Marilyn Maye
‘By Request’
54 Below
Eight Performances, October 10 to November 25

Several times a year, a tiny, elderly woman with bright golden hair and an even brighter gold jacket takes the stage at the underground club called 54 Below, and, when she opens her mouth, magic happens.

Marilyn Maye does both a spring show — usually around the time of her birthday in April; her 2025 project will be to turn 97 — and a fall show at 54 Below, as well as special holiday appearances at Birdland. For this run, both the singer herself and the club have promised a new program, and what she has delivered is mostly a set of material we haven’t heard her do in a while, some of which can safely be described as new.  

It should be stressed that for Ms. Maye, performing new material is almost irrelevant; one gets the impression she has so many loyal fans that she’ll continue to sell out every performance regardless of whether she varies the setlist.

As always, she begins with a zingy uptempo: Sometimes it’s “Get Happy” followed by “I Love Being Here With You,” both of which have well-oiled audience participation bits, and then “It’s Today” from “Mame.” This time around she begins with “The Song is You,” spiced up with baroque variations that don’t seem quite so classical since she and the trio are swinging hard; that detours briefly through “I Hear Music,” which is played as a samba.  

This concept of interjecting another song — it’s more than a mere quotation — is something that Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Tormé perfected, and they both had their own approaches to the idea. The same is true for Ms. Maye, who in this case at least not only switches songs but rhythmic modes.

She’s been doing a version of this “Song Is You”/”I Hear Music” collage for more than 50 years — it’s on her breakthrough 1965 album “First of Maye” and she performed it on at least one “Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson — but has never sounded better or more swinging than when playing with her current trio, led by pianist Tedd Firth and with bassist Tom Hubbard and drummer Mark McLean.

From there she keeps the beat going, but in an entirely different way. When Harold Adamson and Jimmy McHugh wrote “It’s a Most Unusual Day” for a teen soprano in the MGM musical “A Date With Judy,” Jane Powell, it was an uptempo but traditional waltz that conveyed youthful exuberance and innocence. Ms. Maye’s take is more mature but no less energetic, a true 6/4 jazz waltz. And then it’s onto “No Bad News” from “The Wiz,” a show tune that allows her to get into a funky and soulful groove.

The energy level rises even higher for the next 20 minutes or so: She flies into three extended medleys built around three iconic African American pianist-composer-bandleaders, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, and Ray Charles. It’s almost a medley of medleys. 

Is Ms. Maye changing her show? The question seems moot for another reason — there’s so much changing going on no matter what show she does. In this sequence of medleys especially, she constantly changes keys, changes grooves, changes moods, even changes songs: Nothing stays the same very long. Between the continual shifting of the material and the general high uptempo beat, the excitement level reaches an unbelievable pinnacle of intensity.

From there, the temperature almost literally has to cool down, and she easies into a song that announces the shift in moods with its very title, “Lazy Afternoon.” Even then, she barely takes the time to fully finish a whole song before segueing into “Country Boy,” another waltz, but this time a slow and bittersweet one.

Lately I’m discovering that in my own more mature years, I’m increasingly enjoying the middle section of Ms. Maye’s shows more than anything. Where in the first section she grew increasingly fast and furious, now she gets ever slower and sadder. From merely melancholy to bittersweet, she gradually turns the dial up to full-on melodrama. She turns “Ribbons Down My Back” — introduced by another living legend, Sondra Lee, who turned 93 a few days ago — which someone more intellectually driven than I might describe as a song about the male gaze, into a powerful and personal statement.

Yet even here, the music never pauses, which is her variation on a device perfected by three rather different musician-entertainers, Jimmy Durante, Louis Prima, and Miles Davis. “Ribbons” becomes a kind of intro into an autumnal medley, ending with Johnny Mercer and Barry Manilow’s “When October Goes,” a song that never quite speaks to me unless it’s being sung by Ms. Maye or the late Rosemary Clooney.  

She builds to high drama with a much-requested aria of love and betrayal, “Guess Who I Saw Today,” and then a complex story narrative about a completely different kind of love, “Fifty Percent.” Both of these are contrasted with the more wistful “Misty” and the more overtly comic 1981 country hit “Rich Man.”  

In the final phase, she grows philosophical, with James Taylor’s “Secret o’ Life” and “Here’s to Life,” by arranger-composer Artie Butler and lyricist Phyllis Molinary. Nearly every modulation from one phase to another necessitates at least one standing ovation.

Perhaps the single most amazing aspect of the artistry of Marilyn Maye is how she stays in the true emotional core of each song, no matter how fast it flies by, avoiding sentimentality on one side and cynicism on the other. People talk about her as if it were amazing that someone her age — I’ll say it again, 96 — can perform on such a high level, but for me it’s just the opposite. I feel sorry for anyone who tries to do what she does without her talent, intelligence, and many decades of professional experience.