moment.
It was Bobby who called me up some time thereafter. (Crazy.) Having heard that I was working on a biography of the great, forgotten, African American lyricist Andy Razaf (song partner to Fats Waller and Eubie Blake, among many others), Bobby kindly wanted to encourage me on in what he knew was a titanic undertaking. He also wanted to share that he had known Andy personally, out in Los Angeles, where Andy had resettled starting in 1948, and Bobby had sojourned, on and off, beginning around 1946, including a steady gig at L.A.’s coolest supper club, the Café Gala.
Bobby and I met for lunch at the Carlyle and I interviewed him for the book (BLACK AND BLUE: The Life and Lyrics of Andy Razaf, finally published in 1992). Before the end of our conclave, Bobby announced that he had decided his next record would be an all-Andy Razaf album. This came to pass in 1987 (time moved more slowly then), the superb GUESS WHO’S IN TOWN: Bobby Short Performs the Songs of Andy Razaf, for which I wrote extensive liner notes. Bobby then returned the favor by writing a sumptuous introduction to BLACK AND BLUE.
A captivating side note: The great (and also unfairly forgotten) arranger and vocal coach Phil Moore, whose Hollywood voice students included Lena Horne and Marilyn Monroe, among so many others, produced and orchestrated GUESS WHO’S IN TOWN brilliantly. Phil Moore had discovered Bobby at the Café Gala and then had guided Bobby’s early grownup career, as his manager. Phil Moore also lived across the street from Andy Razaf in L.A. When I finally moved into Andy’s home in 1982 to begin sifting through his papers (Andy had died in 1973), I attended a couple of musicale house parties at Phil Moore’s place, in the company of Andy’s widow, Alicia. Small (and miraculous) world.
On December 14, 1992 (two days before Andy Razaf’s 97th birthday) BLACK AND BLUE was released with a big splash of a book party at my midtown bookshop, Chartwell Booksellers. Bobby attended with Lena Horne on his arm. I kid you not. Just typing that sentence gives me chills. I got to meet one of my greatest musical idols and Ms. Horne, in return, made my night by telling me, while holding a brand-new copy of BLACK AND BLUE, that finally having a book about Andy Razaf — whom she too had known — was a highlight of her life. I signed her book but was so flabbergasted I completely forgot to ask her to sign one for me!
My favorite band, Vince Giordano and his Nighthawks, played the party. I asked Bobby (in advance) if he would get up to sing a few Razaf songs with the Nighthawks. Gladly, he replied, but in exchange I must make a donation to his charitable fund for erecting a statue of Duke Ellington at the junction of Fifth Avenue and 110th Street; gateway to Harlem. I, too, said yes gladly. The statue, to Bobby’s immense satisfaction, was unveiled there in 1997; the first Ellington statue anywhere in the United States.
Bobby Short had all sorts of triumphs in his long career beside his many nights at the Carlyle. He thrived in Chicago as a child performer, and he thrived in Paris in the 1950s. He played virtually every nightspot of consequence in New York City prior to landing at the Carlyle — a veritable metropolitan atlas of long-gone names and places, chic and otherwise. Everywhere he went, he absorbed the wisdom of live performance and the depths of the American Popular Song, which came to comprise his artistry. Bobby also expanded the American Popular Song canon to include the incomparable work of composers of color who had long been excluded from its pantheon. He sang the deep blues, he sang the ragtime songs of black vaudevillians, and, of course, he sang songs by the giants of jazz and Black Broadway, including Ellington, Waller, Blake and Andy Razaf. Bobby didn’t discriminate. He sang all of this right alongside Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Noel Coward, Rodgers and Hart — each of whom he devoted albums to that remain among the most definitive ever recorded. Always he sang with joy, with perception and wit, but never with inordinate reverence. These were eternally-alive, not dead songs-revived, for Bobby Short, and he shared them with a saucy, impudent spirit, a very personal down-home grit, and utter emotive mastery. Thankfully.