[Dixielandjazz] harry Allen & Rebecca Kilgore - The music of Marilyn Monroe

[Stephen G Barbone]

I knew there was a reason I loved Marilyn Monroe when I first saw her.  
<grin>

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

Channeling a Bombshell, One Jazzy Note at a Time

NY TIMES - AUG 5 2011 - John Marchese


As a teenager watching old movies on television, Harry Allen heard  
Marilyn Monroe speak to him. “I have this thing about saxophone  
players,” she said in her famously girlish and breathy style.  
“Especially tenor sax.” She added: “All they have to do is play eight  
bars of ‘Come To Me, My Melancholy Baby,’ and my spine turns to  
custard. I get goose-pimply all over, and I come to ’em.”

Decades after hearing those words Mr. Allen, 44, is a well-established  
figure in jazz, performing around the world and recording prolifically  
— on tenor sax. “That line,” he said recently, paraphrasing Monroe,  
“all a saxophone player has to do is play ‘Melancholy Baby,’ and I’m  
his. That made me really want to become a saxophone player.”

The lines come from the 1959 screwball comedy “Some Like It Hot,” in  
which Monroe played Sugar Kane Kowalczyk, the singer with an all- 
female swing band (all-female, at least, until Jack Lemmon and Tony  
Curtis join up disguised as women). In the film Monroe performs  
several songs, including a heartfelt rendition of the standard “I’m  
Through With Love” and a near-novelty take on “I Wanna Be Loved by  
You.” They are part of a body of recorded vocal work she left behind  
that some, like Mr. Allen, believe is overlooked and underestimated.

“Obviously,” Mr. Allen said in a phone interview, “she is considered  
an icon, but mostly for being maybe the most beautiful and sexiest  
woman ever. I’ve always thought that Marilyn Monroe was a really fine  
singer. Today she’d be considered one of the best singers around, if  
she were here.”

Mr. Allen is such a supporter of Monroe’s music that on Tuesday he  
begins a five-night run at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency with a show  
titled “Some Like It Hot — The Music of Marilyn Monroe,” featuring his  
working quartet joined by the vocalist Rebecca Kilgore. When Mr. Allen  
contacted her about the concept, Ms. Kilgore said her first thought  
was, “I can’t possibly impersonate Marilyn Monroe.”

Many other performers have mimicked Monroe in various ways, from  
Madonna’s music video homage to “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,”  
to drag show performers around the globe. James Franco even gave it  
try while hosting this year’s Oscars ceremony. But Ms. Kilgore had  
something else in mind.

“I had to get rid of the concept of having to inhabit her persona,”  
she said by phone from her home in Portland, Ore., “which is kind of  
born from the cabaret world, which I’m not really a part of. I decided  
to have fun with the music.”

As she started studying Monroe’s recordings, tracking down movie  
soundtrack albums and compilations to prepare for the show, Ms.  
Kilgore soon realized that there wasn’t a large collection of  
material, fewer than three dozen songs in all. The actress sang in 10  
movies, starting with a solo turn on “Anyone Can See I Love You” in  
the 1948 film “Ladies of the Chorus” and concluding with several  
numbers in “Let’s Make Love,” in 1960, in which Monroe sang duets with  
Yves Montand and Frankie Vaughan and stepped out to solo on the title  
song and Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” Unsurprisingly,  
throughout her film career as a vocalist, the sex appeal seems as  
important as the singing.

“That on-screen persona was the only one that I knew,” Ms. Kilgore  
said. “Even watching her movies as a young girl I found her sexy, but  
not in a threatening way. She was wise, pretending to subjugate  
herself to men, but doing it with a wink, as a kind of game she was  
playing.” Now, often focusing only on the audio, the singer found  
something else in Monroe’s performances.

“It’s absolutely compelling the way she inhabits the material,” Ms.  
Kilgore said. “It’s hard to put into words. It’s very mysterious. Some  
people sing a song, and it’s pretty, but you never want to listen to  
it again. Marilyn just bears repeated listening.”

Garry Giddins, the jazz critic and biographer of Bing Crosby,  
performed his own reassessment of Monroe’s musical ability and was  
impressed. “She had the same problem as Fred Astaire,” Mr. Giddins  
said in a telephone interview. “They were both wonderful singers, but  
you don’t think of them as singers. So much of Monroe is the way she  
sells the song. You expect her to be second rate, but she never is.”

As Ms. Kilgore began practicing the songs she would include in the  
show, she constantly fought the tug toward imitation. “I would find  
myself doing that pouty, come-hither wispy style that’s so easy to  
imitate,” she said. “I had to keep telling myself that I’m not going  
to imitate her. I’m going to do a — quote, unquote — jazz singer’s  
interpretation.”

In 1953, as Monroe was preparing for the film “Gentlemen Prefer  
Blondes,” which would produce her memorable performance of “Diamonds  
Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” she was advised by a musician that repeated  
listening to a jazz singer would be the key to her own development as  
a singer.

“In the very beginning,” said Hal Schaefer, a jazz pianist, composer  
and arranger who was hired as Monroe’s vocal coach, “I told her to buy  
Ella Fitzgerald’s recording of Gershwin songs. And I ordered her to  
listen to it a hundred times.”

“She wasn’t really into jazz when she came to me,” Mr. Schaefer added,  
by phone. “But I told her: ‘Look, I’m going to be your guide. This is  
where we have to start: listening to the best female singer there is.’ ”

The actress became a fan of Fitzgerald, and the two women became  
friends. In 1955 Monroe persuaded the owner of the Mocambo, a popular  
Hollywood nightclub, to lift its policy of not booking black  
performers and hire Fitzgerald. Monroe reportedly promised to attend  
every performance seated at a front table. Years later Fitzgerald told  
Ms. Magazine, “I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt.”

Monroe’s artistic debt to Fitzgerald is harder to pinpoint. Though the  
actress would develop a reputation for being difficult to work with,  
often showing up late on set or not at all (she was fired from her  
last film for repeated absences), she worked conscientiously on her  
singing, Mr. Schaefer remembered. “About 50 percent of what she became  
as a singer she had to begin with,” he said. “Her intonation was good,  
and her time was good.” Working in a bungalow studio, he would guide  
Monroe through exercises to expand her vocal range and to work on  
breath control.

When a writer from Collier’s magazine visited Monroe and Mr. Schaefer  
at work one day in 1954, the actress told him, “I won’t be satisfied  
until people want to hear me sing without looking at me.” But she  
quickly added, “Of course, that doesn’t mean I want them to stop  
looking.”

Mr. Schaefer became so impressed with his student’s progress, he said,  
that he persuaded executives at RCA Victor to record her singing two  
songs with nobody but the backup musicians looking at her and no film  
performance to pair the vocals with. The 1954 session was not  
immediately released. It produced “A Fine Romance,” the Jerome Kern- 
Dorothy Fields tune, with a spirited jazz arrangement by Mr. Schaefer  
and Monroe swinging in the lower portion of her vocal range. Not Ella,  
but headed in that direction.

The B-side was a ballad called “She Acts Like a Woman Should.” On it  
Monroe shows a firm command of phrasing and avoids the sexpot styling  
that dominates so many of her other recordings. “If you hear the  
record now,” Mr. Schaefer said, “there’s no baloney about it. She’s a  
real singer with a big band in a studio, not some movie star they’re  
trying to pass off as a singer.”

When Ms. Kilgore was surveying Monroe’s work, she was drawn to that  
song despite some seriously retrograde lyrics. “I didn’t have any  
indelible visual to try to divorce myself from,” she said. “That’s  
been the most difficult aspect of preparing for this show. I also like  
the performance because it seems to have less of that self-conscious  
sex-selling attitude. It’s more natural, honest and very appealing.”  
She will perform the song at Feinstein’s.

The one tune that will not be included in Ms. Kilgore’s show is  
perhaps Monroe’s most famous singing performance, and her last. In  
1962, three months before she died, Monroe appeared at Madison Square  
Garden for a party honoring President John F. Kennedy on his 45th  
birthday. The jazz pianist Hank Jones, her accompanist that night,  
later told an interviewer for NPR that they rehearsed eight hours to  
prepare 16 bars of music.

The result, a strange, halting and almost absurdly breathy and  
flirtatious performance of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” seems now  
like Monroe doing a parody of herself, and it is often imitated. The  
indelible impression left by the 30-second performance goes a long way  
toward overshadowing all the solid singing Monroe had done in the  
decade before.

So this week at Feinstein’s, as Mr. Allen and Ms. Kilgore salute  
Monroe’s music, even if an audience member is celebrating a birthday,  
Ms. Kilgore will not sing “Happy Birthday.” But there’s a chance that  
Mr. Allen could be persuaded to play eight bars of “Melancholy Baby.”