"Cole Porter would have made it chic to sweat," Mark Murphy said, finally succumbing to the conditions and removing his trademark baggy white jacket.
But the implausibly youthful 72 year old American jazz singer (old enough, and good enough, to have numbered Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee among his admirers) always sweats in the figurative sense, summer or winter. He remains more committed to risky improvisation than almost any legendary jazz elder still performing, and stands out all the more because he operates out of the usually conservative territory of the cabaret crooner and the Broadway singer.
Murphy was in London until Sunday with a quartet led by that fine vocal accompanist Pete Churchill and including bassist Andy Hamill and drummer Mark Fletcher. The singer's whoops, scatted runs, yodels, indignant falsettos and drumbeat sounds sound a little less secure on uptempo numbers these days, and can periodically disappear into the urgent background melee he likes his bands to generate. But his expressiveness on slow songs, always haunting, seems to have grown even more hypnotic with the years.
With almost all Murphy performances, at least one memory stays with you a long time - and on his opening night, he delivered one of the great versions of I've Got You Under My Skin, beginning as an aching murmur over a two-note bass vamp, ascending over a rustle of cymbals and brushes, erupting in fearful certainty into a closing scream on "Don't you know, you fool, you never can win".
He then deftly delivered All Of You over Bill Evans's chord arrangement, skidding his way along a treacherous path of shifting chromaticisms and scatting frantically through a deluge of climactic percussion.
Several tributes to Cole Porter, one given a samba shuffle, confirmed how imaginatively Murphy remoulds the familiar. When he whispered what could have been a cheesy Porterism ("May the sweet honeydew of wellbeing settle upon you") in one softly evaporating finale, he did it with such affectionate conviction that the audience bought the notion ecstatically. A unique artist, still staring fearlessly over the edge.
