{"id":3932,"date":"2015-12-03T21:16:48","date_gmt":"2015-12-03T21:16:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=3932"},"modified":"2016-02-05T17:07:56","modified_gmt":"2016-02-05T17:07:56","slug":"jazz-singer-mark-murphy-1932-2015-the-next-sinatra-did-it-his-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=3932","title":{"rendered":"Jazz singer Mark Murphy (1932-2015), “The next Sinatra,” did it his way"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The late jazz vocalist Mark Murphy singing at the 1997 Chicago Jazz Festival, a performance he shared with Grammy-winning singer Kurt Elling, who was greatly influenced by Murphy. All photos by Kevin Lynch, except as noted.<\/em><\/p>\n

Call me crazy but I see a little of Crazy Horse in Mark Murphy, the magnificent and fearless jazz singer who died October 22 at 83, of complications of pneumonia. More specifically, I see Murphy in the somewhat quixotic Crazy Horse Memorial sculpture, which I was reminded of while searching for news about Murphy in\u00a0The New York Times. <\/em>This was May of last year, but I had inklings about Murphy’s death, as he’d been seriously\u00a0ill.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

At the time, I stumbled on an obit for 87-year-old Ruth Ziolkowski, who carried on her sculptor husband Korczak Ziolokowski’s dream. He had worked for years on his massive likeness of the great Lakota warrior Crazy Horse carved into the Black Hills of South Dakota.<\/p>\n

In a sense, Ruth succeeded, because The\u00a0Crazy Horse Memorial<\/a>\u00a0draws more than a million visitors a year, as is.\u00a0And yet, her husband ultimately hoped to carve a full figure of Crazy Horse on his horse, out of the rock, and to date all that is visible is the famous Lakota’s 90-foot-tall head, impressive as that is. 1<\/strong>
\nWith Murphy what counted was mainly his leonine head — what came out of his mouth from his brain, and his huge heart and soul.<\/p>\n

And yet so much of him, like the full Crazy Horse figure, remained underground — his proper role as a highly influential innovator, and arguably the greatest male jazz singer of his generation (and right there with the greatest females). I’ve found that his historical recognition appears under-served in light of his somewhat controversial life, talent, dedication and courage. Of course, there’s controversy with the\u00a0Lakota warrior because he defeated Gen. George Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn. Crazy Horse fought against the US government’s removal — and effective permanent internment — \u00a0of Native American tribes to reservations. The issue hangs on your opinion of who the bad guys were in that battle.<\/p>\n

And part of the craziness in Mark Murphy’s life was how far he stuck his neck out in the winds of derision — his artistic and personal risks. He isn’t unappreciated in the music business —\u00a0he earned six Grammy nominations for Best Jazz Vocal Performance. But he never won the award.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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As noted jazz singer Jackie Allen, a student of the art form, told me, “Murphy was being groomed to be the next Sinatra, but he was just too far out. And I’m sure his being gay didn’t help him.”<\/p>\n

So, part of being far out was coming out, as a gay man, very early in his career, which probably doomed his prospects as the next Sinatra, especially as old blue eyes had perpetuated the retro-straight-tough guy persona.<\/p>\n

So Murphy fought for gay male jazz singers and performers from being culturally exiled.
\nAlthough things have improved, jazz remains straight male-dominated and the same is true of jazz critics and historians. And I have to wonder if Murphy’s neglect among major jazz critics and historians has anything to do with his genetic persuasion (as research has shown about gayness).\u00a0Another of Murphy’s gay contemporaries, the exquisite singer-pianist Andy Bey, had a terrible time dealing with his sexual orientation\u00a0in his chosen career, something illuminated in a compelling PBS documentary film on him.<\/p>\n

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With Murphy, the inside story remains comparatively clouded. He\u00a0may epitomize the cognitive dissonance that exists between jazz singers and jazz musicians, as symbiotic as their relationship is. Singers often get their band mates their most consistent and best-paying gigs. Yet too often musicians (I risk a stereotype, I admit) complain of gigs with a “chick singer.” The implication is the singer’s presumed inability to convincingly negotiate complicated chord changes or to sing in an improvisational manner or to scat sing, or her burdening musicians with renditions of hoary and sentimental standards.<\/p>\n

Because male jazz singers are much rarer than female singers (an essay subject unto itself) this problematic relationship is less clearly articulated and understood, but it’s safe to think that a somewhat similar bandstand bias exists against the male singer (Murphy also played piano and sometimes did his own horn arrangements). What is striking and empirically evident is the lack of acknowledgment that Mark Murphy gets among jazz historians and critics who are assumed to be authoritative (see sidebar below, following footnotes). <\/strong>Today,\u00a0with society’s fast acceptance of gayness, Murphy’s under-acknowledged pioneer’s suffering again recalls forsaken Crazy Horse’s.<\/p>\n

But let’s reference a jazz singer’s opinion. Jackie Allen, once musically obsessed with Murphy, recorded a duet version of a\u00a0signature Murphy song: “The Bad and the Beautiful” with the late singer’s number one artistic acolyte, Grammy-winning singer Kurt Elling, on her 2003 album The Men in My Life<\/em>.<\/p>\n

“I’d never heard anyone else sing it \u2013 or anyone else who could sing it, because it spans a couple of octaves,” Allen wrote in her liner notes. “So it was something I always wanted to do.”<\/p>\n

So Murphy was “bad” as in problematic in some folks minds. But man, was he bad — and beautiful (as an artist and as a man, coming from this straight journalist’s judgement.)!<\/p>\n

Some people complained that Murphy sometimes over-dramatized. If this criticism derived at all from the homophobic bias against “drama queens,” it’s good to remember that singing is always partly music-making and partly acting. A happily married heterosexual friend of mine, Bill Camplin, who’s a brilliant jazz-inflected folk singer, calls himself a “drama queen.” And I’m glad, because a sense of drama is essential to his art, as it was to Murphy’s and any jazz singer’s.<\/p>\n

Murphy could go from deeply simmering dulcet tones to a soaring trumpet-strong cry with all too much ease for some, but he often carried a song to uncharted heights in the process.<\/p>\n

I think it’s a confusion or perhaps anti-gay bias that denies the artistic necessity to be honesty vulnerable and expressive with a man’s self.\u00a0Perhaps symptomatic of this is a comment that the highly estimable critic-historian Francis Davis made: “I thought it was amusing that Mark Murphy, a singer fans adore him for his alleged spontaneity, but whom I find unbearably ‘jazzy,’ did his numbers same way every time (during a 6-hour dress rehearsal).”\u00a02<\/strong><\/p>\n

I would suggest that, on this occasion, Murphy was playing it straight for the sake of the continuity of a rehearsal,<\/em>\u00a0which is about getting things down and together that performers deem necessary, before they take the risks of performance for an audience.<\/p>\n

For my money, Mark Murphy was more courageously improvisational than most jazz instrumentalists I’ve heard in a lifetime of listening and 35 years as a professional jazz journalist. Instrumentalists — in the protective perceptual bubble of pure music’s relative abstraction — are comparatively free of a\u00a0singer’s risk of an audience rejecting a daring interpretation of a lyric and melody, especially\u00a0familiar ones.<\/span><\/p>\n

I only saw Murphy perform live once, but unforgettably in 1997, at a side stage of the Chicago Jazz Festival with Kurt Elling and his trio in, I believe, the two singers’ first ever performance together. I suspect Murphy’s appearance came at the behest of Elling, the popular Grammy-winning Chicago singer who’s primary vocal influence is Murphy. The simpatico artistic and emotional bond between the two singers was astonishing, at times dazzling, and moving.\u00a03<\/strong><\/p>\n

As I hope the photos of that gig here show, Mark and Kurt (who’s married and straight) spent much of the set physically close to each other, glowing in mutual warmth, creativity and joy.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Yet amid\u00a0<\/strong>all their electric energy, Murphy wore a black Miles Davis T-shirt, and he embodied a sort of Prince of Darkness reincarnated, replete with world-weary eloquence and forsaken romanticism.<\/p>\n

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Internationally acclaimed jazz singer Kurt Elling (in blue shirt, both photos) shared a remarkably simpatico experience onstage with Mark Murphy, his greatest influence, at the 1997 Chicago Jazz Fest.<\/em><\/p>\n

Listen to Murphy’s live 1999 Vienna performance on the album\u00a0Bop for Miles<\/em>, which is often outrageous in its improv derring-do. Yet he sustains a superb voice and technical mastery of it, to make virtually all of this performance work beautifully. As the album’s annotator Bill Milkowski writes, on the evidence of this live performance, Murphy is “a grand high exalted mystic ruler of improvisation,” a gilded designation few instrumentalists get. I couldn’t agree more with Milkowski.<\/p>\n

Yes, I’ve heard Murphy with a mouthful of ham at times, and stumble in a few of his madcap scat sorties. But\u00a0I think good jazz singers\u00a0ought<\/em> to be guilty of both of those things at times, or they are probably not pushing the improvisational edge, with all the risk and significance that act might convey, not doing what we value them for doing.<\/p>\n

(Here Murphy sings the modern standard “Speak Low” in 1992. Notice his elastic sense of time, how he fully re-imagines the song, yet even his scatting is deep in the rhythmic pocket:)<\/p>\n