This morning's walk to campus, though today's rainy weather and falling autumn elves made the perfect backdrop for listening to one of my all time favorite albums. How I wish Miss Mars would record more.....Review by Michael Mascioli
Janice Mars is a mere footnote in the history of popular music. It's safe to say she's never been discussed at any length anywhere but in James Gavin's fascinating Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret (a book which keeps alive the memory of many otherwise forgotten artists like Spivy, Nan Blakstone, Rae Bourbon, Dwight Fiske, and Claire Hogan). In it, Gavin touches on Mars' reign, at 33, as the proprietor of—and sole singer at—her own club, the tiny Baq Room on 6th Avenue in the late 1950s. There her following was comprised of the New York cognoscenti, including Judy Holliday, Lauren Bacall, Richard Burton, Comden & Green, Noel Coward—and Marlon Brando, in whose study the master tapes for Mars' only album—never released— were stored for safekeeping for the last 40 years. The recent, long-overdue release of the CD Introducing Janice Mars moves her at last out of the footnotes and onto the main page, alongside more famous— but no more talented—names, where she rightfully belongs.
On the CD cover Janice Mars looks mild, staid—even (dare I say it?) a little boring—and inside there's an old newspaper photo of her holding court at the Baq Room (Tennessee Williams sits ringside), looking for all the world like the quintessential boite chanteuse— sort of a white Mabel Mercer, only standing up. So imagine the shock of playing this recording for the first time and hearing an opening blast of trumpets and a huge orchestra building to a crescendo to herald Janice, who makes a bold entrance, blaring, "Damn the city!! I'm SICK of the whole city!" It's the beginning of Baldwin Bergersen & Phyllis McGinley's ultra-obscure and ultra-charming Commuter Song, from their 1948 revue Small Wonder. Mars quickly relaxes and begins to extol the joys of quasi-pastoral living:
Got a bee in my turbanThat I'd like to be suburbanAnd live among the vegetables and fruit...Let's be commuters and commute.
The scenery's pretty and life is swellIn Garden City and New RochelleAnd every morning, come rain or sun,We can hurry in a flurry to the 8:01....
And every night when work is doneI think we might have a lot of funFor the very best families get begunBetween the 5:08 and the 8:01.
(Bergersen, incidentally, also served as Mars' accompanist at the Baq Room.)
Janice Mars is essentially a dramatic singer, and she shares the fluttering, heartthrob vibrato of Judy Garland and Edith Piaf, as well as the latter's hearty, authoritative, clarion style. Indeed, Mars was considered by some to be America's young answer to Piaf. Both her singing and her interpretations are—there is no other word for it— charged. But she also owes much to Eartha Kitt and to other theatrical singers who trod the floorboards a block or two west of the Baq Room during Broadway's golden age—belters like Susan Johnson and, especially, Eileen Rodgers, whom, along with Kitt, I would name as the singer Mars most sounds like, though clearly only by coincidence, not by calculation or imitation. But Mars is, I think, more capable than either of examining all the layers and levels of emotion and color below, shall we say, "the belt." She can be sweet and tender, girlish and genuinely vulnerable when necessary— witness her readings of When the World Was Young (which must be the quintessential cabaret song), Nobody Told Me (also from Small Wonder) and especially the first half of Bye Bye Blackbird (before it begins to build, thrillingly).
That same Broadway sensibility invests her with a sparkling personality, a sense of fun and lightness missing from so many other self-consciously serious, even somber, singers, especially these days. After all, musicals used to be called musical comedies. On Yip Harburg & Harold Arlen's "mockalypso" I Don't Think I'll End It All Today (from Lena Horne's Broadway vehicle Jamaica) you can almost see Mars sashaying and swishing her skirts as she grinningly makes her way through a list of ways to end it all—only not today.
Throughout, she is supported by vibrant instrumental settings created by the triple-threat combination of orchestrator Ted Royal, arranger Don Evans and conductor Milt Rosenstock (who, significantly, was the Musical Director for classic shows like Funny Girl, Gypsy, Finian's Rainbow, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Bells are Ringing and Can-Can). Their combined talents add infinite excitement and color to the proceedings.
The CD contains a dozen songs—her entire recorded legacy—including a hidden bonus track, her commanding version of The Battle Hymn of the Republic (of all things) which, legend has it, a very young Janis Joplin would come to hear Janice sing. I also especially like her uber-dramatic version of Winter of My Discontent (a song I never enjoyed before) by Alec Wilder and Benedict Berenberg—who, it turns out, was Mars' first husband. If she performed this at the Baq Room with this kind of intensity, they're probably still scraping the audience off the walls.
Rounding out the esoteric yet accessible program are Duke Ellington & John LaTouche's Take Love Easy, Lilac Wine (earlier popularized by Eartha Kitt), The World is Your Balloon (from the famous '51 flop Flahooley, starring Barbara Cook—and Yma Sumac!), Take it Slow, Joe (also from Jamaica ), and Frank Loesser's Inchworm (strangely, a big favorite with jazz and cabaret singers.)
Introducing Janice Mars has fast become one of my desert island discs. Of course, my desert island is populated by singers like Frances Faye, Elaine Stritch, Susan Johnson and Kay Thompson—confident, assertive, big-voiced women considered a little sharp, a little edgy, a little too Broadway by some, especially, I would think, by today's growing coterie of jazz snobs.
It's said that Janice Mars (who is alive and well in New Mexico) mistrusted fame and sometimes even seemed to sabotage her own career—surprising considering her enormous, self-evident talent. We can only thank the gods that two members of her family decided to resurrect and release these important recordings as a "late-blooming gift" to Janice. And that Marlon Brando keeps his study so well organized.
To one and all here's wishing you health wealth, peace and bliss!
