We’re more than an hour into Marilyn Maye’s opening night set—way past her homage to the music of Johnny Mercer, her anecdote about performing Mame in front of Angela Lansbury, and the entire Louis Armstrong–Randy Newman–James Taylor medley about smiling with or without a mask—when the 93-year-old jazz singer summons all the showbiz pluck and false modesty and droll timing she’s developed in over 80 years singing in any joint, ballroom, nightclub, or bar that would have her and says, “I hate playing the age card.” Maye’s loyal crowd cracks right up.
I’m sitting in The Belvedere tent at Crooners, the Fridley jazz club that opened in 2014 and somehow remained open despite our plague year. Out of all the nightclubs and venues in the Twin Cities, it was this old-school suburban supper club that proved to be both the first and most willing to contort itself into whatever shape was necessary to follow the state’s continuously changing health guidelines—breaking furlough last summer by first transforming itself into a drive-in cabaret with a takeout menu, then operating as an alfresco supper club under a big-top parking lot tent until reclosing around Thanksgiving, before finally reopening the jazz club’s remodeled main stage this past January. Through it all, it was Crooners, led by its 78-year-old owner Mary Tjosvold, together with all its waitstaff and returning artists, that enthusiastically jumped through epidemiological hoops with the supple grace and electrifying courage of a gold medal–winning gymnast.
As I sit halfway back in the tent this Thursday night, at a little two-top table next to the sound guy, it’s hard not to reel through the weird, flat circle that has become the days of our lives. Maye, with her sculpted blond pompadour and her bedazzled black-and-white pantsuit, is every bit the grande dame of the Great American Songbook. And as she kicks up her heels, belting Sondheim tunes, backed by her swinging three-piece band, bracketed by the trunks of two stately trees on the shores of Moore Lake, I can feel time warping around me. The temporal distortion is amplified by the fact that this is my first real live concert experience since seeing a violin quartet in a friend’s backyard last October. But with the Moderna vaccine coursing through my veins, I don’t have to worry about how COVID-responsible the table sitting to our left was or wasn’t last weekend. Here I am, out on a date, sitting next to other couples out on dates, surrounded by Maye’s sharp-dressed, clean-cut crowd, who are singing along to every song they know and doubling over at all her jokes. Our reward for surviving a pandemic is steak and potatoes and vats of gin martini and show tunes written in America’s postwar period, an optimistic time in this country, when things were looking up.
“Three years ago, we called the tour ‘90 at Last,’” Maye says. “And then the year after, ‘Wish I Were 90 Again.’”
The crowd chuckles. A group of middle-aged gay men at a front table, clutching their vintage Marilyn Maye LPs they had brought to the show to get signed, explodes into particularly intense paroxysms of laughter.
“And then, ‘92 and I’m Not Through.’”
Somebody in the second row unintentionally heckles her.
“Are you really 93, Marilyn?!” they say.
Maye stops the band with a wave of a bejeweled hand.
“We were having so much fun,” she frowns.
The crowd titters nervously. She raises her hand to her forehead.
“I have to go lie down,” she says before flipping the crowd’s switch once more. “I’m a miracle! And I have to do this—I can’t cook.”
Maye is an entertainer who exists wholly outside of our era—the ideal sort of performer to see coming out of a pandemic. How many comebacks has she made in her career? She started out at the age of 9 with her own weekly radio show in Topeka before being discovered by Tonight Show host Steve Allen when she was singing at a club in Kansas City. In 1965, the Grammys nominated her for Best New Artist (she lost to Tom Jones), and she went on to appear on the Tonight Show 76 times (Carson loved her), but her repertoire of standards and show tunes was eclipsed by rock and pop as the 20th century rolled on. It wasn’t until she was in her 70s that she was rediscovered and began packing Manhattan nightclubs again.
But it’s her Midwestern fans in places like Des Moines and Lake Okoboji and Fridley that she credits for sustaining her through her leaner years.
“Just point me to where I’m going and I’ll sing, honey,” she tells me after her show.
She says the strangest part of the last year wasn’t the gigs she actually went through with, like the driveway she played in her hometown of Kansas City last summer or the virtual, audience-less Christmas concert she played in an empty K.C. theater or the five-night engagement she flew into Minneapolis to play in the tent here at Crooners in October 2020.
“The weird part was not working,” she says. “I was set to have one of my busiest years last year—We think the old girl’s gonna kick it any minute, so we better hire her!”
Back on stage, after boasting about her dearth of culinary skill and saying hello to the VIPs (tonight’s notable is Ricky Peterson, the keyboardist from the musical Peterson family and a bona fide Prince collaborator—he’s celebrating his birthday with a table of 10 in front), she launches into “I’m Still Here,” a Sondheim classic from his 1971 musical Follies. Maye says that years ago, she played the part of Carlotta in San Diego. And then she starts swinging hard: Good times and bum times, I’ve seen them all / And my dear, I’m still here. A paean to longevity, the song has served as an emotional highlight over the years in concerts given by the likes of Barbra Streisand and Sammy Davis Jr., but tonight, on a night that’s starting to feel like maybe the first post-COVID night of our lives, it reaches an even deeper poignance.
On Sunday I arrive by myself to catch a matinee by self-described “Cuban Minnesotan” piano player Nachito Herrera in the main room. The main performance space was remodeled during COVID—the back bar was removed to eliminate any audio distraction, and the drop ceiling was torn out. I’m seated in a raised booth directly in Herrera’s line of sight. He sits at the business end of the club’s grand piano, which has a Cuban flag draped over it. Herrera’s wearing a smart white sport coat, and his freshly shaven pate is as shiny as his two-toned saddle shoes in the stage lights. Herrera came perilously close to losing his life to COVID last year—he was hospitalized, ultimately spending 14 days in a coma. This afternoon, he’s celebrating by ripping through songs by two early 20th-century legends: George Gershwin and the Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona. After a deeply felt rendition of Lecuona’s labyrinthine, technically demanding masterpiece “Malagueña,” Herrera introduces his daughter, wearing a diaphanous white ball gown, to the stage, and she accompanies her father, singing Gershwin’s “Embraceable You” and Sinatra’s “My Way.”
After the show, I recognize my college friend Genevieve, who was at the table right below mine. She comes over to say hello and to explain that she’s here with her family on a special occasion. Her father is a COVID survivor (he got early access to monoclonal antibodies) and a longtime Herrera fan. Inspired by Herrera’s survival, he wanted to bring his entire family to this show for his birthday. Right after Genevieve splits, Crooners’ promoter Beck Lee, a Manhattan-born impresario who left New York and clubs like the Metropolitan Room to move to Fridley three years ago, brings the owner herself to my booth.
Wearing dangly, chunky jewelry and a regal purple-and-copper silk coat around her shoulders, Tjosvold might look like the Medici de Fridley now, but her jazz-club-owner origin story is both sweet and sad—like a bizarrely tragic episode of The Love Boat.
“What?” Tjosvold asks. “You don’t think playing the bass drum in junior high was enough reason to do this?”
In the second half of her life, Tjosvold, a former math and science teacher with a PhD from the U of M, went into business with her mother and became a massively successful owner-operator of group and assisted living homes for both the elderly and other clients with disabilities. Now, she has more than 1,000 employees in four states.
But the strangest plot twist in Tjosvold’s second act was when she fell in love with the ship’s piano player during a 2008 solo cruise.
“He was so funny,” she says of Larry Dunsmore, a British musician whose life was changed by a chance meeting with Frank Sinatra before he made a career of working in jazz clubs in Dubai and playing on cruise ships.
After their whirlwind maritime romance, it took a couple years while they were dating to convince Dunsmore to move to Minnesota.
“I had to think of a way to be on the same continent at least,” she says.
So, the two began searching for a place where they could open a jazz club, but they were without any luck until, driving to their favorite Indian place on Central one day, they came across a seemingly abandoned Fridley supper club.
“There was one car in the lot,” she says. They went around back to check it out and found a banker sweeping up the kitchen. “And you know what it means when you find a banker cleaning up his own mess, don’t you?”
The club had been open for less than a year when Dunsmore was diagnosed with lung cancer. He passed away soon after.
“Smoky bars all over the world,” sighs Tjosvold.
Always an outsider and a bit of a crusader—whether teaching math and science in our public schools or bringing a fresh approach to single-level, accessible assisted living—Tjosvold decided to take on the challenge of running a jazz club by herself. There was only one problem: She wasn’t even all that fond of jazz.
“Because I’m so political, there’s no better music for me than by Pete Seeger,” she says. “Songs that make a statement.”
But seven years in and her interests have gone beyond genre.
“The one thing I’m good at,” she says, “is I know if you’re a good performer.”
She hired Andrew Walesch, a smart young music director from St. Cloud with a following of his own (he frequently performs his Sinatra tribute show in the club), to tell her if an artist can actually play or not, but she doesn’t need much help to feel if they’re connecting to the audience in her room.
“I think music can really make a difference in people’s lives,” she says. “And I think the pandemic has shown that people have really missed live music.”
When COVID hit the states last spring, the club closed, but the more urgent problem for Tjosvold was protecting the residents of her assisted living facilities.
“We took it seriously,” she says. She organized a COVID task force in charge of establishing a staff screening protocol and ensuring access to PPE. “We kept telling staff: If COVID comes into one of the homes, you guys brought it in. So, you have to take care of the people we take care of.”
Over the duration of the pandemic, two of her residents lost their lives. There was, however, one small silver lining.
“My being in health care during the day allowed us to be safe here at the club,” she says. “I’m sure most restaurants were running around saying, ‘What does that mean? What do you have to screen?’ Well, we were already screening. We had our task force meeting every week. We knew exactly the questions, we knew the procedures, we knew the temperatures.”
In June of 2020, Crooners became one of the first clubs in the state to reopen, first in the parking lot, in the open air, on a raised flatbed stage brought in by semitruck.
“We wondered if people had this platform, and the bands were up there, maybe there might be some bands that would be willing to perform.”
Local singer/band leader Mick Sterling took her up on her offer—among many others, including jazz vocalist Arne Fogel and jazz singer Jennifer Grimm. The musicians performed socially distanced from their bandmates on the flatbed, and the audiences stayed in their cars. Later in the summer, Tjosvold noticed people were leaving their cars and sitting off to the side, so they added a tent for a mixed seating and drive-in concept. And then at the end of the summer, Crooners added more table seating and heating to its parking lot tent, bringing in Marilyn Maye to perform under the big top in October.
“We only stopped when the snow kept collapsing the tent,” she says.
Maye’s final Crooners set on Sunday evening is going over just as big with the graying late-matinee crowd as it did with the boisterous gays on Thursday night. There is a strong Lake Okoboji contingent who have driven up for the show, and they actually cheer when Maye mentions a 2018 CBS Sunday Morning segment that served as a retrospective on her career.
“Mo Rocca interviewed me for eight minutes!” she brags to more applause before pointing out that she’s now outlived the Inn at Okoboji, the venue where they filmed the segment. “I played there for 67 years in a row. I’ve closed so many clubs in my life.”
Then, just like that, she launches into her reprise of a song from Mame, “It’s Today,” punctuating each—“And we’re living!”—line—“And we’re well, gang!”—with—“So raise hell, gang!”—strutting kicks—“While we may!”
After her one-woman chorus line, she wisecracks that she had to hold on to the piano to balance this time.
“Last year we didn’t have to hang on,” she says. “This year, we hang on.”
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‘ Este Articulo puede contener información publicada por terceros, algunos detalles de este articulo fueron extraídos de la siguiente fuente: mspmag.com ’