There aren't many like Mark Murphy at home. His vocal pyrotechnics are now almost unique in jazz - breathtaking vocalese followed by free-scat outpourings of ee-baps, skiddley-baps and other noises quite impossible to spell.
In fact, nobody does it quite like Murphy and, whether such vocal dexterity is your bag or not, there are those who consider him the greatest male jazz singer of them all. Now 69 years old, he is still doing his very hip thing - taking songs to places they were never intended to go and yet, somehow, always bringing them safely back.
"Well that's the whole puzzle!" he says. "I just make it up as I go along. But I have a big foundation of information and so I know where I am. The mystery of it is that you don't really know what's going to happen next. So yes, say I do something with the kids on these little acid jazz things, I say, `just give me a mike and I'll just scat'. But look, you're working on a plan - it's just that you've got to take the plan a few different places each time. And once in a while, yeah, I have trainwreck."
Born in Syracuse, New York, in 1932, the young Murphy was fairly bombarded with music. His family had played the same organ in the Fulton Methodist Church since 1878 and his father was an accomplished singer, performing in everything from the church choir to barbershop quartets. "He wanted to be a singer real bad," says Murphy. "When my first record came out, he was so happy. He was tickled pink." Murphy also recalls that his father was rather partial to those inevitable songs of old Ireland.
"Every Sunday night, he would sing Does Your Mother Come From Ireland?, and that kind of thing. In fact, my older brother now plays mostly Appalachian music which, of course, is Irish-based. There's a strong Celtic strain in early jazz, too, because jazz is a fusion of five or six different cultures. Because black people were not allowed their own culture, they had to learn Celtic or English pieces for church. Of course they played them their own way, but that Celtic thing is definitely there."
It was at a Murphy clan gathering that the sounds of jazz finally hit the young Murphy in a serious, life-changing way. His uncle lifted the opera disc from the gramophone and quickly slipped on Art Tatum's Humouresque. From that moment, Murphy was hooked and he began to spend his days lying by the Victrola listening to Nat King Cole, Woody Herman, Stan Kenton and Sarah Vaughan.
"From that day, I was just gone. There were two record stores in our little town, and I remember us listening to one of the first George Shearing records. Nobody had ever played so many notes before and we just stood around with our mouths open. And I remember the huge behavioural changes - for example, what Miles's Birth of the Cool did to the way we danced. Remember that this was in the old days - before jazz was concert music."
At the age of 24, Murphy released his debut album, Meet Mark Murphy, on the Decca label. His breakthrough recording came a few years later with Rah!, released on Riverside in 1961. Backed by Clark Terry, Wynton Kelly, Bill Evans, Jimmy Cobb and more, it was clear that a serious young talent was loose. In 1963, he was zooming up the charts with Fly Me to the Moon - blissfully unaware that yet another behavioural change was on the way.
"We had `single potential' in those days - me or Cannonball or Bill Evans - and sometimes we'd make a little noise in the charts. And that's what I did with Fly Me to the Moon - just as The Beatles burst over Liverpool! In four months, the whole business just did a flip-flop. My God! The record companies had never made so such money as they did with this 1960s stuff! Everything which had been accepted for 60 or 70 years of the record business was suddenly shoved aside."
MURPHY spent much of the 1960s in England continuing to record and perform, but working mainly as an actor. In 1972, he went back to the US and signed for Muse, recording about an album a year. The acid jazz craze in Britain then presented Murphy to a whole new audience, as his version of Milestones became a club hit, and work with the United Future Organisation confirmed his cult status.
Despite his extraordinary track record, Murphy remains a fairly hidden figure - his speciality (scat and vocalese) being a bit of a mystery to many. Scat, he'll tell you, is basically the vocal imitation of an instrumental solo. Vocalese is much the same, except that it involves the singing of actual words.
"It's a written-down line," he says, "that the kid can sing either with an instrument or without. I don't worry about it too much - I just take it all apart and put it back together again. But the best of the vocal workouts was Lambert, Hendricks and Ross - I didn't hear them until I got to New York. I had heard people like Slim Gaillard long before that. I remember they were all up at my grandmother's house, just `shagging' on the porch - in the old fashioned sense of the word - and the tune was Slim Gaillard's Flat Foot Floogie With the Floy Floy. So I heard all of that. I remember Duke Ellington coming to town and he practically brought the whole Harlem Renaissance with him. Kay Davis was singing wordless vocalese. So that's where I heard it first."
These days, Murphy continues to perform, record and teach - spending some of the year in Austria where he imparts scat wisdom to pupils from all around the world. While he has never been the most visible of jazz legends, he has long been one of the most audible. For the hipster Murphy, words or no words, that's all that really matters.
"It's all about singing. Singing is a spiritual thing. It's something that is usually spontaneous, and when people get together they start to sing something. I like people to discover the joy of singing and like them to do their best at their own level. Anybody can do that. Then a certain talent takes you to another level, and that is given in different quantities to each person. Vocal jazz and grand opera are the two most difficult. Certainly vocal jazz is the least lucrative but it takes a long time to get all that shit together."
Mark Murphy plays Vicar Street on Wednesday as part of the ESB Jazz Series