Pop: Ballad of the Sad Cafe Singer

“Sadness,” says Singer Carmen McRae, “is more realistic than happiness. Everybody has had at least one unhappy affair of the heart. When I sing the sad love songs, that’s when I really get down to serious business.”

Last week, at Mister Kelly’s in Chicago, Carmen got down to serious business with an ironic, wistful version of Guess Who I Saw Today, a yearning For Once in My Life, a bittersweet Too Good. Her low-pitched, plangent voice was hazed over by the elusive quality that Carol Channing once described as “a haunt.” Her heavy-lidded gaze expressed a wise and womanly woe, and her eyes glinted now and then with the mockery of someone whose only answer to trouble is to survive it. Transported by her own melancholy, she suffused the room with the essential yet all too rare illusion of popular singing: that she was telling her listeners about her own experiences.

Carmen, 46, achieves that illusion by getting inside a song the way an actress gets inside a role. Before she can perform a number to her satisfaction, she has to “live with it” for months; she molds its line and beat like a favorite sofa pillow, until it fits the contour of her feelings. Her melodic embellishments and languidly spread rhythms, no matter how pleasing in themselves, are there only to cushion her dramatic projection of the lyrics. Instead of letting herself be sung by the song, she sings it — and then some.

The daughter of a Manhattan health-club manager, Carmen took classical piano lessons as a child, decided to become a singer after falling under the spell of the great Billie Holiday. During the ’40s she worked intermittently as a band vocalist, filling in the gaps with jobs as a secretary and chorus girl. By the time a Chicago club hired her as a singer-pianist in 1948, she was so broke that she had to borrow money from the owner to join the local union. But in the early ’50s, when she stepped out from behind the piano as a solo singer, her first recordings and appearances in major jazz spots marked her at last as something special.

Too special, by the topsy-turvy standards of music’s mass marketers. Her reputation as a jazz singer, a singer’s singer, has scared off many of the big hotel and nightclub bookers. Record companies have never fully succeeded in capturing the vibrancy of her in-person performances. Musicians, jazz buffs and devoted followers have long recognized that she has everything that Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee have except their success. But somehow the realization has remained a secret from the public at large.

That is enough to make anybody sad. It might explain the flinty edge of conviction in her voice when she sings:

Each time things start to happen again

I think I got something good goin’ for myself;

But what goes wrong? . . .

I guess I just wasn’t made for these times.