[Ed. note: This post was originally published on October 23, 2015]
How’s this for a “What are the odds?” moment with Mark Murphy? On a very hot Sunday afternoon in July 2004, my friend Steven Sussman and I were driving to New York to hear Lee Konitz. In addition to his career as a radiologist at Hartford Hospital and his work as a photographer (his picture of Aaron Diehl is featured in the November Downbeat), Steve produces the annual Jazz for Juvenile Diabetes benefit in West Hartford. As we drove to the city, we discussed prospective artists for the following winter’s concert. Mark Murphy was near the top of the list, and we listened to him on the ride. When we got to Manhattan, still with Mark on the CD player, we turned off the West Side Highway at 28th Street and proceeded to a red light at Ninth Ave. Much to our amazement, there, standing on the corner, was Mark, dressed in a long black leather coat and black leather pants, the attire on this 90+ degree day only of a preternatural cool cat. We got his attention as we pulled to the curb and lowered the windows, exclaiming how we’d been listening to him for the previous two hours. He was only moderately impressed by our sudden appearance and show of excitement, but warmed to the prospect of a gig and told us he’d worked a private event the night before and was waiting for a car service to drive him back home to Jersey.
Mark was a big hit at the benefit the following January, where I introduced him and couldn’t resist telling the Hartford audience of our fortuitous encounter. Up close that weekend, I experienced Murphy as a man who seemed nothing less than himself at every moment. Will Friedwald said much the same about his artistry. “There’s nothing the least bit forced or artificial about anything he does,” he wrote in Jazz Singing: America’s Great Voices From Bessie Smith to Bebop and Beyond. It didn’t take more than one of his shows or albums to make one appreciate what Friedwald called the “smorgasbord of techniques” that enabled Murphy to synthesize a wide array of genres into one of the most original conceptions in modern music.
Born March 14, 1932 to a musical family in Syracuse (one with deep roots in my hometown of Worcester, which Chet Williamson reports on here), he seemed to dig and draw on everything he’d ever heard, from opera to show tunes; classic blues to r&b; scat to vocalese; bebop to bossa nova to the Beats. His Bop for Kerouac is one of the most celebrated of the many superb albums he made for Muse in the seventies and eighties. Here in 1981, the year of Bop for Kerouac’s release, Mark sings the Art Farmer-Annie Ross classic that references an On the Road icon, Wardell Gray. Accompanists include Bill Mays at the piano, Steve LaSpina on bass, and Chiz Harris on drums.
Murphy’s catalog of recordings numbered over forty albums nicely balanced between popular standards and his celebratory takes on jazz originals. These ranged from insouciant takes on “Along Came Betty,” “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens,” and “Doxy,” to heartfelt treatments of “Naima,” “Blood Count,” and “Waltz for Debby.” His extensive and stylistically wide-ranging output for Muse included a pair of tributes to Nat King Cole, the aforementioned Kerouac album as well as Kerouac, Then and Now, a bossa nova date, and One for Junior, a lively meeting with his friend and fellow jazz avatar Sheila Jordan. Few have scaled the high wire of vocal improvisation as daringly and musically as Sheila and Mark.
For this article, Sheila said, “Mark Murphy was like a brother to me. We date back 50 years and he will always be in my heart and soul.” The two first met in the early sixties when he showed up to hear her at the Page Three in New York. In Ellen Johnson’s recently published biography, Jazz Child: A Portrait of Sheila Jordan, the singer recalls, “Everyone knew him and loved him. God was he handsome! I’ll never forget when he got up on the little bandstand and sang “Willow Weep for Me.” I was so impressed with his singing and I thought he really had heart and sang from his soul. There weren’t many male jazz singers around at the time, at least not the way Mark sang.”
Mark’s early sixties Riverside albums, Rah! and That’s How I Love the Blues, straight-ahead dates featuring arrangements by Ernie Wilkins and Al Cohn, were my introduction to him. He called the latter effort with Cohn a personal favorite. Murphy was initially miscast as a teen idol on his mid-fifties Decca debut, but he got on the right track with Capitol, including the masterful This Could Be the Start of Something Big. The 1959 session was built around arrangements by Bill Holman and the cream of the crop of West Coast players.
Speaking of favorites, Mark says “Detour Ahead” is his number one song in this performance with Marian McPartland from Piano Jazz. “It gives you everything you want from a song,” he says. “It’s a very harmonically evocative song. You can just actually play the changes as written. Or you can do a Shirley Horn/Herbie Hancock re-harmonization of it…Anything you play to it sounds groovy. I think that proves a great song.”
Murphy live was even better than on record, for in-person one got the bonus of his stream-of-consciousness reflections on songwriters and musicians; the New York skyline; the mythical Green Dolphin Street hidden in the city’s canyons; memories of the ones who got away. As Friedwald observed, “[He lets] his spiels and inter-song patter seamlessly meander into the music, combining singing with recitations of text and poetry.”
I saw Mark about a half-dozen times, most memorably at Iridium and Joe’s Pub, New York venues that drew his most devoted disciples. Murphy’s Worcester ancestors were active in the establishment of the Bethel Baptist Church, and there was a religious aura to the way he presided over the faithful gathered before him. Like the man himself, Mark recognized us as converts to the music, bonded by the experience we’d all known of a spiritual desert he called “before jazz.”
I’ll long remember the sense of wonder and amusement I experienced sitting in a crowd that he addressed as old friends. It was like eavesdropping on a personal conversation, but after a song or two I experienced the magical feeling that he was speaking to me too. The would-be New Yorker in me will continually go to Mark’s December 2001 album, Lucky To By Me, for its opening On the Town medley of “Lonely Town,” “Lucky to Be Me,” and “Some Other Time.” In a modest but deliberate way, it was Mark’s way of reclaiming the city from the 9/11 terrorists. As he told annotator James Isaacs, “I wanted to sing ‘New York, New York’ [from “Lonely Town”] first because right away those words trumpet New York and New Yorkers’ courage.”
New York appearances brought out other singers, contemporaries like Jordan, proteges like Giacomo Gates (who’ll no doubt pay homage to Mark at his Northampton Jazz Workshop appearance on October 27). Mark was beloved for encouraging singers who sought his guidance, and with his death this week, jazzlists are filling with stories of his patience and generosity. He lived for the music, and recognized the same drive in others. Gates says, “He left a terrific catalog. I feel lucky to have been a fan. Later, to meet him, to do gigs with him, to hang and be friends. Mark was a truly unique and great talent. He’ll be missed by many.”
A novel way of gauging the range of Mark’s company and influence is in the artists who appear in the right hand column of his YouTube clips. “Bebop Lives” triggered Jordan, Gates, Kurt Elling, and Miles Davis; “Goin’ to Chicago” brought forth Carmen McRae, Sonny Criss, and Kevin Mahogany; “Stolen Moments,” the Oliver Nelson classic for which Mark composed a lyric worthy of being added to the copyright (but hasn’t yet), brought up Eddie Jefferson, Al Jarreau and Betty Carter; and Jimmy Rowles’ haunting ballad, “The Peacocks,” brought on a wave of songs by the introspective British singer-songwriter Nick Drake.
Mark Murphy died on October 22 at the age of 83. Here he is on the March 16, 1958, edition of The Steve Allen Show, singing the signature song of the great Lady who, more than any other, established the profoundly personal style of jazz singing that Murphy honored and exemplified for six decades. Thank you, Mark.
