Bobby SHORT (Jazz Hot 637)

Interview by Josef Woodard

In 2005, the musical chair long occupied by the unique and tireless pianist-singer Bobby Short was emptied, when he died of leukemia at age 80. The celebrated cabaret-jazz musician had ended his 35-year “regular job” at the Café Carlyle the year before, well after most have yielded to the temptation of retirement or an easy-going autumnal life. Even now, though, Short’s absence can be felt in Manhattan, where he was a fixture for so long.
For many years, when a tourist in New York did as the tourists - and other music lovers - did, often they would swing by Café Carlyle and check out Short, one of the city’s institutions. It’s a place he knew especially well, having gigged there since 1968. In a music business, indeed a world, all about flux, Short came to represent a certain unwavering solidity, which also had to do with the timelessness of his repertoire and, of course, the burnished sophistication of his presentation.
In terms of his place in jazz, Short was also a regal member of the elite musical scene in which suave vocalizing matched to a clean, articulate and swinging approach to the piano. In other words, he brought jazz sensibilities to a realm where jazz wasn’t necessarily the first language of an audience. But they got it, slipped into their musical cocktail without them noticing. In that way, Short was an impressive ambassador for jazz, even though he had dual citizenship in the world of cabaret and old school nightclub chic.
With a resume extending back to the 40s, Short’s link to the material he sang - Cole Porter, Rogers and Hart, Duke Ellington - was a direct one. He was born in Danville, Illinois in 1926, and was already working in the regions of jazz and vaudeville by the time he was 12. Like Nat King Cole, whose smooth, subtle style and timbre his voice resembled, Short developed twin talents for economical yet swinging piano playing and singing of unruffled elegance. He worked nightclubs for decades, and made appearances with orchestras and in several White House regimes (though neither of the Bush White Houses).
All that time, Short worked avidly in the area between, or straddling, cabaret and jazz. Fans have come from both camps. But lest he be typecast as a singer who just happens to play piano, his final album, the 2000 date entitled simply Piano (Surrounded By), offered a largely instrumental foray. Despite its declarative simplicity of its title, the album finds him teamed up with a supple rhythm section of bassist Frank Tate and drummer Klaus Suonsaari, with tasty cameos by the fine guitarist Howard Alden and trumpeter John Eckert. At the warm center of the music, including generous doses of Ellingtonia and other Great American Songbook entries, is Short’s unassuming focus as a player. In retrospect, the album was an impressive portrait and a swan song for the jazz man who would be king of cabaret.
Short, still very much engaged in his musical work and aware of his “veteran” status, gave an interview in 2002. At the time, he was about to embark on one of his rare musical trips “out of town” (in the sense that for diehard New Yorkers, everywhere else is “out of town”). In our conversation, it quickly became apparent that the charm and intelligence that made Short a musical institution were fully intact.


Jazz Hot : How do you like the road life?
Bobby Short : I don’t like the road life, particularly. I suppose if I were a big star, making thousands and thousands of dollars, it might be different. I just saw a full-page ad for Diana Krall the other day and her road schedule is something to marvel at. Of course, she’s playing very large venues and making lots of money. If I had to do that, I think I could manage that.
But going on the road has its difficulties. There are matters of practicalities, such as clean clothes and getting enough sleep and watching your diet. All those things are very important. So it’s not agreeable, unless you’ve got lots of people around you to keep you in shape.

You’ve been at the Carlyle since 1968. That’s got to be some kind of a record.
It is a record, I think. Nobody else has been enslaved quite that long (laughs).

Enslaved, or liberated?
I don’t know. As an entertainer lives such a precarious life, and I’ve been able to be steadily employed for all these years, so I should thank my lucky stars.

It’s advantageous in professional terms, but do you also view it as having a regular workshop situation?
Well, it becomes a work place. It is that. No matter how I try to justify it or disguise it, it is a workplace. I am such a perfectionist that I manage to make every single performance a challenge.
So it’s never just a gig?
No, never just a gig. It’s always a challenge.

You do have a knack for miraculously bridging the worlds of cabaret and jazz. Not many performers have done that as seamlessly as you have.
I think cabaret is very dependent upon jazz. Look back on cabaret singers who have been successful, and many of them have had great jazz roots. Cabaret is meant to be kind of vulgar, as opposed to the other kind of music, the other venues. Jazz is also meant to be vulgar. The two kind of go hand in hand, don’t they?

A bond of vulgarity?
I think so. I remember when (operatic soprano and Wagner specialist) Helen Traubel sang at the Copacabana here in New York. Well, that was some kind of fluke, I suppose. There are some opera singers who sang in Las Vegas. But that was an unusual case. It was not a true cabaret performer singing in a cabaret setting.

We could throw Kurt Weill in there somewhere, in terms of straddling the worlds.
Yes, he did write for cabaret. Many of his early pieces, particularly the early ones performed in Germany, were little cabaret pieces. There was a word for that… it was cabaret, back in the days when cabaret was full of social commentary. Today, it’s not, but in those days, it was meant to make people sit up and think.

Considering your early days in music, were you equally drawn to influences from those different traditions, of show tunes, per se, and jazz?
Growing up in Illinois, there was not much of a chance to hear show tunes unless we heard the hit songs from shows. We didn’t know them as hit songs from shows, but just as hit songs. I wasn’t aware of the Broadway stage, really and truly, until I finished high school and went to Chicago. My very first show I heard was Porgy and Bess, in 1942. A whole new world opened for me. The second show I saw was Lady in the Dark, which was, of course, Kurt Weill.

So those led you naturally into pursuing the show tune tradition?
They led me into an inquiry into most of the songs I now know.

Were you simultaneously working on your piano playing and singing?
I performed, you see, since I was a child. I’ve always played the piano and always sung. The two went together. It was not considered to be extraordinary for me to be a child performer. There were many child performers back in those days.

Did you sense that something was happening in jazz culture around the time in the ‘50s, when Nat King Cole became a hit and yet was putting jazz elements into the air?
Yes, he was, but he was always a hit. I knew about Nat Cole when he was just doing air checks. I was in high school and my big brothers would say `oh, this Nat King Cole Trio is wonderful, listen to the way he plays the piano.’ He was not at all a star in those days. We heard him on the air, as air checks.
And then, I worked with Nat King Cole, for a few weeks in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1943. Nat had a cult following of young jazz people, performers and musicians, and a lot of young ladies who were enamored of him, naturally. He was a very sexy performer, you know. When he really became a household name, jazz had been put in the background. There are people who don’t even know that Nat played the piano.

That’s ironic.
It’s a matter of being commercial, of making a career.

Well, you obviously take piano playing seriously.
Well, I was a single for an awfully long time. I worked at the piano and sang, and was alone. I didn’t acquire two sidemen until 1954. And then I acquired a band about five years ago.

Your album Piano, is wonderful. Tell me about the concept and the title, or is this self-evident?
I think it’s self-evident. We had a very good friend who admires my piano playing, and says `I think it would be wonderful if you did an album and just played the piano.’ When you consider making a record, you have to consider all the facets of it. A very important facet is: how much money will it make for the producer (laughs). There are not that many successful jazz piano records out there these days.

Who are some of the pianists out at the moment that you like?
I’m crazy about Billy Charlap, and I think Fred Hersch is a marvel. Of course, when you go back to the old fellows, I’m fond of George Shearing and Dick Hyman. These are old favorites. Marian (McPartland) is a good friend of mine. Barbara Carroll and I are great buddies. I admire her enormously. Then, of course, I go all the way back to Ellington and Tatum and Waller.

Bill Charlap told me that he doesn’t believe in the jazz idea of playing the melody and then beginning the improvisation, returning to the melody at the end. He believes that every time you play a melody, it should be with spirit and intention - and improvisation.
Well, yes. Those are his rules and they’ve stood by him very well. That’s what makes him seem so alive and so interesting.

You are similarly melody-driven, wouldn’t you say?
I do respect it entirely. I can’t tell you how much I respect the melody. As a singer, I’m singularly involved with the melody. I think the composer had something in mind when he wrote the song. I can’t tell you how many jazz musicians today could not, if you asked them, play the lead line for “How High the Moon.” They know the changes, but they don’t know the melody. Interesting, isn’t it? They cannot play the melody.
Once in a while, you’ll hear them play a standard like the Cole Porter song, “All of You.” Well, I was around when that song first came out and I know how the melody was written. You’ll hear young jazzies playing it and they have no idea. They know all the changes, but they couldn’t play the melody to save their souls.

Some Broadway composers have trouble with jazz for that reason, don’t they? Too many liberties taken?
Many of them have been more restrictive than others. Dick (Richard) Rogers had no use for anybody who sang his songs with the least change. He could not put up with it. He was quite a stringent taskmaster.

I know that you have frequented the White House over the years, for four different presidents. Which was the biggest music-lover?
Biggest music lover? I don’t know. It’s interesting: I think I had the best all-around reception with Nancy Reagan. She came out of the theater and was a singer, so she knew songs. No other first lady could discuss that as well as she could, with me, that is. I don’t know what the musical taste of the Bushes happens to be. I know that Bill Clinton, who I see from time to time, has a pretty good idea. He plays the saxophone. So I wouldn’t write him off. I think he has pretty decent taste.
But you know, we have these people running the country now who were rock and roll fans. They grew up that way and that’s all there is to it.

Country western may be the reigning flavor in the current White House.
Yes, I’m afraid you’re right about that.

Do you feel like you represent a certain artistic viewpoint?
I don’t know. Artistic viewpoint? That sounds fancy. I just do what I do.

I feel that you do represent something, maybe a certain elegance of expression that’s rare to find.
Perhaps that’s true. I think I represent a deep sense of respect for what I’m doing, and also for the audience I’m doing it for. And also for myself.

As you say, each gig is a new challenge?
Each show. That’s what eventually wears you down. It’s the most masochistic thing you can possibly imagine. Performers are, at once, repelled and attracted by what they do for a living. They are. It’s absolutely true.

What you’re talking about is what it means to make art.
Yep. It’s very, very hard.

But you make it look easy.
That’s what art is about, also. The performing arts are particularly that. You can look at a sculpture and understand that it took a long time and a lot of patience to do that. But a live performer in front of an audience must by seamless. To achieve that takes a lot of hard work.