[Dixielandjazz] Marilyn Monroe, singer; Harry Allen, Rebecca Kilgore

[Robert Ringwald]

Marilyn Monroe, singer

Channeling a Bombshell, One Jazzy Note at a Time
by John Marchese
New York Times, August 7, 2011
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."
Gary 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."


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
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