Music Review: You Fascinate Me So – Phillip Officer Salutes Mabel Mercer / You Fascinate Me So – 54 Below, New York

You Fascinate Me So: Phillip Officer Salutes Mabel Mercer (Center Stage Records).

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

You Fascinate Me So, 54 Below, New York.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

It is 48 years since I saw Mabel Mercer for the only time at London’s Playboy Club, a little old lady with a black shawl around her shoulders sitting in a chair. Accompanied only on a piano, she held her audience in a spell for an hour and a half.

Barely saying a word and in a half-speaking, cracked singing voice that had seen better days, she hypnotised everyone with song after song delivered in such a stylised, intimate way that we understood exactly where those masterpieces from the Great American Songbook were coming from. The voice might have struggled but the actress in her still burned bright.

Mercer was 77 then but we knew we were in the presence of greatness. After all, it was Frank Sinatra himself who said she had a gift with a song that made other singers think of seeking another occupation (“Everything I learned about phrasing I learned from Mabel Mercer”). She redefined the art of extracting every last nuance from a song. Joni Mitchell said nobody had ever sung ‘Both Sides Now’ with such intelligence.

Sinatra and Mitchell weren’t alone in sitting at Mercer’s feet at her Byline club on East 52nd where she’d sing and sing and sing, sometimes until four in the morning. Peggy Lee, Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, Rosemary Clooney, Cole Porter and even the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were devoted fans, either from her 1930s years at Bricktop’s club in the Rue Pigalle or later, when she was the toast of New York, having married a gay musician – they never lived together but as a devout Catholic she would never divorce him – in order to gain entry to the country where she would in the 1950s take out citizenship.

Not bad for an illegitimate Black English girl from Burton-upon-Trent unwanted by her teenage mother from a vaudevillian music hall family, who never saw her musician father or for 28 years her mother, got dumped in a Catholic school at the age of four by an aunt and started in variety herself at 14. Not only a singer, she acted on stage and screen too, even landing a small part in Show Boat at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1928.

Mercer was such an icon that in 1983, the year before she died, Ronald Reagan awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civil honour, part of the citation reading “for her unique way with a lyric”. He called her “a singers’ singer” and “a living testament to the artfulness of the American song”.

Phillip Officer, a regular performer at the Mabel Mercer Foundation Cabaret Convention held in New York at this time of year, has honoured this legend with this ‘You Fascinate Me So’ album but also with a cabaret at Birdland and 54 Below showcasing the classics he has chosen from the Mercer discography.

Although little known in the UK, he is an excellent old-fashioned singer who does a solid job on numbers like ‘While We’re Young’, ‘Hello, Young Lovers’, ‘I’ve Got Your Number’ and ‘By Myself’ right through to ‘Ballad of the Sad Young Men’, ‘Sail Away’, ‘Fly Me to the Moon’, ‘Both Sides Now’ and ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye’. There probably won’t be a song or a composer you don’t know.

They are all, in the modern vernacular, ‘bangers’ and Officer pays due deference to how Mercer interpreted them. Yet others have sung them as well or better and Mercer fans will have her records so it is hard to see his market despite the expert back-up from MD Mark Hartman on piano, Kevin Kuhn on guitar, Mollie Rose on violin, Saadi Zain on bass and Ray Marchica on drums. (The line-up for 54 Below saw Stephen Benson sitting in for Kuhn on guitar.)

Strange he has had to wait until the age of 69, but the concert was Officer’s debut at the famed Manhattan nightspot. With a rather jerky stage presence and little in the way of humour, he is not, despite his experience, a cabaret natural, but a full house seemed happy enough and there was the bonus of a duet with his guest KT Sullivan, the artistic director of the Mercer Foundation and a wonderful singer in her own right.

Jeremy Chapman