Review: MARILYN MAYE High Kicks In The New Year At Birdland

Heigh-Ho Friends & "Family"! Bobby Patrick your RAINBOW Reviewer here. Putting the silent T in CABARET to bring you all the T.

Legend, Icon, STAR, Super Star; these are all WAY overused terms to describe so many performers today that they have become, quite frankly, BORING! Other terms such as Genius, Brilliant, and Master... even more boring... right? Well, my pets, in this age of cellphonia and ever-decreasing attention spans, Marilyn Maye is the most important thing that any performer must be today; Marilyn Maye is NOT boring. At near 92 years of age and since she began to sing professionally at 14, Ms. Maye has a career that has outlasted your grandmothers and even your great grandmothers. Truth be told, long ago, this lady's voice should have packed it in and said, "Buh Bye," but her tone, her range, her vibrancy of sound and her skill as a jazz singer and arranger (for she does her own) is as full, vital and alive as it has ever been.

With the most casual ease and grace of any professional working today, La Maye took to the stage at The Birdland Theatre New Years Night in her sparkly black sequinned pullover, slacks, and diamond earrings to wow a crowd of devotees. To love Marilyn Maye is to love The American Song Book and The American Song Book, my darlings, is a collection of the most important and influential American popular songs and jazz standards from the 20th century. Supported by the incomparable (and adorable) Billy Stritch pounding the keys, Daniel Glass beating the drums, and Tom Hubbard slapping that bass, the lady sang, danced, jazz scatted, high kicked (YES! High Kicked!) through her 70-minute set showing the unparalleled skill of her song stylings in a setlist that included tributes to composers; Cole Porter, Jerry Herman, Ray Charles, and her beloved Johnny Mercer. For those of you little lambs that may not know, when a jazz stylist like MM tributes a composer, they put together as many as half a dozen songs from that artist's collection, arranging them so they move from one composition to the next without stopping, making an almost imperceptible transition from song to song, placing them in a jazz context where vocal improvisations and the singer's virtuosity shines through, making something new and in this moment out of something "old". This, in short, is the art of Marilyn Maye. Picking what seemed to be everyone's favorite songs from each of the gents she tributed, Maye knocked us all dead with her presence, her musicality, and her voice. She made magic dear ones and no mistake.

I can go on and on raving about Marilyn Maye and talking about how she was as wonderful to watch as she was to hear. That she was funny, charming, off-the-cuff and musically unstoppable, but we all know what that would be dear hearts... That would be BORING! The point is, my dearlings, if you have not seen Marilyn Maye, you have missed experiencing one of the great surviving artists of an era that has given us so much FABULOUS music. So, since she has 2 more shows left this week (Tonight and tomorrow) click the link to Birdland and get tickets now. Finally, it must be said that Ella Fitzgerald once referred to Maye as "the greatest white female singer in the world," and that, my children, is NOT Boring. And for being so NOT Boring, we give the lady 5 out of 5 Rainbows.

Marilyn Maye Has A Webby: HERE
And You Can Get Tickets To The Birdland Theatre: HERE

Photos by My Boss Stephen Mosher

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