[Dixielandjazz] Mary Cleere Haran Obit

[Stephen G Barbone]

Mary Cleere Haran, Cabaret Singer With a Big-Band Style, Dies at 58

NY TIMES - February 6 2011 - By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Mary Cleere Haran, a classic popular singer and writer much admired  
for her cabaret shows celebrating the American songbook, died on  
Saturday at a hospital in Deerfield Beach, Fla., two days after a  
cycling accident. She was 58 and was living in Florida, having taken a  
break from a career that saw her perform in every major New York  
supper club.

Ms. Haran was struck from the side by a car coming out of a driveway  
after dropping off her résumé at a hotel, according to a friend,  
Bridge McIntyre. She never regained consciousness.

A singer of remarkable purity whose simple unaffected pop-jazz style  
echoed big band singers of the 1940s, most notably Ella Fitzgerald,  
Ms. Haran made her Manhattan cabaret debut in 1988 at the now-defunct  
Ballroom. Swinging lightly, she eschewed melodramatic posturing to  
deliver deep, thoughtful interpretations of standards by Rodgers and  
Hart, Harry Warren, the Gershwins and others. She had a special love  
of the wry, wistful lyrics of Hart to whom she paid tribute in two  
different shows.

Her stage personality reflected the upbeat, can-do spirit (with zany  
screwball touches) and subdued glamour of long-ago film stars like  
Myrna Loy, Irene Dunne andClaudette Colbert. Much as she admired those  
actresses, her attitude was not that of a besotted fan but of a modern  
woman with a feminist sensibility who refracted the past through the  
present.

Comparing Lorenz Hart’s lyrics with Richard Rodgers to Oscar  
Hammerstein’s in her 2002 show at “Falling in Love With Love: The  
Rodgers and Hart Story” she remarked that Hammerstein’s lyrics told us  
what we “should feel” versus Hart’s, which told us what “we did feel.”

A particular singing idol was Doris Day, whom she interviewed in a PBS  
documentary, “Doris Day: Sentimental Journey,” which she also wrote  
and co-produced. She contributed to the PBS documentaries “Remembering  
Bing,” “Irving Berlin’s America,” “When We Were Young: The Lives of  
Child Movie Stars,” and “Satchmo.”

Doris Day was the subject of Ms. Haran’s acclaimed 2007 show at  
Feinstein’s at the Loews Regency, where she made her last major  
appearance in late 2009 with a Johnny Mercer tribute.

Some of the pianists who accompanied her included Bill Charlap, Don  
Rebic, Fred Hersch, Lee Musiker and Tedd Firth. But her most frequent  
partner was Richard Rodney Bennett.

The second of eight children in an Irish Catholic family, Ms. Haran  
was the daughter of a professor of theater and film at San Francisco  
City College and grew up enthralled by the music and movies of the  
1930s and ’40s. As a teenager, she was a champion Irish step dancer.

She moved to New York in the 1970s and made her theatrical debut as a  
band singer in “The 1940s Radio Hour” and appeared off Broadway in  
“Manhattan Music,” “Swingtime Canteen” and “Heebie Jeebies.” On  
television, she had a recurring role as a nightclub singer in the  
series “100 Centre Street.”

She married twice. Her son, Jacob, from her second marriage, to the  
writer and director Joe Gilford, whom she divorced, survives her, as  
do six siblings: Terence, Bronwyn Harris, Brigid, Ned, Tim, and Eithne  
Bullick; an uncle, Ed McCarthy; an aunt, Patty Lautze; and several  
nieces and nephews. She is also survived by her stepmother, Loyce Haran.

Ms. Haran made her recording debut in 1992 on Columbia with “There’s a  
Small Hotel: Live at the Algonquin.” Later albums included “This Funny  
World: Mary Cleere Haran Sings Lyrics by Hart” (1995), “This Heart of  
Mine: Classic Movie Songs of the Forties” (1994), “Pennies From  
Heaven: Movie Songs From the Depression Era” (1998), “The Memory of  
All That: Gershwin Broadway and in Hollywood” (1999), and “Crazy  
Rhythm: Manhattan in the ’20s” (2002).

For one of her most popular shows, “An Affair to Remember,” in 1994,  
Ms. Haran visited the 1950s to deconstruct the decade’s cultural  
iconography and affectionately chastise its films for their lack of  
humor. She joked that she preferred Cole Porter musicals which  
portrayed “fun, sex and money as the most important things in life” to  
the heavier message shows of Rodgers and Hammerstein.

For Ms. Haran, who sardonically addressed her audiences as “fellow New  
York sophisticates,” keeping a sense of humor was paramount.