The oldest pop singer in America begins his rehearsal.
He’s a slender man, not tall but with good posture, and along with his belted blue jeans he is wearing an orange-flowered green shirt from what he calls his Harry Truman collection.
“We’re going to do ‘Blue Skies,'” he announces, standing next to a piano. Irving Berlin, he adds, 1926.
Blue skies
Smiling at me
Nothing but blue skies
Do I see
He sings with verve for the smattering of listeners in the social hall of his retirement home, his hands sweeping the air, his eyes often on the woman sitting in front of him in a wheelchair. Her gaze never leaves him. They’ve been married for 68 years.
Noticing the days hurrying by
When you’re in love, my how they fly
The oldest pop singer in America had meant to remove his hearing aids — they can distort music — but didn’t get around to it. He mostly stays on pitch anyway, his voice strong if a little hoarse, and when he hits the final note, his wife applauds.
He moves on to “I Can’t Get Started,” explaining that it’s a very sad song about a man who has everything he wants, except the woman he loves.
“Which,” he says, “means he has nothing.”
The self-described oldest pop singer in America is named Jordan Miller. He is 91.
“And a half,” he stipulates.
And if he’s not really the oldest pop singer in America — who knows how many other crooners are out there in the retirement homes of the nation — he does know, as the flyer for his upcoming show points out, that he is six months older than the legendary Tony Bennett.
And if, unlike Bennett, he’s not a professional singer, so what?
After Saturday’s performance for the residents of the Selfhelp Home, where Miller and his wife live, that could change. He has a dream of singing the classics of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s — the works of Hoagy Carmichael, Cole Porter, the Gershwin brothers — in retirement homes anywhere and everywhere.
“I want to take it on the road,” he says. “I mean, nothing else to do.”
Miller once imagined a singing career, but after he was counseled that music was a terrible business, he went into an equally iffy enterprise, publishing. He made a go of it.
For nearly 40 years, he and his wife, Anita, ran Academy Chicago Publishers, a small house that earned a big reputation. They published books they loved, ones that might never have made it into the world without them: feminist books, children’s books, a book about non-sexist children’s books. They reprinted old books that were hard to find. They brought famous poets, including e.e. cummings, to Chicago.
In 2013, the Millers sold the company, and last June moved into the Selfhelp Home, a retirement home in Chicago’s Uptown community that began as a haven for refugees from Nazi persecution. There, they learned to adjust their routines to the circ*mstances.
“We take a lot of naps,” he says, “eat three meals a day, watch a lot of politics on television.”
Though they still read newspapers and the New Yorker, they don’t read books as much as they once did.
“It’s kind of stressful,” says Anita Miller. She doesn’t mean the brainwork of reading, but the physical work of holding the book.
In their new home, Jordan Miller’s mind returned to his dreams of a singing career. Maybe, he thought, he could do a free concert. Make a video of it. If the video got around, maybe he’d get some gigs. Ester Hana, a popular Chicago pianist, agreed to accompany him.
“It’s something he needs to do,” Anita Miller says. “He’s a performer by instinct.”
As he began planning for Saturday’s gig, he wrote down the names of all the songs he could remember. There were 52, many of them wistful. He whittled them to a set list for the show.
“I picked all songs that were depressing,” he says, congenially. “Which is sort of typical of me, I guess.”
They’re songs for people who like words, and he talks about the stories they tell, their rhyme schemes and structure.
“These lyricists were not dummies,” he says.
When Miller sings, he occupies the songs with his whole body, just as the songs, written when he was young, seem to inhabit him. He thinks of singing as exercise, meditation, therapy.
“Everybody ought to sing,” he says, “whether they can or not.”
Most of the singers he loves, the ones who brought the songs he loves to life, are gone. Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra.
But one beauty of good songs is that they outlast their singers, and at 2 p.m. on Saturday, the oldest pop singer in America will demonstrate that getting old can be a creative act.
mschmich@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @MarySchmich
