Marilyn Maye: alive and really kicking
This week, Kansas City lost one native jazz artist — Pearl Thurston Brown died Monday at age 84 — as another legend, one year younger, was literally kicking up her legs (to great applause, by the way) onstage at Jardine’s. Kansas-born Marilyn Maye turned 83 years old this year and is having the best third act of any of her Girl Singer contemporaries like Rosemary Clooney, Margaret Whiting, Jane Morgan and Kaye Starr (most of them are either long retired or dead).
In the past few years, Maye has been rediscovered by New York City audiences, who have been clamoring for tickets to her Manhattan club dates at Feinstein’s or the Metropolitan Room. She even made it, finally, as a headliner in Carnegie Hall, winning a standing ovation at last year’s 80th birthday tribute to composer Stephen Sondheim. And as an octogenarian, she’s getting the best reviews in her career. A long career: Maye had her own radio show on Topeka’s WIBW when she was 9 years old.
Maye says she won’t retire: “When you stop working, you’re dead,” she said, autographing CDs for patrons attending her 7:30 p.m. show last Sunday at Jardine’s (one of her two sold-out shows that night). She has club and concert dates booked through 2012 and beyond. If any of those venues care about her age, they don’t appear to care. Last month, Maye performed at the Inn at Lake Okoboji in Iowa for the 55th consecutive year. “There’s a new owner there,” Maye says. “He asked me if I wanted a long-term contract. I said yes.”
