Just a reserved Englishwoman

NEW YORK —  Marian McPartland, 89, has just finished playing the standard “These Foolish Things,” so jazz singer Rebecca Parris serves her a compliment.

“Marian, you made me cry,” she says. “From your second eight, I had tears in my eyes.”

“As long as it wasn’t holding your nose,” McPartland says back from the wheelchair behind her piano.

“No, I was not,” Parris says. “It was beautiful, darling.”

They do the same verbal dance minutes later, when McPartland asks the Boston-based singer if they might do a number together, “if you think you have enough faith.”

“Be real,” Parris says. “It’s a privilege. You know that.”

Later, McPartland dismisses the self-deprecation as “just sort of polite nonsense,” banter to fill the space on the “Piano Jazz” radio show she’s been doing on NPR for a mere 29 years. But she adds, “I suppose I mean it a little bit. I wasn’t thrilled how I played for her. It was OK, you know?”

Some people like having a fuss made over them, some don’t. And some fall in between, insisting they don’t want the attention, but putting up with it, maybe even inviting it a tad and, in spite of themselves, enjoying it -- sort of the way McPartland is going about turning 90 this week, when she has a special birthday gig at the Jazz at Lincoln Center complex of clubs.

She recalls how her late husband, Jimmy McPartland, the cornet player who grew up alongside Louis Armstrong in the rough Chicago jazz scene, loved it when people would gather around late at night. She was the reserved Englishwoman, born Margaret Marian Turner, who didn’t smoke or drink, and she’d nudge him, “Let’s get out of here,” and he’d say, “No, let’s leave gracefully,” she recalls. “He always said that, ‘Let’s leave gracefully.’ And he did. In more ways than one.”

She had a lot to do with him leaving gracefully, of course. They met in 1944 while entertaining British and American troops in Belgium -- he performing while still in the Army, after participating in the Normandy landing, she as part of a four-piano act -- and were married a year later at a military base in Germany. She played with him after they settled in the States, but he encouraged her to get her own group, which is how she wound up leading a trio at the Hickory House restaurant-club in Manhattan. That’s where critic Leonard Feather saw her and declared that she had three strikes against her in the jazz world: “being English, white and a woman.”

Ages afterward, when he went on her radio show, Feather swore it was a joke, she recalls, and “I said, ‘That was no joke, Leonard,’ but it never bothered me. It kind of spurred me on.” Well, her run at the Hickory House lasted eight years, until 1960, and it was the same pattern with the radio show, which began in 1979 with funding for 13 weeks. It’s still on, with most of the hourlong shows recorded in the Manhattan studio where she was goes back and forth, verbally and musically -- improvising without rehearsal -- with the biggest names in jazz and also over the years with celebrity musicians (Jack Lemmon, Clint Eastwood), Broadway veterans (Betty Buckley), even opera and country singers (Renee Fleming, Willie Nelson). In Southern California, the show appears on KCLU-FM (88.3) from 11 p.m. to midnight on Fridays.

Back to Jimmy, though. He was a boozer from day one, and there were other issues, and they divorced in 1967. But they remained friends and neighbors on Long Island, and when he got cancer she took him into her Port Jefferson home, made room for a nurse in the basement, made sure his records were playing, and remarried him two weeks before the end in 1991. That’s how, at 83, “he died gracefully,” she notes.

When her time comes, she won’t be returning to England but Chicago -- she has a plot next to Jimmy’s for her ashes, “bought and paid for,” she says, “because I didn’t think any of the McPartlands would pay for it,” that quip offered with a healthy laugh. She’s relating this in a rear lounge after the show, on which her voice again was deep, smooth and assured, giving listeners not a clue as to what a struggle it is for her to get to that piano. She’s broken both hips and her pelvis and her wrist twice, both injuries coming when she fell off her porch while gardening. Then there’s the arm she broke on a trip back to England to perform, and the arthritis that crept into her fingers years ago. “I hope I still have my marbles,” she says, another comment inviting the obvious response that she does, indeed.

Duke Ellington, who regularly had dinner at the Hickory House, was said to have told her, early on, “You play so many notes,” and thus taught her a less-is-more wisdom that she carries over from her music to her interviews. So it is on this show, when Parris introduces “This is Always” by saying, “I always sing this to my hubby Paul because it describes how we met.”

McPartland says, “Oh, really?” and out comes the juicy detail, of how the singer’s ex-husband introduced her to her current mate. “I’m a bad girl,” Parris says.

Stories spill out

There are jazz tidbits from her guest too, like how like how Miles Davis may have turned his back on the audience, “but he wore gold lame when he did it,” or how she and Dizzy Gillespie were playing the Charles Hotel in Cambridge “and he stole my bacon off my breakfast.” Then Parris blurts out another personal gem, the tale of how the girlfriend of Sarah Vaughan’s piano player introduced her to a grown jazz enthusiast whose mother had died when the daughter was 2 . . . and whom Parris eventually adopted. “My goodness!” is all McPartland has to say, and the singer goes on, “She needed a mommy and I needed a little girl.”

McPartland is judicious about throwing in her own stories, for it would be hard for any guest to top, say, how a pesky armchair critic once asked her, “Is there any sex in your music?” and she replied, as the elegant Englishwoman, “There sure is -- especially if you’re going with the drummer.” The folks at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in the Jazz at Lincoln Center complex at Columbus Circle wanted her to do five nights of concerts to commemorate her birthday and the release of her album “Twilight World,” her 21st in 29 years for the Concord label. She understands that birthday concerts can be genuine gestures and show biz -- she had them for her 80th and 85th -- but five nights at 90? She first talked them down to three, then to one, though she will do two shows Wednesday -- both sold out -- with violinist Regina Carter, singers Norah Jones and Karrin Allyson, fellow pianist Bill Charlap and other guests.

“Five nights? . . . I knew I would collapse,” she says. She also insisted that they not reserve a hotel room for her in the city, part of a strategy “all plotted out,” she says, to escape quickly, almost Elvis-like. There won’t exactly be a “Marian has left the building” announcement, but the war plan does call for her to thank everyone, “try to not sound rude by leaving,” then high-tail it out with her wheelchair and “three or four stalwart friends to sort of bar the way,” to keep off the crush of well-wishers. She’ll pile into a waiting limo with Jimmy’s granddaughter, from a previous marriage, and her nephew, both coming in from Europe, and with Gosia Gil, the woman who cares for her these days. They’ll all whiz home “and yes, absolutely have a cup of tea. And go to bed.”

A few years ago, she was self-conscious about not being able to walk to the piano, and would try to fake it, but “at this point I don’t really care. I suppose they do want to see what I look like,” she says with another laugh.

She was still deciding what she’d play, but Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” seemed likely to be in the mix.

Her tastes run in the classic jazz tradition -- Duke, Basie, Monk -- while her label describes her own songwriting as “lyrical romanticism,” producing material recorded by Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee and others.

“‘Blackberry Winter’,” Gosia says, suggesting a number for the big night.

“How about ‘Windows?’ ” says Shari Hutchinson, the producer of her radio show, naming a Chick Corea tune.

“Oh, I don’t know,” McPartland says, “It might be one of my tunes or . . . I’ll make up some blues, ‘Birthday Blues.’ ”

It’s been a grueling day, with the trip in from the island and the long recording session, with its takes, retakes and sound checks. It’s time for her to shuffle with her walker toward the elevator, next to which hangs a copy of the famous “Great Day in Harlem” photo of jazz greats taken in 1958, and she’s up there, a lass of 40 then.

“I’m not much of a birthday person. But this one they said is a milestone,” she says at the elevator. “I said, ‘No, it’s a millstone.’ ”

They sometime go through a closing ritual, she and her veteran producer.

Hutchinson will say, “That was another wonderful show.”

And Marian McPartland says back, “Fooled ‘em again.”

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paul.lieberman@latimes.com