BOBBY SHORT,THE JAZZ INVENTOR

O cantor e pianista de cabaré Robert Waltrip Short, se tornou famoso como Bobby Short, e nasceu no 15 de setembro de 1926, em Danville, Illinois, e tornou-se a personificação do estilo e sofisticação de Nova York se apresentando ao piano no Hotel Carlyle, em New York City.

Com suas canções clássicas e presença suave, ele divertiu milhares de pessoas no Carlyle e apesar de sua adoração pelos clássicos, não era nostálgico. Seu gosto musical, assim como sua voz suave e sua elegância no vestir, eram sempre impecáveis.

Tocou na Casa Branca para os presidentes Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan e Bill Clinton. Apesar de ter perdido público para os Beatles e outros grupos novos da época do iê-iê-iê, superou essa fase com um show ao lado Mabel Mercer, em Manhattan, que originou um álbum de muito sucesso (1968) e assinou com o Cafe Carlyle, onde permaneceu por mais de 35 anos (1968-2004).

Mesmo com a mudança dos tempos, continuou devotado ao grande estilo do Great American Songbook, com canções de Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, os Gershwins, Billy Strayhorn e Harold Arlen.

Apareceu no filme Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), de Woody Allen e concorreu ao Grammy com Late Night at the Cafe Carlyle (1993) e com You´re the Top: Love Songs (2000). Nunca se casou, morava no Sutton Place, em Manhattan, e morreu de leucemia, aos 80 anos, no Hospital Presbiteriano de Nova York, deixando um filho adotivo, Ronald Bell, e seu irmão, Reginald Short, ambos da Califórnia.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRD7mt_9oMs

After he took up residence in the lounge of New York's elegant Hotel Carlyle in the late 1960s, vocalist and pianist Bobby Short became an icon of New York and American cultural life. Short called himself a saloon singer, but actually he roosted at the top of the hierarchy of entertainers who perform in cocktail lounges, and indeed he did much to define the modern categories of lounge singer and cabaret singer. New York visitors stopped in at the Café Carlyle for decades to hear Bobby Short, to glimpse the lifestyles of the city's well-heeled residents, and to take a tour through the classics of American popular song with one of its most knowledgeable curators for a guide.

Robert Waltrip Short, the ninth of ten children, was born in the small town Danville, Illinois, on September 15, 1924. His father was a coal miner from Kentucky who sometimes landed higher-paying jobs, and the family had a piano and a radio tuned to jazz. At age four, Short taught himself to play the piano. The resourcefulness that put Short on the road to performing in posh nightclubs was inherited in part from his mother. She "taught survival. I think she had a framework of cast iron," Short told CNN. The young musician had a childhood remarkably free of racial discrimination. "There was a total absence of any kind of overt racial prejudice in those years, and it was kept that way by our teachers—which I was not aware of then," he wrote in his autobiography, Black and White Baby.

Fonte: ufcg.edu.biografia