It might be easy, I suppose, to forget that the singer and ebullient personality named Spider Saloff has been entertaining tens of thousands of us for more than three decades. Often it seems like she’s been here forever and somehow remains fresh and exciting. It has been a wonderful long while, even though some of her most devoted fans may not be aware of the details of her life and career.
She is a child of Woodbury, New Jersey, a suburb of Philadelphia, where her father ran a jewelry store and she had, as she tells me, “A lovely childhood in an idyllic setting. But I was as a child an oddball. I didn’t seem drawn to what other kids liked.
“There wasn’t anything artistic about my family but we often traveled into Manhattan to see plays and that, combined with my fascination with Ella Fitzgerald, who I saw on the “Ed Sullivan Show,” inspired me to sing.”
She did not share this activity with her parents, practicing at a friend’s house until being cast in her school’s variety show and breaking the news to her folks.
“It was a huge surprise to my parents to see me sing. It was like, ‘Where did she come from?’” Saloff says. “But I remember the song I sang. It was ‘I’m the Greatest Star’ from ‘Funny Girl’.”
She was in plays during high school, and while studying theater in college, and then jumped into the business. “I could sing but wasn’t much of a dancer and that limited me a bit,” she says. “But I did some touring shows and a couple of Broadway flops until finally that audition grind really wore me down and I started to explore the cabaret scene.”
And she changed her name. Born Diane, she became Spider, saying, “It was a nickname I got when I was in college because of my long legs, arms and fingers. And it would not go away, so eventually I started using it professionally in the mid-1980s.”
She quickly found her footing, on her own and in a cabaret act with pianist Ricky Ritzel. She more than once won a MAC Award from the Manhattan Association of Cabarets. “I met so many great musicians, learned so much,” she says.
One of those musicians was the singer Julie Wilson, who told Saloff about an intimate Chicago cabaret called the Gold Star Sardine Bar.
Saloff sent tapes and reviews to its owner, the inventive impresario (and co-owner of the Treasure Island grocery chain) Bill Allen. He booked her for a one-nighter (New Year’s Eve in 1992) at the Gold Star, invited her back for a month-long engagement later in the year and finally asked, “How’d you like to move here?” She said, “You bet,” and she and her husband, writer Bob Drake (née Dudrakey), came here for keeps.
She became a regular performer at the Gold Star. My former colleague, the critic Howard Reich, wrote that she was a “clever entertainer who … knows how to discreetly walk the line between jazz and cabaret singing. … Listen to what she does musically, and you’ll hear a venturesome artist looking for new ways of handling familiar scores. Listen to the way she lingers over a syllable or places a particular verbal accent, and you’ll witness an actress who knows how to maximize the dramatic meaning of a song.”
Those were some of the first words in what would become a mountain of praise, as Saloff played most of the city’s best spots, finding “nightlife in Chicago a lot more like what it was in New York in the ’60s.”
She expanded her performances across the country and the planet. She made records, became adept at all the new recording and recording business technologies. “Spider Saloff Sings Gershwin” toured across the country and her touching and bold one-woman musical, “The Roar of the Butterfly,” includes nine songs she wrote and has been long in the works, much of it inspired by the unexpected death by heart attack of her husband in 2009.
“I love theater and I love jazz, they are both so timelessly American,” she says. “And all about storytelling. … Falling in love, falling out of love. Human stories.”
Naturally, the pandemic cut down her performance schedule but she is back at it. You can find her Sunday at Winter’s Jazz Club.
She is performing “S’wonderful! The Music and Life of George Gershwin” accompanied by Pete Benson (piano), Stew Miller (bass), Eric Schneider (reeds) and Alex Hall (drums).
“The post-COVID audiences have been electric and filled with familiar faces and also many new ones,” she says. “Occasionally, some young person will come up to me after a show and ask, ‘Did you write such-and-such-song?’ And I’ll smile and say, ‘No, that was Cole Porter.’ Isn’t that just wonderful?”
She could have mentioned any number of other great songwriters, since so many continue to inspire her music. Her latest album is a splendid example. “From Broadway to Jazz: Songs from Broadway that Became Jazz Classics,” features Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein, the aforementioned Porter, Richard Rodgers, those Gershwin brothers and other familiar giants.
She is pleased with its substance and its reception and having listened to her over these many years I can tell you that her voice has naturally matured, now richer and warmer. And her interpretive gifts have a greater punch and deeper understanding. Her on stage personality shimmers.
She is, in short, better than ever. And that is really saying something.
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
“Spider Saloff Quintet’s S’wonderful! The Music and Life of George Gershwin” is 5:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Sept. 29 at Winter’s Jazz Club, 465 N. McClurg Court; tickets $27.75-$32.75 at www.wintersjazzclub.com
