E-Mail This Article to a Friend Two for the road Eartha Kitt and Carly Bley hit Newport BY JON GARELICK
	Related Links Eartha Kitt's official Web site

When the Newport Jazz Festival opens, it likes to open BIG, with glitz appeal. For the past few years, the day-long weekend events at Fort Adams State Park have been preceded by a Friday-night kickoff at the swank Newport Casino at the International Tennis Hall of Fame. Past years have included Rosemary Clooney, Tony Bennett, and Harry Connick Jr. This year, when plans fell through for Michael Feinstein to play the August 12 opening, the festival turned to Eartha Kitt.

Call Kitt what you will: living legend, camp classic (an unofficial report from the box office had orders from gay ticket buyers spiking after she was announced), last of the great cabaret artists. She can command an audience with a stage persona that’s utterly self-possessed, and she has a way with songs that’s made her a regular at New York’s Carlisle Hotel, a kind of Cabaret Central where the likes of Barbara Carroll, Ute Lemper, and most famously Bobby Short have all held court. The one thing those artists share is a literate, conversational way with a lyric that closes the gap between spoken verse and song. Kitt’s heightened stylizations are no exception. When she sings, "I want to be evil, I want to spit tacks," those bitten consonants let you know she’s not kidding.

Born to a black sharecropper mother and a never identified white father in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1927, Kitt was shipped up to relatives in Harlem. While still a teenager, she auditioned for Katherine Dunham’s dance company, with whom she toured. After a couple of years, she left the company in Paris and became an overnight smash. Equally adept at dancing, singing, and acting, she landed a part in an Orson Welles stage adaptation of Faust as Helen of Troy. Later, of course, came Catwoman. So how did she learn so fast?

"Because I was in need of survival," Kitt tells me, laughing over the phone from her home in Connecticut. She laughs a lot because, she says, "I can’t believe the things I did." She auditioned for Dunham on a dare from a friend. "It was the kind of dancing I knew nothing about, but I was a very good street dancer." Afro-Cuban dance was the rage in Harlem, and Kitt had a reputation as a great partner. At the audition, she followed the teacher’s moves and won a scholarship to Dunham’s school. In Paris, touring with the company, she was spotted by a club owner who needed a replacement for a Cuban singer. Kitt knew the language from her experiences in Harlem. (She’s always been adept at singing in multiple languages and even had an early hit with the Turkish "Uska Dara.") "It was 1950, and it was 350 francs to the dollar, so I went to the club owner and borrowed 3500 francs, bought a piece of material, made my gown overnight, and went to rehearsal. The band conductor asked where my music was and I said I didn’t have any. He said, ‘What are you going to do?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, but I’ll think of something.’ "

Appearing in a gown slit high up the side in order to show off the legs that the French photographers always seemed to admire, Kitt was struck dumb with stage fright. "The French are rude and they drink and eat and talk, but all of a sudden they realized there was a spotlight on this kid who was standing in front of a microphone, so everyone stopped and looked at me as if to say, ‘All right, go on.’ "

More silence. The orchestra "vamped and vamped" for Kitt to begin the first number, but she just stood there. Finally, "I started to talk. Don’t ask me what I said, I don’t know, but the next day — I don’t remember the songs I was singing, but obviously it was jazz and blues — the next day they said it was the most exciting thing to happen in Paris in 25 years."

Kitt says she had no obvious role models — there was no one else she wanted to be. But she did draw inspiration from Dunham and Lena Horne because of their color. "Being a yellow girl, I was rejected by both sides." Horne and Dunham meant possible acceptance from black and white.

She still suffers stage fright. "I don’t like to have anybody interfere with that boundary between Eartha Mae and Eartha Kitt when I’m going on stage because I’m a nervous wreck and trying to gather myself into becoming whatever it is I’m supposed to be on stage. I never know if the people are going to like me or not, therefore I’m still auditioning for my next job. And that’s the way I feel about everything, because every moment of my life I’m earning my next step toward wherever it is I’m going to go."

Carla Bley, who plays the festival on Saturday afternoon, guesses that she last performed at Newport "at least 30 years ago. I remember that Duke Ellington was playing that day too." She led the nascent Jazz Composers’ Orchestra. "Milford Graves was the drummer, Eddie Gomez bass, Roswell Rudd was in the band, Archie Shepp, Perry Robinson maybe? And Michael Mantler on trumpet."

What did she play? "That was really back at the beginning of my writing for large group. So it might have been some horrible piece called ‘Roast.’ Oh and another horrible piece called ‘Sideways and Mexican.’ Nothing that I ever really saved."

Bley’s easy self-effacement and sense of humor are typical — and the humor has typified her pieces as well. But it’s difficult to think of anything "horrible" in her book. She’s been criticized for writing music that was too funny (i.e., not serious) or too pop-light for her talents. But she’s been a recognized prodigy from early on — when she wrote pieces for her then-husband, the pianist Paul Bley, and made her first big splash with A Genuine Tong Funeral (RCA), which was written for the Gary Burton Quartet and released in 1967. Then came her masterwork, the jazz opera Escalator over the Hill, with a libretto by the poet Paul Haines and performances by Jack Bruce, John McLaughlin, and the Jazz Composers’ Orchestra. She also began writing the arrangements for Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra. Since then, Bley has released a steady stream of albums for all-sized groups on her own Watt imprint through ECM, but she has a special skill with long forms performed by her own big band — which rarely plays Boston, or even Newport. Her brilliant post–September 11 big-band cycle, Looking for America (ECM), was slated for a Boston performance, but that never materialized. "My ‘American tour’ ended up being a week at Iridium in New York City and one concert at the University of Minnesota. And that was really disappointing, because the album was called Looking for America and I didn’t even have a chance to look for it."

A Bley large group deserves a spot at Newport, but instead she’ll be playing with her fine Lost Chords quartet: saxophonist Andy Sheppard, bassist Steve Swallow, drummer Billy Drummond, and Bley on piano. Her early braying avant-garde side has given way to her own quirky brand of jazz classicism. She likes swing and Latin dance rhythms (especially tangos), odd chord voicings and lyrical melodies, and there’s humor in the way a title like "3 Blind Mice" can lead to a 15-minute suite that evokes the three opening notes of the nursery rhyme as well as "Stormy Weather" and asymmetrical Monk-like piano chords. The Lost Chords is a spare, lovely record, and at times, for a supposed humorist like Bley, the mood is wistful, especially when she’s cycling through the slow, stately piano chords of the title track under Sheppard’s horn. Was she in a particularly sad mood when she wrote the pieces for the album?

"I wasn’t in a mood. I don’t think I’m ever in a mood . . . Usually when I go to the desk, if I’m sad, I don’t go. You have to be feeling good, feeling healthy, and feeling like working. I don’t think any moods come into it. The moods are basically if you wrote something great, then you are in a great mood, and if something is not so great, you’re sad."

JVC Jazz Festival-Newport, RI | Fort Adams State Park | August 13-14 | Eartha Kitt + Artie Shaw Orchestra | Newport Casino, International Tennis Hall of Fame | August 12 at 8 pm | 866.468.7619