What a terrific way to start the season! I thought things wouldn’t start cooking until the Cabaret Convention later this month, but Mary Cleere Haran’s new show at the Oak Room which opened September 8, is so virtually perfect, it sets the standard for all in its wake.
      A stunningly elegant performance, Crazy Rhythm: Manhattan in the Twenties is a sparkling, intelligent look at the music of 1920s New York. Although it features songs from Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, this show’s not a typical songbook revue. What makes it different is Haran—all charm and wit, she offers backstory that inspires. Take note, you aspiring divas and starry-eyed Dream Curlys.
     Like a favorite party guest who can always be counted on for bon mots timed just so, Haran’s got class and attitude in spades. And it shows in her clever patter. An erudite discussion of the era’s romantic and effervescent mood segues beautifully into gorgeously sung snapshots of Manhattan (I’ve never heard a lovelier version of Rodgers and Hart’s “Tree in the Park”). Her explanation of the decade’s what-the-hell morals is paired with Berlin’s sprightly “Pack Up Your Sins,” a wicked tune dedicated to all those “ex-Caths” in attendance. “They’ve got a couple of old reformers in heaven/Making them go to bed at eleven,” she croons with a sly grin. “Pack up your sins and go to the Devil/And you’ll never have to go to bed at all.”
     Other cabaret singers may offer snippets of information about the songs on their playlist (“and then he wrote…”), but Haran really knows what she’s talking about. She doesn’t just rattle off stories about the 20s, she understands these tales intimately. Her rarefied and confident demeanor makes one believe she’d actually been there, as when she gives the audience a verbal tour through Berlin’s opulent midtown apartment.
     Backed up by the impressive Richard Rodney Bennett on piano and Linc Milliman on bass, Haran provides a beautiful textbook example on how a cabaret act should be. Dream Curly, are you listening?
 

    As his millions of admirers know, this grand time for Tony Bennett, the near-septuagenarian singer of high pop who has reached new heights of artistic skill and confidence when most sip Geritol and clip coupons. But it is also ( this is less widely known) a grand time for singers, period, a point that has been brought home to me by the serendipitous discovery of yet another gifted practitioner of the art.

High pop is sophisticated popular song, much of it written for the stage or the movies between the 1920s and the 1950s, in which music and lyrics are of equal importance, in which melody and romance predominate, though the latter is often given a wry twist. Its singers are men and women deeply steeped in this music who approach it with a mixture of reverence and insouciance, determined to honor its intrinsic character while placing their distinctive stamps upon it, men and women who know that lyrics are supposed to mean something and that the singer's task is to comprehend and interpret them.

The great-grandfather of them all was Fred Astaire, the incomparable dancer-singer for whom an astonishing number of great songs were written; it was "Steppin' Out," Tony Bennett's brilliant reprise of many of the best of those songs, that revived Bennett's career and awoke baby boomers to the possibility that music just may have existed pre- Beatles. The great-grandmother was Billie Holiday, who almost single-handedly arranged the marriage of jazz and high pop, who set the style in every sense of the word that has been ground zero for every other singer to follow.

Astaire and Holiday were the first generation, along with Mabel Mercer and Lee Wiley and numerous others. The second generation is mostly still alive and singing, though with varying degrees of artistry. Bennett at his peak; Mel Torme and Blossom Dearie not far below; Carmen McRae, Chris Connor and Anita O'Day full of life if short on chops; Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald sadly depleted but refusing to pack it in. But whatever state of disrepair their vocal cords may be in, their active presence is both a comfort and an inspiration.

A few years younger and a lot more energetic are the singers who have reached their prime. The leader remains Bobby Short, whose status as king of cabaret is unchallenged and who continues to explore the dimmest recesses of high pop's past in search of undiscovered gems. Rosemary Clooney, who left Top 40 years ago, demonstrates in her terrific new album, "On the Road Again," that there's a place in high pop for Willie Nelson and Paul Simon as well as for George Gershwin and Johnny Mercer. Abbey Lincoln is off in a universe of her own, but her recent albums with Clark Terry, Jackie Maclean and Stan Getz (his final recording) are idiosyncratic delights. Dave Frishberg adds a witty new song to the genre every time he writes(and then sings)one. Marlene Verplanck sings Johnny Mercer as well as anyone around and Dixie Carter,  yes the "Designing Woman", does the same for the songs of John Wallowitch.

Then there's Mary Cleere Haran. "How do you spell that?" asked my friend the cabaret connoisseur when I told him about her last week. No doubt she has a following at the Oak Room of the Algonquin and Michael's Pub and other places where the night owls flock, but out here in the musical boondocks she's an unknown quantity. Precisely why it was that I chose to take a $15 flier on her new CD, "This Heart of Mine: Classic Movie Songs of the Forties," is a mystery, but of this there can be no doubt: With the first notes of its first song "How Little We Know," I experienced a thrill of discovery rarely matched since the day when, as a teenager, I first heard the incomparable voice of Jo Stafford.

Haran, like Stafford, is out of this world; there's no other way to put it. Her voice is clear and true, with just a hint of huskiness; her sense of humor is abundant on an earlier album, "There's a Small Hotel: Live at the Algonquin," she brings new life to "Personality" and "Let's Do It" and  her choice of material is unerringly tasteful and apt; she sings every song in her own way but never subordinates the melody or lyrics to herself.

This last, as much as anything else, is what separates her from the rest of the boomer high-pop singers. Young people who listen to recordings by Mabel Mercer or Billie Holiday mistake style for affectation and assume that the way to make a mark for oneself is to turn the music into a vehicle of mere self-expression. Thus we have Michael Feinstein and Susannah McCorkle, who shove themselves and their voice so forcibly to center stage that it's easy to forget what they're supposedly there to do.

There's never any such problem with Mary Cleere Haran at least not on either of the CD's I've thus far been able to track down. Like Marlene Verplanck she has a way with Johnny Mercer, which is a good thing since he wrote the lyrics for so many classic films songs of the '40s. Of the 14 songs on "This Heart of Mine," exactly half have Mercer lyrics. Haran does wonders with the old Judy Garland show-stopper "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe," tempering its good cheer with a faint note of wistfulness: That railroad doesn't stop here anymore. To my taste, though, she reaches the heights with her interpretations of two Mercer love songs: "I Remember You" and "My Shining Hour."

Both of those songs are of World War II. If high pop is in the early stages of a revival, part of the explanation may be a longing for the romance that was everywhere in the air as men went off to war and women stayed at home yearning for their return. The Smithsonian has issued a two-CD set of World War II love songs, Rosemary Clooney and Andrea Marcovicci have done their own reprises on the theme, and the definitive album, Jo Stafford's "G.I. Jo," is back in release.

Maybe a twinge of that longing makes me particularly receptive to the songs Haran sings on her '40s album, but that's only part of it. Chatting with the audience on her Algonquin album, she says, "I've just recently become a very impassioned fan of the actor Charles Boyer." Me, I've just recently become a very, very impassioned fan of Mary Cleere Haran. 

                                    Copyright 1998 Mary Cleere Haran. All rights reserved.