Word: mabel
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This latest collection of a dozen profiles, mostly from his New Yorker criticism, is Balliett's "act of homage to a highly gifted and unaccountably neglected group of Americans." They are America's nonclassical singers: figures like Mabel Mercer, Tony Bennett and Ray Charles, who straddle the worlds of theater tunes, blues and popular standards. They work within a rich tradition that came out of ragtime and came in with the fascinating rhythms of George Gershwin and Jerome Kern. The early singers were "intuitive and homemade," Balliett observes, but their descendants are sophisticated musicians who blend the soft...
...singing the blues last week for Mabel Mercer or Alberta Hunter. The two were delighted with their portraits in "A Song I Can See: Great Women in Jazz," an exhibition of photographs by Barbara Bordnick at The Space gallery in Manhattan. Mercer, 78, still croons in cafes and listens to her old discs, though "only for correction. Never for pleasure." Hunter, 83, is back on the cafe circuit after having given up music 20 years ago to don a nurse's uniform. On Dec. 3, she takes on Washington at a Kennedy Center gala, and she knows her program...
...Composer Charlie Smalls is a gifted comic writer, and soon Nipsey Russell, whose rusty tin man is easily the best characterization of the film, sings an oozy and oleaginous Smalls ballad, Slide Some Oil to Me. To ward the end, awful Evillene, the Wicked Witch of the West (Mabel King), rumbles out a menacing hard-rocker, Don't No body Bring Me No Bad News...
Somebody told somebody that Mabel Sheehan, 72, who lives alone with her sheep dog in a working-class district of Philadelphia, had bought a car for a friend. Somebody else heard that she had paid for several trips to Puerto Rico for other friends. None of this was true, police said later, but people in the neighborhood began estimating how much money she might have stashed away in her modest row house. Someone guessed $35,000. Someone guessed more. There was even talk of a hoard of $45 million. None of this was true either-her only income...
...about Beatty are legion. He rarely, if ever, is on time for any kind of appointment: Agent Sue Mengers, a friend inured to his late arrivals, says she now "plans buffet entertaining if Warren is coming to one of my parties." Wealth makes him uncomfortable. He would rather hear Mabel Mercer sing in a quiet club than boogie at Regine's; he owns a Cartier watch, but prefers to wear a Timex. An articulate man who refuses to use either Hollywood lingo or the latest L.A. hip-speak, Beatty likes to take long pauses in the middle of sentences...