Marlena Shaw, who cultivated a sensual stage presence and a husky voice from the final echoes of the big band era, to the go-go Playboy Clubs of the 1960s, the rise of funk, disco and, finally, the modern cabaret circuit, Died on January 19. She was 84 years old.
His daughter MarLa Bradshaw announced his death on social media but did not share any further details.
Ms. Shaw first came into the public eye in the mid-1960s, when she performed at Playboy clubs around the country. Describing one of those performances of hers in 1966, the Los Angeles Times called her a “beautiful singer,” but also called her “the surprise of the bill.” That same year, Jet magazine reported that “three record companies waved contracts in his face” after an engagement in New York.
He signed to Cadet Records, which in 1967 released his recording of “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy”, a vocal version of the Joe Zawinul song that had been a hit for Cannonball Adderley. It reached number 58 on the Billboard pop chart and number 33 on the R&B chart.
She also caught the attention of Count Basie, who invited Ms. Shaw to try out for a job singing with his band.
He traveled to Las Vegas for an audition. “I have to admit,” he recalled to The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1975, “that when I was first asked to sing with the Count I thought he was dead.”
Halfway through one of his songs, Basie left. Mrs. Shaw was not surprised: she didn't think she had any chance at the job.
Then he reappeared with two glasses of Courvoisier in his hand. She handed one to Mrs. Shaw.
“Don't force your voice,” he told her, he recalled to The Inquirer. “Save the pipes; You’ll need them tonight.”
He sang with his band for several years.
“From Basie I learned that you can put on a good show without having to go at a frenetic pace,” Shaw told The San Francisco Examiner in 1977.
He also toured and performed with Sammy Davis Jr., but in the early 1970s he embarked primarily on a solo career.
He began to develop a style that was half mischievous and half melancholic.
Jazz label Blue Note released their album “Who Is This Bitch, Anyway?” in 1975, her theme song, “You Me and Ethel / Street Walkin' Woman”, featured a parody in which Shaw played an imposing and intelligent but depressed prostitute; She works, she says slyly, in “social services,” gently disposing of a would-be client who offers just $25. The album's liner notes said that, for her, her songs narrated “some of the scenes I've experienced.”
He transformed himself once again in 1979 with a fast-paced disco album, “Take a Bite.” Although she continued to release albums until 2004, she never found success as a recording artist. Journalists often noted that she had not gained the recognition or celebrity that was once expected of her.
“Marlena Shaw is one of those enduring performers, a reliable force in jazz even when she's not at the top of the charts,” jazz critic Josef Woodard concluded in The Los Angeles Times in 2001.
Live performance became the center of his career. In 2003, she worked 175 appointments a year. She was inspired to sing gospel after trying the style on a jazz-themed cruise. She studied how to relate to the public, regaling them with bawdy stories. When she sang “You've Changed,” a ballad made famous by Billie Holiday, she was reminded of a cross-dressing boyfriend.
Not everyone enjoyed the trick. In 1978, New York Times music critic John Rockwell praised Shaw's ability to turn even “the simplest songs” into “jazz extravaganzas” but deplored his use of “the elegantly vulgar sexual mimicry that is so popular.” in the dinner”. -Club circuit.
Another Times critic, Stephen Holden, took the opposite view. “His outstanding skill is the ability to interpolate humorous, semi-improvised comments within songs, in a variety of musical styles, which makes them personal testimony,” he wrote in 1987.
In 2005, when Shaw was performing at the Le Jazz Au Bar cabaret in Manhattan, Holden found that his performance had retained the kind of appeal it had almost 20 years earlier.
“She evokes the battle of the sexes, which she says is ongoing and ultimately hopeless,” Holden wrote. “Her weapon of choice is a voice with the edge of a butcher knife.”
Marlina Burgess was born on September 22, 1939 in New Rochelle, New York. She grew up singing in a church choir and during her childhood she performed at the Apollo Theater. She hoped to go on tour with her uncle, a trumpeter named Jimmy Burgess, but her mother forbade it. She later adopted Marlena Shaw as her stage name.
One night, when Ms. Shaw was in her twenties, she was at a bowling alley when a friend of hers insisted that she ask the leader of the band performing there if she could sing. With the courage of two beers, Mrs. Shaw introduced herself. She got a job singing at the venue for $15 a night.
By the mid-1970s, she had five children and was married to Ed Boyer, a bassist, but family life did not stop her from touring. “We talk about problems on the phone when I'm traveling,” she said of her relationship with her children in a 1977 interview with The Oakland Tribune. “They are very kind about my trips.”
Ms. Shaw lived in Las Vegas for decades. She did not have complete information about the survivors.
In recent decades, some of Shaw's records provided soundtracks for television commercials and sampling material, including “California Soul” (which was used by KFC and Dockers) and “Woman of the Ghetto” (which was sampled by Fat Joe and Beenie). Man, among others).
Before her death, her birth year was usually listed as 1942 or 1944, but her daughter wrote in her death announcement that she was actually born in 1939. On that topic, Ms. Shaw once told the Oakland Tribune that He had learned a lesson from Sammy Davis Jr.: “He taught me to use everything I have on stage; “I don't hold anything back except my age.”
