JazzObituaryMark Murphy obituary
Innovative and influential US jazz vocalistThe American jazz vocalist Mark Murphy, who has died aged 83, could sound like a pretty convincing conventional crooner when he wanted to, but he spent most of his colourful career distancing himself from popular music’s mainstream as a fearless innovator. “People say I’m a risk-taker, I’m on the edge,” he once said. “But I had to be there, because that was the only place that wasn’t overcrowded.”
Murphy’s vocals were often like fast-moving Charlie Parker saxophone solos, peppered with jittery yelps, falsetto sounds and dissonant feuds with the underlying chords. But as the critic Will Friedwald put it: “He doesn’t abstract and skewer a song merely for the sake of being different, but to get at its inner meaning. By making you think differently about a song you’ve heard before, he makes it relevant and meaningful all over again.”
As a consequence Murphy’s influence was immense among jazz vocalists, and his name consistently comes up alongside the late Betty Carter’s when the most influential heirs to such jazz-singing originals as Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Jon Hendricks are considered. Despite his reputation for experimentation, Murphy could also seduce the unaware with long baritone purrs as hypnotically resonant as Frank Sinatra’s, and his handling of the Great American Songbook was so audaciously accomplished that stars as luminous as Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and Sammy Davis Jr admired it.
He made more than 40 albums, received six Grammy nominations, and worked over the years with jazz celebrities such as Clark Terry, David Sanborn, and the Brecker Brothers.
Murphy was born in Syracuse, New York, and raised by music-loving parents – his father, Dwight, was a trained singer and the local methodist church choirmaster, while his jazz-loving mother, Margaret, also sang. The young Murphy began piano lessons from the age of seven, listened to his uncle’s jazz records, became entranced by the voice of Nat King Cole, and sang in his brother’s dance band as a teenager, before studying music and theatre at Syracuse University. In 1953, his graduation year, Sammy Davis Jr heard Murphy singing at a jam session and invited him to perform in his stage show. A first television appearance followed, on Steve Allen’s popular The Tonight Show, and Murphy’s recording and touring career blossomed from the late 1950s onwards – notably with popular versions of Allen’s hit composition This Could Be the Start of Something Big (1959), a distinctive account of Fly Me To The Moon (1963), and some swashbucklingly confident sessions for prestigious labels, including Capitol and Riverside, that included the sophisticated 1961 album Rah, with its athletic vocalese (singing lyrics on the melodies of famous instrumental solos).
After a brief spell in Los Angeles he recalibrated his career in the face of Beatlemania’s impact on jazz sales by basing himself in London from 1963 onwards. There he had a parallel career as an actor, singing in the 1967 British comedy film Just Like a Woman, while also performing in clubs and on radio across Europe. He returned to the US in 1973 and eventually settled in San Francisco, where he began a creative run of recordings for the Muse label – notably Mark Murphy Sings, in 1975, with its John Coltrane and Herbie Hancock covers, and the singer’s own lyrics to trumpeter Freddie Hubbard’s On the Red Clay. Murphy also wrote words to Oliver Nelson’s seductively swinging Stolen Moments, and his search for distinctive texts memorably led him to splice classic bebop themes and hipster prose from Jack Kerouac’s On The Road into his acclaimed 1981 session, Bop for Kerouac.
That unusual venture helped to reinvigorate Murphy’s commercially uneven career in the 1980s, particularly in Europe. He worked with the celebrated Swiss pianist and Berlin jazz festival director George Gruntz’s Concert Jazz Band in 1989, and from 1991 regularly visited the University of Music and Performing Arts, in Graz, Austria, to teach. He won DownBeat magazine’s readers’ poll as best jazz vocalist in 1996 and 1997, and again in 2000 and 2001. He made a fine series of recordings for the HighNote label in the late 90s and early 2000s, with Some Time Ago (1999) including an exquisite version of the British singer Norma Winstone’s lyrics on The Peacocks, and vigorous visits to the blues on the Joe Williams tribute album Memories of You (2003).
The currency of Murphy’s work with younger listeners – which had grown with the late 80s rediscovery of his 1961 cover of Miles Davis’s Milestones by acid-jazz DJs – continued with his spoken-word role on 4hero’s Creating Patterns album (2001) and inclusion on dance-oriented compilations such as the Kings of Jazz (2006), picked by the British-based DJ Gilles Peterson and the German chill-out collective Jazzanova. His 2005 album Once to Every Heart (made with the trumpeter Till Brönner) hovered on the edge of lounge jazz but still contained characteristic Murphy flashes of irony or anguish. On 2007’s Love Is What Stays, the then 75-year-old Murphy let his inimitable chemistry of 1950s crooner sounds and bop-scat fireworks loose on a tracklist including songs by Johnny Cash, Nelson and Coldplay with much of his trademark intelligence, wit, bruised optimism and delicacy of nuance. The singer Liza Minnelli reputedly said of him, “there’s a party going on in Mark’s head, and I want to go to it”. In youth or old age, whether ecstatic or pensive, Murphy always revealed the hunger for life that made him such a captivating artist and engaging human being.
His partner, Eddie O’Sullivan, died in 1990. He is survived by his sister, Sheila.
Mark Howe Murphy, jazz singer, born 14 March 1932; died 22 October 2015
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