Molly Hammer battles breast cancer for a second time, but it won’t stop her from singing

The first time I saw Molly Hammer sing was a little less than a year ago. It was at the now shuttered Broadway Jazz Club. Hammer was playing an early set to fewer than a dozen patrons. She stood on the odd, angular stage, facing a dark room as the waning summer sun slowly set behind her.

Hammer didn’t seem to mind the scarce audience. Accompanied by a pianist and a bass player, she unspooled a robust set of jazz standards infused with an energy all her own. Her smile appeared frequently, a bright flash of diamonds between red-painted lips. Her Colleen Moore-inspired bob shook with every toss of her head. This is a woman who knows how to hold a room, I furiously scribbled in my notebook.

Hammer, a 43-year-old veteran of both jazz and theater, still knows how to hold a room. But over the next few months, she will appear in fewer of them. Most of her time, she says, will be spent fighting Stage 4 (metastatic) breast cancer.

“When I first got the news [earlier this month], I cried and cried and cried,” Hammer tells me. “I was eight years in remission. It was 2008 — the first time I was diagnosed — and I went past the five-year mark, which is supposed to be huge for breast cancer. Then, eight years in, I had some symptoms.”

It’s a clear day, and Hammer is sitting in a sunny window seat at the Filling Station in Overland Park, near her home. She’s wearing a canary-yellow cardigan with a cerulean scarf; with her red hair, she is the perfect triangle of primary colors. Her makeup accentuates her eyes, almond-shaped and focused. She frequently stretches in her seat, a series of yoga moves meant to combat the soreness settling into her body. She drinks a fresh beet juice, and she pushes back a grimace with every swallow.

“I’m trying to like beets,” she says, “‘cause cancer.” She lightly raises her glass in a toast, smiling wryly.

Hammer speaks with an actor’s diction, clear-voiced and enunciating every syllable. She studied theater and worked as an actress for years before making the switch to a career in jazz. Acting, she says, lost its charm.

“I grew weary of being told exactly what to say and where to say it,” she says. “‘Take two steps down stage, look to the right and sing these notes exactly.’ I felt like I was a bird in a cage, and I wanted to step out and make my own choices.”

In 2012, Hammer left the theater to study jazz under legendary pianist Joe Cartwright. In the years since, she has established herself as one of Kansas City’s most recognizable and original voices.

“Always, in the back of my mind, I secretly wanted to be a jazz singer,” she says. “But you can’t just wake up one morning and call yourself that. You have to start slow and learn as much as you can, and that’s what I did, and I discovered that it’s what I’m meant to do. As a jazz singer, I felt like I had more creative freedom over my material. I could put my own setlist together and pick out tunes that I wanted to play. I wasn’t being told exactly where to stand.”

For the most part, though, Hammer is still taking someone else’s material and delivering it to an audience that knows what to expect before the first chord is through. That doesn’t bother her. Hammer has always loved the standards and the strong women — Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee, Dinah Washington — who made them classics.

“To connect with your audience, it doesn’t matter if you’re singing a song that’s 60 years old,” Hammer says. “If they’re feeling you, then they’re with you. You tell the story because the stories are timeless, and in the best-case scenario, you’re telling the story from your own specific viewpoint — and that’s always going to be interesting.”

Hammer’s viewpoint is complicated these days, but she’s not letting it shake her. She plans to keep as many gigs on her calendar as she can, including the bimonthly Saturday set at the Green Lady Lounge.

“My hope right now is for me to do a lot of gigs, but there’s just no way of knowing for sure,” she says. “I’m in a situation now where I’m fighting for my life, and I’m continuing to sing as often as I can, but getting my health in check is priority number one. I made a decision that I will do as many gigs as I can unless they’re gigs that stress me out a whole lot — the less stress, the better right now.”

Aside from the cancer, Hammer has a whole other issue to face: what treatment looks like without health insurance.

“Too often, we as professional musicians put self-care aside in the pursuit of gigging,” she says. “It’s what I did. And I’ve accomplished so much in the last few years, and I’m so happy with that aspect of my life, but I’d be stupid to say I don’t regret not making sure I carved out time for self-care. It’s so easy to keep saying, ‘Oh, I’ll get it [health insurance] next month. I can’t afford it right now. Let’s just see if this weird symptom clears up in the next couple weeks.’”

Hammer is hoping to help combat the cost of treatment with donations to a Go Fund Me page (she’s close to $19,000 — nearly 20 percent of what she needs to raise), plus some financial assistance from the Midwest Music Foundation. She says there’s a team of social workers at KU Medical Center helping her get paperwork together, and that they will try every avenue for financial relief until something works out. She says this calmly, purposefully.
What she doesn’t say is that metastatic breast cancer, though treatable, is incurable. There will be no possibility of remission; there is only living with it from here on out. It is a grim diagnosis. But Hammer is ready for a fight.

“I’m resolved not to get depressed,” she says. “I’m resolved to stay hopeful until there’s just no more reason for hope, which I don’t see happening. I think the worst thing people can do when they hear words like ‘stage four’ is give up or assume the persona of the sick person. I’m determined not to be a sick person and to be as healthy as I possibly can. I’ll do whatever I have to do.”

Molly Hammer
Saturday, April 23, 2-5 p.m.
Green Lady Lounge
1809 Grand

Molly Hammer with Paul Shinn, Bob Bowman and Todd Strait
Saturday, May 28, 3-6 p.m.
Green Lady Lounge
1809 Grand