The cat with the scat: Mark Murphy, the singer’s singer.

Idols

The Last Beat

This month on obscuria’s abandoned jukebox, a jazz singer supreme reflects on the end.

Mark Murphy Love Is What Stays

VERVE, 2007

W HEN ELLA FITZGERALD did an impromptu scat-singing duet of Tea For Two with Mark Murphy at Ronnie Scott’s in 1968, she memorably declared, “he’s as good as I am.” Scott Walker and Dusty Springfield also loved Murphy’s singing, while Liza Minnelli is credited with the words, “There’s a party goin’ on in Mark’s head and I want to go to it.”

Yet mainstream acclaim was always denied him. A wildly expressive, tirelessly explorative and technically virtuosic jazz singer born in Syracuse, New York in 1932, his mind opened to the music in the presence of Peggy Lee and Nat ‘King’ Cole, among others. After debuting with Meet Mark Murphy in 1956, his was a long career of imminent but never realised lift-offs.

Moves to Los Angeles and Britain followed, as did, in the decades that followed, recordings for multiple labels – LP concepts included Jack Kerouac, UFOs and Latin re-imaginings of Cole Porter – which earned him the “singer’s singer” tag, not to mention acclaim on London’s ’80s acid jazz scene. A restless, wandering talent given to off-the-wall scatting, his output was frequently deemed too jazz even for jazz fans. An unrepentant wearer of the most unconvincing wigs, his worldview was also one of an in-the-moment, unfettered beatnik: in Peter Jones’ excellent 2018 Murphy biography This Is Hip, the singer’s friend Roger Treece called him, “probably the least (well) adapted human being that I’ve ever met to living in this world.”