On Music
COOK, BRUCE
On Music EXCELLENCE INAN UNEXPECTED PLACE BY BRUCE COOK WHENEVER I go to Houston I make it a point to stay at that downtown monument to mammon, the Hyatt Regency. It's not the see-through...
...And in the Nevada casino lounges, a singer can't win...
...though people may like you, there is nothing they can do about it...
...There is no harder work for a performer...
...Hearing the two of them was a treat...
...The better part of a lifetime has gone into learning that repertoire and developing the style...
...And several customers weren't listening closely...
...At its bottom, though, it reaches comfortably into the male tenor range, something few female voices can do...
...She says she must have played every club in Houston before finding a home at the Hyatt Regency...
...Mildred Jones uses this instrument with delicacy and subtlety...
...Not long after, she married, and took time out to have two children...
...It suits her, and people who like her know where they can find her...
...That's right, a lounge singer, the vocalist who competes with conversation and the clink of swizzle sticks in glasses, the one who has to know the words to "The Yellow Rose of Texas" and "Pistol-Packin' Mama" to satisfy requests from insistent drunks...
...Their collaboration on Matt Dennis' "Angel Eyes" was superb, too...
...And her range is remarkable...
...At its top it goes, as a good, natural alto should, up into the mezzo-soprano area...
...By 1958, she was back on the road again, playing New York and Los Angeles, being "discovered" half a dozen times, getting national television exposure—and always returning to Houston to raise her son and daughter...
...Yet for those who did, the occasion was one of those lucky accidents underlining the spontaneity that is the essence of American music...
...Mildred Jones holds forth six nights a week at the Back Room of the Hyatt Regency just as she has since February 1973 (with time out for an eight-month stint at the lounge in Harrah's Club in Lake Tahoe, Nevada...
...I stay at the Hyatt Regency because that way I can be sure I'll hear Mildred Jones...
...Yet, in the midst of all the commotion, a voice burst forth, suddenly filling the long rectangle of a room...
...She should also have a recording contract...
...It is not an easy life, but what is hardest in it for someone as talented as Mildred Jones is knowing you are good enough, yet never quite connecting...
...But when somebody asked her to do a blues number, she turned them down cold: "I can't sing the blues," she said...
...It was midway in the evening...
...Born and raised in the small East Texas town of San Augustine, Mildred Jones came to Houston to attend Texas Southern University...
...She began singing in clubs on weekends to help pay her way through college...
...To do the job at all it is necessary to discipline oneself to be indifferent to indifference, to ignore the cigarette and cigar smoke that leaves the throat raw at the end of a night...
...They had brought a blind jazz pianist named Bliss Rodriguez, and at Mildred Jones' invitation, he sat in, accompanying her and doing long solos on every number...
...and the place was fairly empty...
...You have to be good enough to draw customers in, but not so good that they stay away from the gaming tables...
...Her only bad habit is relying on some mannerisms she picked up from Carmen McRae and Delia Reese...
...She has, as any musician would say, "paid her dues.' Her curriculum vitae offers a glimpse into one of those careers spent struggling for recognition...
...Yet no singer 1 know performs with such presence, taste and style—in conditions that to most others, those accustomed to the comparative luxury of concert tours and club dates, would seem utterly intolerable...
...So, barring a call from a record company, the Hyatt Regency offers her the best possible compromise—good working conditions and, except for the hours, a reasonably normal life with her family...
...She also accompanies herself on electric piano, doing the job simply and well, making explicit what was implicit in every note she sang: that she is unquestionably an excellent musician...
...I still find it hard to understand how a singer as good as Mildred Jones could be so long in the business and remain comparatively unknown...
...That evening, Mildred Jones even demonstrated how to make an impossible song, the frequently requested "My Way," possible—by speeding it up, doing it at a walk rather than at the usual dirge tempo...
...Even so, the conversation level was high, a kind of persistent drone punctuated regularly by bursts of shrill laughter...
...While she was working at Harrah's, Mildred Jones' sets were cut short by the management because too many people were listening to her for too long...
...In many respects, the entire experience was typical...
...There were drunks: One spilled his drink over my notebook as I was jotting down my impressions...
...On "Lover Man," she seemed almost transported, completely within the lyrics, consumed by the yearning articulated in this strange, wistful song...
...She's pacified, though not satisfied...
...That, however, was not the problem on the night, about a year ago, that 1 happened into the Hyatt Regency and heard her for the first time...
...So until there is, if you're ever down in Houston...
...Without one, there is simply no point in playing dates around the country, or even going on television...
...The More I See You" came through as just what it is—one of those naive, sweetly solemn love songs from another era—and Rodriguez, bobbing slowly over the keyboard, wrung more from it in his solo than I ever suspected was there...
...In fact, when I heard her recently, the room was well filled, with a good many sitting around the piano who had obviously come to listen...
...She says she knows about a thousand songs, but night in and night out she chooses her material from those familiar two or three hundred that comprise a jazz singer's standard repertoire—very heavy on George Gershwin and Cole Porter, and nothing much new except some Beatles and Stevie Wonder material...
...When, in 1954, the chance came to tour, she grabbed it, going on the road with the B.B...
...Who is Mildred Jones...
...With Rodriguez present, Mildred Jones was able to move away from the piano and concentrate on her singing...
...others included "April in Paris" and "Happy Birthday, Dear Donna...
...It's not the see-through elevator that attracts me, nor the center gallery with its skylight 18 stories up, nor is it the muzak available in each and every room...
...Mildred Jones amended my praise when I talked briefly with her afterward, describing herself as "the best lounge singer who should be in a showroom...
...It would be nice to end this piece by urging you to rush out and buy her new album—but of course there is no new album, nor an old one...
...Today, her son, the older of the two, is a freshman at New Mexico State on a football scholarship...
...My Way" was only one of several requests...
...You must sing material you know to be good, and keep up your own high standards of performance night after night to satisfy yourself and the few—sometimes not even one in a single evening—who come in and really listen...
...She is unquestionably the finest lounge singer in America today...
...She doesn't sing loudly, but she has power, a deep, strong voice...
...A few of these were local musicians...
...A couple of her fans told me that they had never heard Mildred sound better...
...King show...
...The McRae influence must be especially hard to resist since the two women sound rather similar...
...The set they did together lasted for nearly two hours...
...She has quite a following...
...A sense of mutual discovery and respect suffused the entire evening, which became a kind of celebration...
Vol. 59 • March 1976 • No. 5
