She’s got it covered

Jane MONHEIT slips onto the stage at Feinstein’s at the Cinegrill. Silk gowned, beautifully poised, she stands in the curve of a grand piano, her creamy skin and jet-black mane contrasting dramatically with a vase overflowing with lush, colorful flowers.

Seated in a center booth on the second level of the elegant Hollywood room’s semi-circular risers, Monheit’s personal manager, Mary Ann Topper -- the super-manager who played a vital role in Diana Krall’s rise to fame -- nods her head appreciatively, a broad smile crossing her face as her new young star kicks off the opening tune.

She leans over, whispers to a companion. “Aren’t the flowers beautiful? I had them done especially for Jane. Don’t they fit her perfectly?”

The music begins. Completely engrossed, ignoring food and drink, Topper sways in sync with the shifting nuances of each phrase as Monheit applies her velvety contralto to a set of torch-song standards. After every number -- and sometimes during --Topper leads the applause, hooting enthusiastically, easily the most responsive member of the crowd.

In jazz, where the stars (with the exception of singers) and the managing powers have traditionally been male, Topper is one of a small but influential contingent of women who’ve begun to thrive in a role that’s part mother hen, part marketing strategist, part incorrigible nudge. By refusing to acknowledge jazz’s glass ceiling for women, she has pushed through it to become one of the jazz Pygmalions of the 21st century music scene.

Topper has done so at a time when jazz record companies have had less success with new artists than they have with the repackaging of their valuable catalogs. Although jazz sales have grown recently, with SoundScan reporting a 21% increase from 2002 to 2003, the spike has been aided by the success of some acts that are only loosely jazz-related, such as Norah Jones, Steve Tyrell and Boz Scaggs.

Aware of the importance of this kind of star power, Topper maintains a small roster of acts that she feels have strong breakout potential.

But it hasn’t been easy. Along the way, she’s taken her share of potshots, bruised more than a few male egos and been managerially divorced by some of her highest-profile clients.

A few days after Monheit’s appearance at Feinstein’s, Topper is having lunch at her West Hollywood hotel.

“I wasn’t over the top, was I?” she says, referring to her effusive response to the performance. Her smile makes it clear that she doesn’t really feel that she was over the top, that Monheit fully deserved every iota of the response she received.

“Isn’t that what a personal manager’s supposed to do? Be a cheerleader?” says her lunch companion.

“Sure. That’s one thing,” replies Topper. “That’s the fun part of being a manager. But there’s much more.”

‘An enormous responsibility’

When Topper, who is never at a loss for words, says “much more,” she means it. She hasn’t become one of the most successful personal managers in jazz by being reticent.

Her talent roster over the past two decades has included such established jazz artists as Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams, Freddie Hubbard, Ray Brown, J.J. Johnson, Joe Henderson and Jim Hall. Add to that a long line of younger musicians whose careers have been nurtured to maturity by Topper -- Krall, Joshua Redman, Christian McBride, Russell Malone and Wallace Roney.

Her current list includes, in addition to Monheit and singer-pianist Peter Cincotti, the superb, multi-skilled Cameroonian bassist-singer Richard Bona and the vocal quartet New York Voices.

“Personal management is an enormous responsibility,” she continues, “for careers, for lives, for talents. We’re not just talking about performance bookings and recording deals. We’re talking about insurance policies, health insurance, homes, cars, children, their education -- all of this surrounding a decision that you may or may not make with that artist, and for that artist.”

Topper’s involvement reaches into the creative arena as well. Trained as a musician with a master of music degree in music literature and vocal performance from the University of Michigan, she takes an active, in-the-trenches role with every aspect of her clients’ careers.

“Mary Ann is a very hard worker,” says Bill Traut, the veteran manager of singer Kurt Elling. “And that’s one of the things that makes her a very strong manager. But also, as a woman, she gets seriously, hands-on involved in a performer’s appearance -- clothes, makeup, hair styles -- in a way that just doesn’t happen with male managers.”

The flowers for Monheit are a small example of Topper’s eye for detail. So too was her transformation of Krall from a pianist who sings to a glamorous blond vocalist who, by the way, plays pretty good jazz piano as well. With Cincotti, her marketing strategy has placed as much emphasis on his youthful good looks and stylish dress as it has on his obvious musicality. This kind of complete career planning has been a hallmark of Topper’s style and an influence on other managers as well.

She has, in addition, rigorously followed one of the basic paradigms of good artist management -- that keeping a performer in front of an audience will assist record sales, and vice versa. Each of her acts appears with great frequency, both domestically and internationally. At one point in Krall’s career, she was doing nearly 300 performances a year. And Topper has pioneered the cross-fertilization of talents, frequently arranging for guest appearances on other artists’ albums.

“I’m always thinking about combinations of artists that would be interesting,” she says. “When I heard the Nevilles recently, I had this moment where I thought I’d love to have Aaron Neville sing with Richard Bona’s bass playing.”

Despite the success produced by her aggressive management style -- and, perhaps to some extent, as a result of the style -- Topper has lost a few of her best-known acts. Krall is the most obvious, leaving Topper’s New York-based Jazz Tree company several years ago to sign with the Canadian firm Macklam/Feldman Management that also manages Joni Mitchell and Norah Jones. Others who left Jazz Tree include Redman, Williams and Hancock.

In a business in which what-goes-around-comes-around is a mantra, those willing to suggest possible reasons behind Topper’s losses generally insist on anonymity.

“A lot of musicians,” says one industry professional, “are kind of loose about how they handle their money, and they kind of feel that their manager should go along with their needs. But Mary Ann was always very careful about getting the money and sometimes -- even though she was entitled to do so -- she would hold the money when they thought she shouldn’t be doing that. And that didn’t rub well with some musicians.”

Other comments frequently revolved around Topper’s “upfront frankness” about what she thinks and how she feels something should be done. Some previous clients were reportedly rankled by her efforts to impose her own musical preferences on their work.

Topper shrugs off the criticism, insisting that “when they’re young performers, as most of mine are, these are young people who already have heavy schedules and heavy responsibilities in their young lives -- responsibilities to their bands, their tour managers, their record companies, their agencies. And I want to make sure that the burden isn’t left completely on their shoulders. That they have someone to turn to -- even if it’s only for a few minutes a day -- someone who can say, ‘It’s OK; we’ve got it covered.’ ”

Then, in a brief moment of defensiveness, she adds, “No one trains to do this, you know, to be a manager. They don’t have a school for that. So I suppose this is my gift, the way the music is the musician’s gift. It’s like when you hit a high C as a singer, and it comes out just perfectly, and you know that you can do it.”

That’s precisely the quality that Cincotti, strikingly mature for his 20 years, was looking for when he first met Topper as a 17-year-old.

“I met with several people,” he says, “but I felt that Mary Ann and I saw things eye to eye. She knows the business inside out -- especially within the jazz world -- and I felt it would be a very good match. Music is the priority for many artists, but that’s not always the case with management. But Mary Ann and I share the same priorities in terms of the music, and that’s very important to me -- especially at this early stage in my career.”

A growing network

Topper traces her inner drive and confidence to her father, a doctor in a small western Pennsylvania town who told her she “could do anything.”

She declines to give her age, saying that, like Jack Benny, she stopped counting at 39, but based on the facts of her career, she is presumably in her 40s or 50s. Never married (“I’m just a career woman who happens to have a very full and exciting life,” she says), Topper was a music educator and vocal performer for 15 years before founding Jazz Tree in 1980.

At that time, there were only a few prominent managers, with the powerful Norman Granz at the top of the list, and even fewer females, with Helen Keane, who managed Bill Evans, the most visible.

Since then, other women have moved into positions of authority in the business arena of the jazz world. A short list of Topper’s contemporaries includes managers Ann Marie Wilkins, Gail Boyd, Michelle Taylor, Robin Burgess and Karen Kennedy and club owners Lorraine Gordon (the Village Vanguard), Catalina Popescu (Catalina Bar & Grill) and Ruth Price (the Jazz Bakery).

“There’s still not enough networking,” Topper says, “but things are definitely improving. Who knows what we could do if we really worked together?”

Popescu, who will soon open a new, dramatically expanded Catalina Bar & Grill on Sunset Boulevard, agrees.

“To me, Mary Ann is a hero,” she says. “She’s been through so much, but she never gives up. And I prefer working with another woman -- like Mary Ann -- because I feel more connected. I think women are more persistent, and we combine that with a lot of passion. We go after things, and when we put our heads to something we don’t stop until we get it done.”

Back at her lunch, Topper pauses for a rare moment and finishes off an iced cappuccino that has become noticeably watered down during the course of her voluble conversation. Then, as if to underscore Popescu’s comments, she looks at her watch, frowns and gathers the purse and the handful of overflowing notebooks that accompany her wherever she goes.

It’s mid-afternoon and Topper’s day is just getting into high gear. Final arrangements have to be made for Monheit’s imminent trip to Japan and Cincotti’s trip to Germany. And there are all those home-office problems awaiting resolutions, even before she lifts off later that night on the red eye to New York.

She gets up, smiles, tosses her well-coiffed blond locks. “Oh, this was great fun,” she says. “Did I leave anything out?”