It was a world where top hats and tails, white gloves and satin gowns graced the night.
The champagne flowed to the wee hours, the food arrived in finger-sandwich size, the cafe tables were tiny and lighted by the warm glow of small, shaded lamps.
Even cigarettes were elegant then, particularly because they were smoked from a holder and presented from a case, usually 14 karat and often engraved.
That glittering world-American cafe society of the `30s, `40s and `50s-is but a memory today. Yet the exquisite music of that day still flourishes in cabarets and jazz clubs around the world.
”It`s getting to the point where some of the young people in the audience even are getting hip enough to request particular songwriters and specific titles,” says Denise Tomasello, a fine young singer who`s playing through March at Toulouse, on West Division Street.
”Why is it happening? I think most people reach an age where they want to hear lyrics again.
”And when they do, they`ll never hear anything better than Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin and people like that. Their songs move you in a way that a rock song cannot.”
Porter, Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington, Harold Arlen-these and dozens more created songs every bit as elegant as the world from which they came. The miracle is that today, in a society nearly saturated with the high-decibel sounds of rock and rap, a more artful music still thrives.
”I play for these youngsters a song that I have been taking for granted for the past 50 years,” says veteran Chicago pianist-singer Dave Green, ”and their eyes open up, like they`ve never heard it before-which, of course, they haven`t.
”And they`re knocked out. I can read it on their faces.
”That`s when I realize that there are a couple of generations of Americans who have been robbed-musically,” adds Green, who holds court at Christopher`s on Halsted during his regular Tuesday-through-Satur day slot.
”Ever since the late `50s, they`ve heard nothing but rock on the radio, and they never got a chance to learn that there`s more to music, and more to life, than just three chords and a beat.”
Had they come of age when great cafe singers such as Green and Bobby Short did, in the `40s, ”they really would have seen some sights,” says Short, who this year is celebrating his 25th anniversary at the tres chic Cafe Carlyle in Manhattan.
”People got really dressed up and went from one nightspot to the next. There was a kind of rhythm to it, a marvelous energy. You had all these smart supper clubs to go to. In New York, there was El Morocco, the Blue Angel, the Stork Club, Basin Street East, the Embers.
”In Chicago, there were wonderful rooms in the Drake Hotel and the Blackstone. There was the London House, Mister Kelly`s.
”There even were one or two places in Los Angeles,” adds Short, no doubt referring to such legendary spots as the Cocoanut Grove. ”The men wore white tie and tails, the women wore beautiful gowns and furs. A nightclub back then was a kind of hallowed space. The lights were dim, and people were free to do what they wanted-within reason.
”You could sit there and drink in the atmosphere and put your hand on somebody`s hand, if a song moved you to do so.
”Or you might lean over and give somebody a kiss, or sip three or four drinks you wouldn`t have had ordinarily. That was what a nightclub was all about-a magical, mysterious place.”
A place to learn
It also was a showcase for American popular music at the peak of its sophistication.
”If you wanted, you could get a musical education in those clubs, like I did,” says Green, who grew up in Chicago when ”every corner seemed to have a nightclub.
”I`d go to places like the Club De Lisa or Joey`s DeLuxe Club, and you could hear Nat Cole, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sammy Davis Jr.-all the greats.
”And even the places that didn`t have entertainers always had a piano in the corner. So if you wanted to work, you could practically walk in, sit down and play. You weren`t making much money, but you were playing the best music there was in the world.”
You also were performing for a most remarkable audience.
”When I first came to New York,” recalls Short, ”to play in the Beverly Hotel in `56, cafe society was a marvelous thing-even if the last, downhill slide of supper club entertainment was just beginning.
”But, still, rooms like the Cafe Carlyle (in the Carlyle Hotel) were special places. A lot of girls from Finch College (a plush, long-gone East Coast institution) would drop in at places like the Carlyle, and they would tell me funny stories about their mothers, who fully anticipated that their girls would want to go someplace for a drink.
”So their mothers would say: `You shall not drink. But if you must, you may drink only at the Carlyle!` ”
With cocktail in one hand, Russian cigarette in the other, the listener could savor songs that were oh-so-polite on the surface but wickedly naughty beneath it. Almost every important song by Cole Porter, for instance, intimated an erotic message.
”I know women today who are in their 80s, who still almost blush at some of Cole Porter`s lyrics,” says Short, who makes the most of Porter`s double- entendres on his latest recording, ”Late Night at the Cafe Carlyle,” a Telarc CD set to be in stores next week.
”When Porter uses phrases like `Let`s Do It` or `You`ve Got That Thing,` that was titillating, but it was subtle too.”
The advent of rock
The genteel, somewhat rarefied world that nurtured such songwriting, however, was bound to be shattered by the new mores of the late `50s and thereafter. Now messages of sensuality were not implied, as in the brilliant lyrics of Cole Porter, but brazenly flaunted, as in the pelvic gyrations of Elvis Presley.
The `60s onslaught of rock `n` roll, the rise of home entertainment such as TV and stereo, and the escalating cost of presenting live entertainment all brought an abrupt end to America`s poshest supper clubs.
”Around 1963 or so, the discos and rock `n` roll took over, and that was the end of cafe society,” says Short, who today is a partner in the Gold Star Sardine Bar in Chicago. ”Where people once got dressed up to go to a nightclub, now they were getting undressed to go to a discotheque.
”The pop song lyrics-which had been so clever with their brilliant rhymes and subtle little puns by Porter and Lorenz Hart-weren`t clever anymore.
”I mean, when somebody sings a song like `I Want Your Sex` (a George Michael hit of 1987), Lord knows that`s not too inventive.”
Why the simple pop song overwhelmed the sophisticated one is open to speculation, but surely the massive sales generated by rock music had something to do with it. So long as record companies and radio stations could reach a huge youth market with unsophisticated musical fare, the more complex songs were not going to have much of a chance.
For Short, however, ”It was the rise of the ego that changed everything. In other words, people were no longer content to sit and watch somebody else sing a song and listen to its subtleties. Now they themselves wanted to get up and do it, to stand up and scream and shake and dance and be a part of it all. ”By now, it has gotten to the point where many people don`t even know how to behave at a live performance anymore. I went to the opera a couple of weeks ago-it was a very serious opera-and the couple sitting in front of me had their arms around each other and were necking furiously during the whole thing.
”That just wasn`t done before!”
Cafe singers in demand
The glorious anomaly, however, is that despite all these profound social changes, the music of American cafe society is enjoying an unexpected renaissance.
Short, for instance, remains a hot ticket. He recently performed on the NBC series ”In the Heat of the Night,” he`s currently in London taping a show for HBO, and he`ll host a ”Big Band Ballroom Bash” at 9 p.m. Saturday on WTTW-Ch. 11.
Elsewhere, too, the non-rock songbook thrives.
The superb cabaret singer Andrea Marcovicci makes her second Chicago appearance this year with a five-day engagement at the Park West beginning April 7. First-rate singer-pianists such as Michael Feinstein, Billy Stritch and Steve Ross have made national names for themselves. Rosemary Clooney, a sublime stylist since the `50s, is in terrific demand these days, with a new record, ”Girl Singer” (Concord), having won glowing reviews.
And in Chicago, excellent performers such as Audrey Morris, Frank D`Rone, Bruce Robins and the like are busily working a variety of rooms around town.
”Let`s put it this way,” Tomasello says of the classic American pop tune. ”These songs will be around forever.”
