It`s just past midnight at an East Coast nightclub, but jazz diva Carmen McRae is thinking back on the old days in Chicago.
”I owe a lot to that town. Chicago is where I learned I could do it,”
says McRae, who returns here Tuesday to open a four-day stint at the Cotton Club on South Michigan Avenue.
”I thank Chicago for giving me my beginnings, for letting me learn whatever it is I do.”
What McRae does, surpassingly, is weave exquisite melodic variations on great American tunes. For roughly 50 years, she has graced the old standards- and a few newer sounds-with one of the smokiest voices in the business.
And though she was born and raised in New York, her art first blossomed here in Chicago.
”It was so long ago, it`s almost hard to believe it was me. I turn 70 next month, you know,” says McRae, though most biographical dictionaries say she`s about to turn 68.
”Back when I started out, I was playing piano and singing,” says McRae, who broke into the business in New York, working with Benny Carter, Count Basie and Mercer Ellington in the `40s, before heading to Chicago.
”All I dreamed about was becoming a jazz singer. But I quickly discovered that to become a singer, you also have to pay the rent, and you`ve got to do that by playing the piano.”
After learning such lessons in Chicago, McRae figured it was time to give a try back home in New York.
”My folks owned an old brownstone, and they told me my old room was still waiting for me,” she says. ”So I took them up on the offer.”
Although McRae`s rise was not a meteoric one, she believes ”it was never really a struggle, either. I didn`t expect to become a big name overnight, so I wasn`t disappointed.”
”All I wanted to do was be out there singing my heart out. And that`s just what I did.”
By the late `50s, however, McRae`s star began to sparkle, with connoisseurs ranking her among the more inventive of the post-World War II jazz singers. Yet for all the complexity of McRae`s improvisations, they never lack the tastefulness and elegance associated with the best jazz singers. She stands in the same league as such jazz masters as Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Anita O`Day.
Like those singers, McRae carries a massive repertory of American art song, singing everything from vintage Gershwin to classic Ellington and beyond. At the heart of her repertoire, however, is the pungent music of Thelonius Monk.
”He was a complete genius,” says McRae, whose exceptional new recording, ”Carmen Sings Monk,” is on RCA`s Novus label.
”Once in a lifetime you`re going to hear somebody like that, and I`m thankful I got to hear him.
”Whenever I would listen to him playing the piano-whether it was with me or anyone else-he would just crack me up. I actually couldn`t help laughing, out of sheer delight! Nobody else in the world did chord changes like he did. ”I`m afraid we won`t be around long enough to see another one like him-or close to him.”
McRae, too, has made unique contributions, many of which have been documented in her catalog of recordings on the Concord Jazz label. Although some singers can easily be categorized by style or repertoire, McRae is a chameleon, adapting her work to the needs of the moment.
”I just don`t like singing the same old thing all the time,” says McRae, with typical forthrightness. ”I get sick and tired of doing the same old tunes over and over, so I just try to keep on going ahead.
”It`s true, though, that some songs just seem to stay in your repertoire forever-like Gershwin`s `The Man I Love.` I just have to keep singing that song. But the trick is to give it a rest now and then; leave it alone for a while and push on to something else.”
McRae is the first to acknowledge that her voice is not what it was half a century ago. Nor need it be.
”I suppose most of us singers don`t have the same clarity (of pitch)
when we get older-I know I don`t,” she says.
”But I like to think that maybe that has been replaced a little bit with having learned a few things over the years, and with being able to feel the songs a little more than I used to.
”In other words, I`d rather bring more feeling to a song than sing it perfectly, and with a cold heart.”
As for the future, McRae apparently has no intention of giving up the jazz life-and the rigors of the road it entails.
”You walk out onto a stage,” says McRae, ”you see a bunch of young faces in the audience, and then you realize that what you`re doing really lasts.
”So who would want to give that up?”
