Chicago, 2007

last month at age 86, saddening us jazz aficionados.  She and her pianist husband, Roy Kral,  performing for more than a half-century as “Jackie & Roy,” offered original interpretations from  such classic American songwriters as the Gershwins, Hoagy Carmichael, Frank Loesser, Cy Coleman, Alec Wilder and the curiously underrated Dave Frishberg.  Usually backed up by a bassist, percussionist and vibraphonist, J&R electrified supper clubs and jazz houses across America from the late 1940s until Kral’s death at age 80 in 2002. 

Although not widely known outside jazz circles, Jackie & Roy were always admired by their contemporaries.  Frank Sinatra quipped that one could tune a piano with Jackie’s voice, and in 1993, when I last saw the couple perform, at Tavern on the Green in New York, Tony Bennett was in the audience.  In 1972, the performing-arts critic Rex Reed wrote, “Jackie Cain and Roy Kral are a singing duo with such built-in radiance that to have missed their music is to be a little poor in life.” 

Jackie & Roy provided an antidote to the drug-laden insurrectionist musical culture of the ‘60s and ‘70s that was so formative to my generation.  Not to belittle Dylan, the Rolling Stones or Jimi Hendrix, but Jackie & Roy were not protesters (except to complain once as the after-dinner air became pungent: "We're not smokers, but we sure get enough of it.")  Rather, they were about transcending war and oppression and simply living the musical experience, corny as the songs sometimes were.   

Many vocalists have performed the sensuous ballad “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” written by Fran Landesman and Tommy Wolf, but none better than Jackie.  Anyone in jazz will tell you that Jackie Cain owned that song, yet she is inexplicably not among the 14 artists listed by Wikipedia as having recorded it.  How curious.  

Jackie & Roy entered my consciousness in 1974, when I asked a friend in Chicago if there were any jazz concerts worth hearing that weekend.  “You’re in luck,” he said.  “Jackie & Roy are in town.”   We went to the Jazz Showcase, Chicago’s still-famous  club on South Plymouth Court.  (While my college friend, Jerry, was good company, he was not the companion I’d have preferred that night as I remember it.  While Jackie & Roy were lifting me into the clouds, my mind drifted to a certain Oregonian woman, named Jan, whom I had impressed with card tricks a few weeks earlier at a bar in San Francisco.  As I listen to my J&R soundtracks today,  I wonder whatever became of her.  Or of Jerry, for that matter.) 

By 1976 I had moved to Toronto, where one night I illicitly recorded, with a pocket taping device, a Jackie & Roy performance at the now-defunct Bourbon Street Club, which was actually on Queen Street.  What I came away with was not exactly high fidelity, but it was good enough to entertain me for about 20 years until one of my small children in Paris irreparably unraveled the cassette.  This particular tour included Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind,” and a clever interpretation of Jobim’s "Samba do Avião," a song about flying dreamily into Rio de Janeiro.  I considered the cassette precious because live recordings of J&R were always few and far between. Most of their 40 or so albums were studio-made and therefore lacked the electricity of a live event.  This is unfortunate because the audience – with the undertone of clinking forks and knives and dinner plates – always contributed to the magic.  My cassette had captured that.  

That 1976 tour took J&R in September to Rodondo Beach, California, where they performed at Howard Rumsey’s club Concerts by the Sea.  Happily, someone had the wisdom to record the performance professionally but we groupies didn’t know that until years later.  The first of two albums, Concerts by the Sea, was released in the year 2000, and the second, Echoes, in 2007.   But talk about a pleasant surprise!  The live material on my damaged cassette was now resurrected. 

Jackie & Roy’s tribute to Stephen Sondheim, recorded live at New York’s Michael’s Pub in 1982, probably captures their supper club presence better than any other album.   How I wish I had known about that engagement, but I was living in Paris by then and out of touch.   Jackie & Roy didn’t do Europe, and I didn’t see them perform again until 1993, when, having noticed a blurb in The New Yorker magazine about Tavern on the Green, I impulsively booked a trans-Atlantic flight.  I caught two shows that weekend, aware that they would be the last for me.  The shows were great, of course, but the couple looked their age.  It was clear that the party would soon be ending.  Still, they performed for another nine years, until Roy’s death.

Sadly, there are no video recordings of any J&R club performances; at least none that I know of.  While some of their recorded music is on YouTube, there are only two live videos – both studio setups for TV.   The earliest, in 1968, is embarrassing.  This was the period in which they were trying to come to grips with the reality that their be-bop 1950s act was, for many, hopelessly dépassé.  The world had moved on.  Jackie looked terrific singing “The Word” at age 40, but she and Roy were no match for Jefferson Airplane or Sonny and Cher.  Thankfully, they soon gave up on this idea and returned to what they did best.   In the other video, from the mid-1970s, they perform two songs during an interview with Hugh Downs;  the club atmosphere is left to the imagination.  I find it hard to believe that these two clips are all that remain of their many fabulous performances.  Somebody please say it ain’t so.

––––

Rio de Janeiro, 2000

Chicago, 2012

Cracow, 2013

New York, 1993