Minneapolis-based vocalist Maud Hixson is a lady — refined, well-spoken, and rarely a pest. So when she sends two emails and makes phone calls urging music lovers not to miss a particular singer who’s coming to town, it’s worth noting.
The singer’s name is Marilyn Maye, and if you watched “Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show” (that’s “Tonight” pre-Jay/Conan/Jay), you’ve probably seen her; she was Carson’s guest a record 76 times.
Carson called her “Super Singer.” Ella Fitzgerald called her “the greatest white female singer in the world.”
More recently, in June 2009, New York Times critic Stephen Holden described her as “the embodiment and summation of a brash sock-it-to-’em nightclub tradition that runs from [Judy] Garland through Bette Midler, but with jazz added.”
No publicly accessible videos exist (that I could find) of Maye on the “Tonight Show,” but here’s one from “The Hollywood Palace” in 1967:
That was then — more than 40 years ago. What about now?
Hixson says, “I saw her last year in New York and her performance was a revelation.” That must have been around the time this Johnny Mercer medley was recorded at Birdland:
The voice is deeper, more resonant, not as elastic, but the personality is enormous and the swing even swingier. Watch as she works the stage, reaching out to the audience with genuine warmth, bringing it home. Check her energy and stamina.
Born April 10, 1928, in Wichita, Kan. (she turns 82 this year), Marilyn Maye took singing and dancing lessons from her mother, won numerous talent contests and prizes as a child, and was given a featured spot on a Topeka radio show at age 11. By the time she was in high school she was hosting her own radio show in Des Moines. After graduation she took a job as staff vocalist at WHAS in Louisville, performing half of each show with full orchestra.
“When I walked onstage 20 years later to do my first RCA recording with a live orchestra,” she writes in her bio, “I felt at ease and fully prepared.”
When her contract ran out, Maye worked in nightclubs around the Midwest. In the mid-1950s, she began an 11-year engagement at The Colony, a supper club in Kansas City, Mo. Discovered by Steve Allen, she made regular appearances on his show, flying back and forth between Kansas City and New York. One night an RCA executive was in the audience; that led to a recording contract, 7 albums, and 34 singles. She began her long run with Carson in 1966, the year she was nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy. Maye (along with Herman’s Hermits, the Byrds, and Sonny & Cher) lost to Tom Jones.
In the 1970s, as the nightclub scene faded, Maye switched to theater, starring in productions of “Can Can,” “Mame,” and “Hello, Dolly!” She continued to live in the Midwest, playing regional theaters and performing arts centers. “I never was retired,” she told a writer for broadwayworld.com. “The word ‘retirement’ is not in my vocabulary.”
In 2008, Maye was “rediscovered” at a cabaret convention at Lincoln Center, where she sang a tribute to the late Carson and earned the prestigious Nightlife Award for Outstanding Cabaret Vocalist in a Major Engagement. A series of performances at New York’s Metropolitan Room followed, winning critical raves and leading to major engagements in Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis, where she’ll play two nights at the Dakota. She calls herself “the overnight success who’s been working all of my life.”
People are saying that Maye has the voice of a singer half her age. I’m not sure that’s true or even relevant. She has a big voice, a powerful stage presence, a lifetime of experience, all that accumulated wisdom — and she can still really sing. She travels with a regular trio; two of the three — pianist Ted Firth and drummer Jim Eklof — will be with her at the Dakota. At this writing, her bass player is TBD.
“I have a philosophy about the way I perform,” she told Dick Robinson, host of American Standards by the Sea, in a 2008 interview. “I perform to the people, not for them.”
“You make people feel terrific,” Robinson said. “You make us feel good about ourselves.”
Not a bad way to spend an evening, onstage or in the audience.
Marilyn Maye: Wednesday-Thursday, Feb. 17-18, Dakota, 7 p.m. ($32-$40). Note: Maye will perform only one show per night, not two.
Pamela Espeland keeps a Twin Cities live jazz calendar, blogs about jazz at Bebopified and tweets about jazz on Twitter.
