The Unsinkable Marilyn Maye

Update: Mariyln Maye turned 95 on April 10 2023, and celebrated with a special 95th birthday concert at cabaret venue 54Below in New York on May 27, 2023 with a live stream world-wide, which I watched from my hospital bed. $28 which I thought was great value.

by Melissa Errico

Nearing 95, the inimitable singer is about to make her Carnegie Hall solo debut. In an eight-decade career, it’s a crowning moment — and just another gig.

Marilyn Maye on the stage of Carnegie Hall, March 24, 2023

Turning the corner of 54th Street in a New York City taxi, the peerless nightclub singer Marilyn Maye is reminded of an early moment in her career. Sixty years ago, while performing on national television, she was also singing at a nightclub. “This was on Broadway,” she says, quickly adding, “on Broadway, I mean, in Kansas City.” (She still lives there. “The closets,” she explains.)

But there was no advertising or publicity pointing tourists toward her show. So she found out from local hotel concierges which cabdrivers worked at the airport, and did a free concert for 20 of them. “I told them: When somebody gets off a plane and says, ‘Where is this Kansas City singer?’ — now you know!”

“That was enterprising,” she twinkles.

Still enterprising and still twinkling at nearly 95, Marilyn Maye is the last of a great generation of American Songbook singers. She is both the endurance runner and the mystical Sphinx, a “consummate master of the stage,” the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis says, on the brink of her birthday and her solo debut at Carnegie Hall, where she will perform with the New York Pops, conducted by Steve Reineke, on March 24.

Maye is famous for many things: She made 76 television appearances (the most of any singer) on “The Tonight Show” and was a friend and favourite of Ella Fitzgerald’s. She works nonstop all over the country, and has had hit runs with birthday concerts, including 10 sold-out nights at 54 Below in Manhattan called “94, Of Course, There’s More.”

Poster for Marilyn Maye's 95th birthday concert live stream at 54Below, New York, 
May 27, 2023

Michael Feinstein, the singer and founder of the Great American Songbook Foundation, calls her “more than an entertainer and a great musician — she is a life force that awakens something in other people.” For her fans, Carnegie Hall marks a long-awaited opportunity to see her celebrated in high style after eight decades of commitment to the strange, confounding world of cabaret singing, which has as many casualties as queens.

What really astounds her colleagues, though, is not only that she has survived and remains committed, but that Maye’s humour, spirit and above all her voice are in the best shape of her career. Shining octogenarians in saloon singing, like the great Mabel Mercer were seated and largely speaking their songs; Maye never sits down, and her delivery has never been as effortless.

One secret may be her equanimity: Carnegie Hall will be the most important night of her life … and just another gig in a year, like all her years, jammed with travel, devoted audiences, parties, mentoring, master classes and a steady rush of concerts on any and all-sized stages. She is omnipresent: a photograph of last year’s edition of “Broadway Bares,” the annual midnight benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, reveals her smiling in the front row.

Another secret might lie, perhaps, in her eclectic approach: Maye sings jazz, but she acts jazz too. She enters a song, her life experience colouring every phrase. One admirer, the actress Tyne Daly, calls Maye’s “an evolved technique” that is “emotionally smart.” “She’s totally in the room,” Daly says, “and to tell the story, she uses everything she knows, so far.”

A typical Maye set list — she is famous for putting it together at the last moment — might begin with “Look of the Silver Lining”, a song introduced by the 1920’s star Marilyn Miller for whom Maye was named by her stage-struck mother. It will then often curve into a long set of medleys — she is known in the trade as “Medley Maye” — in which, say, six songs about smiling, from the 1928 “When You’re Smiling” to James Taylor’s “Your Smiling Face,” might intertwine.

First published in The New York Times, March 15, 2023

*Melissa Errico is an actress, singer and frequent contributor to The Times. Her latest album is “Out of the Dark: The Film Noir Project.”