Mark Murphy Wins the Waiting Game : Jazz: His unyielding stance on vocals forced him into exile for a decade. ‘If you don’t make it at first,’ he says, ‘you make it at last.’

Mark Murphy has devoted a long career to singing the hippest music with the best musicians, and the economic consequences be damned.

Consider the company he has kept on records: in the 1960s, Clark Terry, Dick Hyman, Roger Kellaway; in the ‘70s, David Sanborn and the Brecker Brothers; in the ‘80s, Frank Morgan, Richie Cole and the Azymuth Trio. Consider the jazzmen to whose instrumental works he has sung lyrics: Sonny Rollins, McCoy Tyner, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter.

Though he has enjoyed greater acceptance lately on his home turf, Murphy’s uncompromising stance as a jazz singer forced him at one point into expatriation; he was based in London from 1963 to 1973.

“It was a bad time for all the boppers,” he said, in a call from his San Francisco home. “All the undergrounders had surfaced in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, then we had to scatter again and wait.”

Murphy’s approach to the vocal art has involved straight ballad singing, scatting, humming, whistling and occasional ventures into songwriting. He has been a chance-taker; sometimes the gambles haven’t paid off, artistically or financially, but more often, especially during the past few years, he has ended ahead. If his version of “Take the A Train” involves silly quotes from “Mairzy Doats,” it also entails wild wordless interludes that will recall for some a manic singer of the ‘40s named Leo Watson.

“People don’t realize,” said Murphy, “that in jazz, to borrow a phrase from Colette, you don’t make it at first, you make it at last. It’s a waiting game. Sometimes a record will be released and it may surface months or even years later. It’s because of the complexity of the material, or maybe the disc jockey just had a stomachache when he received it and didn’t get around to listening for a while.”

Born in Syracuse, N.Y., to a family of musicians, Murphy studied piano at the age of 7, played and sang with an older brother’s dance band, began touring, and made his first album in 1957. An early and influential supporter was Steve Allen, who then had “The Tonight Show.”

By the early 1960s, he was earning critical plaudits from expert observers; Gene Lees, then editor of Down Beat, became an ardent champion. But the decade of the Beatles was upon him, and Murphy found that critical approval didn’t translate into cash. Ironically, an album he looks back on fondly as one of his best ever, “That’s How I Love the Blues,” was released just before he left for Europe.

Over the past two decades he has built a commendable backlog of albums, among the most notable being a splendid collection of Ivan Lins songs, “Night Mood” (Milestone), produced in 1987 by the late Richard Bock. Next week, he will have two important credits: a four-day stint at the Vine St. Bar & Grill in Hollywood, opening Wednesday, and a new album, “Then and Now--Kerouac” (Muse).

A belated sequel to his 1981 “Bop for Kerouac,” the new release includes a monologue taken from “Big Sur,” about driving frantically around San Francisco, and a passage from “On the Road” in which Kerouac recalled a jam session in Chicago by George Shearing. To the latter, Murphy attached an original song, with Bill Mays’ music, to his own lyrics for “November in the Snow,” its title inspired by the old Shearing hit “September in the Rain.”

Murphy continues to add to his stockpile of lyricized jazz works. In the new record are “Ask Me Now,” the Thelonious Monk composition with lyrics by Ben Sidran, and the first-ever vocal version of Billy Strayhorn’s elegiac “Blood Count,” with words by M.E. Stillman.

Whenever his schedule allows it, Murphy devotes time to teaching. “I have about a dozen students, and I do occasional clinics--I did one recently at Berklee College in Boston. Next spring I may go and teach at a school in Graz, Austria, where Sheila Jordan has been a jazz vocal instructor.”

The Graz connection came about through a job Murphy took last year with George Gruntz, the Swiss composer and pianist, who toured Europe and the U.S. leading a large orchestra. In Hamburg, Murphy recorded an album of Gruntz’s music. “That was a most interesting group to work with,” he recalled. “Gruntz’s music is somewhere between Gil Evans and Carla Bley. While I was over there Sheila, who was also with the orchestra, told me about the school.”

Indoctrinating foreign students in the art of jazz singing should be no more difficult than teaching Americans--and no easier. “Sometimes,” he said, “I simply have to say, ‘Look, you are just not right for this, but if you like I can still help you.’ Jazz can be very difficult, very taxing to the vocal cords. In fact, it’s the hardest music to sing correctly, outside of grand opera. I have to drum a lot of technique into them.

“It’s rough to teach people to develop an ear for music or for improvisation. It’s better if they start out with some knowledge of an instrument like guitar or piano. When I’m doing a clinic, I’ll take them through several choruses of a tune like ‘Green Dolphin Street’ until eventually they really are familiar with the song and what they can do with it.”

Presumably Murphy must also teach his pupils what he has learned the hard way: patience, and the realization that neither a perfectly honed talent nor a successful career will come easily. In his own case, he can finally say that Colette was right: After more than 30 years of striving, he didn’t make it at first but has made it at last.