Mark Murphy, on the road.

Mark Murphy, the always astonishing vocal improviser, has--as jazz musicians say--caught the last bus. He was 83, a significant age in the jazz world, outlasting Charlie Parker by almost fifty yeare and Bix Beiderbecke by nearer sixty.

Murphy exploded on the scene in the late 1950s with his recording of Steve Allen's "This Could Be the Start of Something." He was unlike any other male singer--and there were great ones, from Herb Jeffries to Sinatra to Johnny Hartman; instead, he was closer to Betty Carter, and perhaps Sheila Jordan, with an approach to melody that regarded it as a runway, from which he could soar above the clouds of imagining.

We remember his inventive two-way performance of "Long Ago and Far Away," blending the 1944 Jerome Kern-Ira Gershwin ballad with James Taylor's same-titled 1971 lament. But the Mark Murphy album we play most often is "Bop for Kerouac."

In this 1981 recording, made in San Francisco, where he spent most of his career, Murphy, backed by a solid group of players, including Richie Cole, Bill Mays, Bruce Forman, Bob Magnusson and Jeff Hamilton, sings lyrics to music of Parker, Mingus, Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis. He also croons, and that, for once, is the right word, David Raksin's theme from "The Bad and the Beautiful," and the anxious sensuality of "You Better Go Now" ("because I like you much too much--you have a way with you").

Most impressive are Murphy's readings from Kerouac's "The Subterraneans" and "On the Road." Mark Murphy is now on the road himself. Maybe he'll meet Kerouac along the way.