No Dimming This Star of the 1930s

This year marks the centennial of the pioneering crooner Russ Columbo. Fittingly, the date was celebrated with a special performance three weeks ago at Charley O's in Times Square by the singer and scholar Gregory Moore, who assembled an 11-piece band for the occasion. Four years after Columbo's birth, another iconic pop singer, Tony Martin (née Alvin Morris), was born. He would enjoy a much longer career and, in his own way, weave himself into the fabric of American popular music. But when 2012 arrives and it comes time to honor to Mr. Martin on the occasion of his own centennial, we have every reason to hope that he will be here to do it for us.

In fact, the singer, who turned 95 last month, opened a week-long engagement at Feinstein's at the Regency on Tuesday and, from the way he's sounding, it feels like he will be with us forever. It would be amazing for anyone, from a plumber to a politician to a novelist, to continue to "do do that voodoo" (as Cole Porter would have put it) as well as Mr. Martin is doing in his mid-90s. So, considering that he has long enjoyed one of the most important careers in American pop, his is one of the most essential New York nightclub engagements we will ever experience, at least in this millennium. Mr. Martin is a modern miracle of music: He may not possess the lung power he had in 1950, but he still has his beautiful, agile, basement-level baritone, remarkable control and flexibility, and just plain chops, both vocally and mentally. Not to mention his sense of humor — when he played two nights at Feinstein's in October, after singing a chorus in Italian on "There's No Tomorrow (aka 'Ole Solo Mio')," he drolly commented, "I didn't learn that in Hebrew school."

Mr. Martin was already an aspiring singer in 1930, when both Crosby and Columbo achieved their initial breakthroughs. By the late '30s, when he was regularly turning out hit records and appearing as a leading man in movie musicals (and marrying the premier song-and-dance gal of the era, Alice Faye), he was already one of the singers whom younger singers (like Tony Bennett) were listening to.

At Feinstein's, Mr. Martin talks about attending law school before the early recordings of Crosby and Columbo inspired him to try his luck in showbiz. Surprisingly, the Oakland, Calif., native doesn't mention that he started as a reed player in Bay-Area dance bands. His foundation as an instrumentalist undoubtedly contributes to the musicality of his singing: Even in Hollywood, he was more than just another cleft-jawed romantic lead who played straight man to the Marx Brothers. In 1951, at the height of his fame as a top-of-the-pops hit maker, he played the Copacabana with a backup band that included the guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli. ("Every night, Tony took out his clarinet and played a whole set for dancers — just because he enjoyed it," Mr. Pizzarelli said recently. "He was good, too!")

In fact, Mr. Martin figures twice in pop history: In the '30s, he was one of the first movie baritones to follow Crosby, when most of the competitors were still old-fashioned tenors like Dick Powell. During World War II, Mr. Martin put his personal life and career on hold to sing with Major Glenn Miller's Army Air Force Band. Following the war, it took him a few years to find his footing, but by the end of the '40s he had staged a huge and ultimately lasting comeback and wooed the actress Cyd Charisse, to whom he is still married 60 years later.

To hear Mr. Martin talk about it, the record labels considered him a B-list boy singer who had to make do with castoffs that the Alisters rejected. Yet it all worked to his benefit: In 1938, Crosby decided he'd rather go on vacation than sing Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine," giving Mr. Martin the chance to record the hit vocal version. A generation later, he cut a hit adaptation of "O Sole Mio" because Perry Como couldn't get excited over that ancient Roman chestnut. (Mr. Martin later, and with equal generosity, bequeathed it to Elvis Presley, who re-titled the song "It's Now or Never.") When he sings it at Feinstein's, he throws his neck and shoulders back in a classic pose, raising his arms as if in the start of an embrace.

Mr. Martin was a major presence in the early years of postwar pop, constantly on the charts, on the air, and on screens large and small, with songs that spanned the globe and the time line. Apart from Porter's Martinique "Beguine" and his many Jolly Neapolitan airs, there's "I Get Ideas," a hit tango that raised the ire of the censors, and "La Vie En Rose," which he was inspired to do by Edith Piaf when he met her in Paris.

At Feinstein's, he sang virtually the whole show perfectly from memory without a music stand or cheat sheet of any kind, even the 108-bar "Beguine." Apart from these international escapades, the meat of his show comprised top-drawer standards like "You Stepped Out of a Dream" (which he introduced in "Ziegfeld Girl" in 1941) and "Let's Face the Music and Dance," which he interprets with a combination of emotion and intellect, illustrating what the late lyricist E. Y. Harburg meant when he described a generation that knew the difference between sentiment and sentimentality.

In October, when Michael Feinstein introduced Mr. Martin, he spoke of how the singer had recently performed at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles. As it turned out, he had worked the same venue years before, when it was under a different name. Mr. Martin couldn't remember exactly when that was, but there was a movie playing across the street at the time, and he remembered it was "Rain," starring Joan Crawford. "Do you realize that was 1932?" Mr. Feinstein asked.

"You see?" Mr. Martin answered. "They liked me so much that they brought me back!"

wfriedwald@nysun.com

Mr. Martin continues his engagement through Saturday (540 Park Ave. at East 61st Street, 212-339-4095).