\n<\/p>\n
Marlena Shaw, who cultivated a sultry stage presence and husky voice from the final echoes of the big-band era, to the go-go Playboy Clubs of the 1960s, to the rise of funk, to disco and finally to the modern cabaret circuit, died on Jan. 19. She was 84.<\/p>\n
Her daughter MarLa Bradshaw announced<\/a> her death on social media but did not share any further details.<\/p>\n Ms. Shaw first came to public notice in the mid-1960s, when she performed at Playboy Clubs around the country. Describing one of those performances in 1966, The Los Angeles Times labeled her a \u201cpretty girl singer\u201d but also called her \u201cthe surprise of the bill.\u201d That same year, Jet magazine reported that \u201cthree record companies were waving contracts in her face\u201d after a New York engagement.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She signed with Cadet Records, which in 1967 released her recording of \u201cMercy, Mercy, Mercy,\u201d a vocal version of the Joe Zawinul tune that had been a hit for Cannonball Adderley. It reached No. 58 on the Billboard pop chart and 33 on the R&B chart.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It also got the attention of Count Basie, who invited Ms. Shaw to try out for a job singing with his band.<\/p>\n She traveled to Las Vegas for an audition. \u201cI have to admit,\u201d she recalled to The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1975, \u201cthat when I was first asked to sing with the Count I thought he was dead.\u201d<\/p>\n Halfway through one of her songs, Basie walked out. Ms. Shaw was not surprised: She didn\u2019t think she had a chance at the job.<\/p>\n Then he reappeared, holding two glasses of Courvoisier. He handed one to Ms. Shaw.<\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t push the voice,\u201d he told her, she recalled to The Inquirer. \u201cSave the pipes; you\u2019ll need them tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She sang with his band for several years.<\/p>\n \u201cFrom Basie, I learned that you can put on a good show without having to have a frantic pace going,\u201d Ms. Shaw told The San Francisco Examiner in 1977.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She also toured and performed<\/a> with Sammy Davis Jr., but by the early 1970s she was mainly embarked on a solo career.<\/p>\n She began developing a half-mischievous, half-melancholic style.<\/p>\n The jazz label Blue Note released her album \u201cWho Is This Bitch, Anyway?\u201d in 1975. Its lead track, \u201cYou Me and Ethel\/Street Walkin\u2019 Woman,\u201d featured a skit in which Ms. Shaw played a commanding and clever but down-and-out prostitute \u2014 she works, she says slyly, in \u201csocial services\u201d \u2014 who gently shakes off a would-be john offering only $25. The album\u2019s liner notes said that, for her, its songs narrated \u201csome of the scenes I\u2019ve lived through.\u201d<\/p>\n She transformed yet again in 1979 with an up-tempo disco album, \u201cTake a Bite.\u201d Although she continued to release albums until 2004, she never made it big as a recording artist. Journalists often noted that she had not garnered the acclaim or celebrity that was once expected of her.<\/p>\n \u201cMarlena Shaw is one of those evergreen performers, a trusty force in jazz even when she isn\u2019t at the top of the charts,\u201d the jazz critic Josef Woodard concluded in The Los Angeles Times in 2001.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Live performance became the focus of her career. As late as 2003, she worked 175 dates a year. She was inspired to sing<\/a> gospel<\/a> after trying out the style on a jazz-themed cruise. She studied how to relate to audiences, regaling them with ribald stories. When she sang \u201cYou\u2019ve Changed,\u201d a ballad made famous by Billie Holiday, she reminisced about a cross-dressing boyfriend.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Not everyone enjoyed the shtick. In 1978, the New York Times music critic John Rockwell praised<\/a> Ms. Shaw\u2019s ability to make even \u201cthe plainest of songs\u201d into \u201cjazz extravaganzas,\u201d but he deplored her use of \u201cthe elegantly vulgar sexual miming that is so popular on the supper\u2010club circuit.\u201d<\/p>\n Another Times critic, Stephen Holden, took the opposite view. \u201cHer outstanding skill is an ability to interpolate amusing, semi-improvised commentary within songs, in a variety of musical styles, that turns them into personal testimony,\u201d he wrote<\/a> in 1987.<\/p>\n In 2005, when Ms. Shaw was performing at the Manhattan cabaret Le Jazz Au Bar, Mr. Holden found that her act had retained the kind of appeal it had nearly 20 years earlier.<\/p>\n \u201cShe evokes the battle of the sexes, which she suggests is continuing and ultimately hopeless,\u201d Mr. Holden wrote<\/a>. \u201cHer weapon of choice is a voice with the cutting edge of a meat cleaver.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Marlina Burgess was born on Sept. 22, 1939, in New Rochelle, N.Y. She grew up singing in a church choir, and during her girlhood she performed at the Apollo Theater. She hoped to go on tour with her uncle, a trumpeter named Jimmy Burgess, but her mother forbade it. She later adopted Marlena Shaw as a stage name.<\/p>\n One night when Ms. Shaw was in her 20s, she was at a bowling alley when a girlfriend of hers insisted that she ask the bandleader who was performing there if she could sing. With the courage endowed by two beers, Ms. Shaw put herself forward. She got a job singing at the joint for $15 a night.<\/p>\n As of the mid-1970s, she had five children and was married to Ed Boyer, a bassist, but family life did not stop her from touring. \u201cWe talk about problems on the phone when I\u2019m on the road,\u201d she said about her relationship with her children in a 1977 interview with The Oakland Tribune. \u201cThey\u2019re very cool about my traveling.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Shaw lived in Las Vegas for decades. Complete information about survivors was not available.<\/p>\n In recent decades, some of Ms. Shaw\u2019s records provided soundtracks to TV commercials and material for sampling, including \u201cCalifornia Soul\u201d (which was used by KFC<\/a> and Dockers<\/a>) and \u201cWoman of the Ghetto\u201d (which was sampled by Fat Joe<\/a> and Beenie Man<\/a>, among others).<\/p>\n Before her death, her birth year had generally been listed as 1942 or 1944, but her daughter wrote in the death announcement that she had actually been born in 1939. On that subject, Ms. Shaw once told The Oakland Tribune that she had learned a lesson from Sammy Davis Jr.: \u201cHe taught me to use everything I have onstage; I don\u2019t hold anything back, except my age.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n