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Maria Bethlehem
American jazz singer from Colin MacInnes' 1956 novel Absolute Beginners. The narrator, photographer Blitz Baby, is on his way to a concert by Czar Tusdie's band featuring Maria Bethlehem.
... as for Maria Bethlehem, I’d say that, second to a great like Lady Day (who, to my mind’s right up there on an Everest peak all of her very own), she’s the world’s best female jazz singer that there is.
When Blitz Baby takes his seat at the North London auditorium, he's just in time to catch the singer's entrance:
Maria is big, and no longer a young woman, but she walked on the stage just like a girl: quick feet, easy gestures, and a face that’s so darn friendly, though it can also be kidding you, and sometimes quite severe. She’s like a girl, yes, but she’s also, in a strange way, just like everybody’s Mum: she welcomes you all, takes charge of you all, and from the very moment she comes on, you know that you’re all there with her in safe hands. And straight away she swings into the song she’s chosen, no tricks, no crafty pauses, no hesitation whatsoever, and what she does to the songs is unbelievable: I mean, she takes even quite familiar standards and turns them inside out, and throws them right back at you as though they’ve become nobody’s but her own – Maria’s. And she can be witty as hell, throwing everything away and shrugging, but then, the next moment, rising like a bird, and sweet or melancholy. But whatever she does – and this is the whole thing about Maria Bethlehem – her singing makes you feel it’s absolutely wonderful to be alive and kicking, and that human beings are a damn fine wonderful invention after all.
