[JPL] Fading Sounds of an Elegant Manhattan

[Jazz Promo Services]

http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/05/03/nyregion/03waldorf.html?scp=1&sq=Daryl+
Sherman&st=nyt


May 3, 2008
MUSIC
Fading Sounds of an Elegant Manhattan

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
For the last 14 years, some of the most welcoming sounds in Midtown
Manhattan have been the voice and piano of Daryl Sherman, heard as you enter
the Waldorf-Astoria hotel at Park Avenue and 49th Street. As you ascend the
green carpeted stairs to the lobby, her music invites you into a world of
elegance where the spirit of Cole Porter, a longtime resident of the
Waldorf, still hovers.

As of Sunday evening, those sounds will be stilled. A few weeks ago, Ms.
Sherman received word that for economic reasons her tenure at the cocktail
terrace between the Empire and Hilton Rooms would end. Saturday and Sunday¹s
performances are four-hour laps, from 3:30 to 7:30 p.m.

Last year, the Hilton hotel chain, which owns the Waldorf-Astoria, was sold
to the Blackstone Group of investors. Such sales almost always entail
streamlining the operations and cutting back expenses.

Ms. Sherman is one the very last and finest of a vanishing breed of
singer-pianists who used to hold forth in the lobbies of luxury hotels in
Manhattan. At the end of last year, the Cafe Pierre in the Pierre hotel was
closed for renovation, ending the two-decade engagement of its longtime
musical fixture, Kathleen Landis. The Waldorf still has live piano music in
Peacock Alley on the way to the hotel¹s Lexington Avenue entrance, but that
serves as ambient background tinkling.

Ms. Sherman, an effervescent 50-something woman, makes music suited to the
foreground as well the background. The piano she has played is not any old
keyboard but Cole Porter¹s piano, a brown, hand-painted midsize Steinway
grand adorned with decorative scrolls and courtly, bewigged dancing figures.

Constructed in 1907, it was presented by the hotel in 1945 to Porter, who
had already lived there for six years; it was moved to the lobby after his
death in 1964. It is an impressive instrument, especially in the lower
register, whose resonance Ms. Sherman sometimes demonstrates to patrons
sipping tea (there is a full tea service in the afternoon) or cocktails.

If you spent enough hours on the terrace listening to her play, sing, and
spin anecdotes from her storehouse of musical lore, sooner or later you
might absorb most of the history of American popular song.

Introducing Porter¹s perennially requested ³Night and Day² early Friday
evening, she remarked, ³This is not me playing ‹ this is Cole Porter¹s
spirit playing by Ouija board.² After finishing the instrumental
introduction, she sang the rest of the song, then smiled and said, ³That was
me, just so you¹ll know.²

Songs from the Porter musicals ³The New Yorkers² and ³Jubilee² followed, as
well as her own song, ³Welcome to Manhattan,² which she described as ³a
contemporary song that sounds like a 30s song,² and it does. ³The 30s are my
decade ‹ Depression,² she joked.

A jazz baby who plays a buoyant stride piano, Ms. Sherman grew up in
Woonsocket, R.I., the daughter of the jazz trombonist Sammy Sherman, who
took her to jam sessions as a child. In 1974, three years after graduating
from the University of Rhode Island, she moved to New York and began
performing in Manhattan jazz clubs, both as a soloist and in small
ensembles. She has many distinguished jazz mentors, most notably the trumpet
player Dick Sudhalter, who introduced her to the classics of the Bing
Crosby-Paul Whiteman era.

The sunny, steadily swinging style of Mildred Bailey is a particularly
strong influence. Her 1999 album, ³Celebrating Mildred Bailey and Red Norvo²
(Audiophile) pays her homage, and Ms. Sherman hopes someday to honor Ms.
Bailey in a one-woman music-theater piece. Ms. Sherman¹s newest album, ³New
Orleans² (Audiophile), is her response to Hurricane Katrina.

Vocally, Ms. Sherman is frequently compared to Blossom Dearie, who has a
similarly light touch and sly playfulness, but Ms. Sherman¹s voice is fuller
with a sweet twirling vibrato. If her singing evokes pleasure and
playfulness, it isn¹t all sunshine and flowers. Her rendition of a song
associated with Ms. Bailey, the Carl Sigman-Duke Ellington ballad ³All Too
Soon,² was sultry and wistful Friday.

Some of the best advice about singing she ever received, she recalled, was
from the great jazz interpreter Sylvia Syms, who died in 1992: ³Stop
listening to the sound of your own voice and find the crux of the song and
work back from that.²

Ms. Sherman has a chin-up attitude about the future. ³I¹ve been very lucky,²
she emphasized, ³and I¹m grateful for the last 14 years.² Then she giggled.
³Now all I have to do is find a rich man to buy the hotel and pay for a
facelift when I really need it.²


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