[Dixielandjazz] Bobby Short

[Stephen Barbone]

Well this has to be the end of an era. Bobby Short is ending his 36 year
run at the Hotel Carlyle. Not bad for a kid who got his start playing
songs like Tiger Rag in saloons professionally when he was 10. His show
at the Carlyle was just superb.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

April 21, 2004 - NY Times - By FELICIA R. LEE

Bobby Short Ending His Run at the Carlyle

Bobby Short, whose name has become synonymous with a kind of timeless
New York elegance, has announced that on New Year's Eve he will end his
36-year run at the equally elegant Cafe Carlyle.

"I'm 79 years old, and I've had some serious thoughts about pursuing
other things," Mr. Short said in a telephone interview. "More time for
my friends, more time for things I like to do." The Cafe Carlyle, on the
East Side of Manhattan in the Carlyle Hotel, "has been wonderful to me,"
Mr. Short added, but the life of a saloon singer can be tough.

"I've had the pleasure, the privilege," he said, "of working in the best
saloon in the world."

Mr. Short has no plans to retire and will continue to tour and perhaps
play an occasional date at the Carlyle, said his publicist, Virginia
Wicks. On May 4 Mr. Short will begin an engagement at the Carlyle that
continues until June 26; a series of autumn dates begins on Oct. 12,
ending on Dec. 31.

The dapper Mr. Short is such a city institution that chic New Yorkers
could mark their calendars by his appearances at the Carlyle, where his
bubbly cabaret act evoked what Stephen Holden of The New York Times once
called a "soigné aura of Cole Porter and caviar."

A frequent escort of his good friend Gloria Vanderbilt, Mr. Short is
well-known in New York's social circles. Over the years his name
appeared on best-dressed lists and in the Social Register. He played
himself in Woody Allen's 1986 film "Hannah and Her Sisters."

The ninth of 10 children born to a coal miner and a maid in Danville,
Ill., Mr. Short was a self-taught piano prodigy who began performing
numbers like "Tiger Rag," in local saloons when he was 10.