This is a mistake, Mark Murphy says. And by his crisp, lively voice, and the fact that he's resumed touring at age 79, and that his mind and spiky sense of humor seem quite intact, that does indeed seem to be the case.

Murphy is living in a small room in the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, N.J. It is an assisted living facility for entertainers, although not famous ones. Vaudeville performers have spent their final years here, and Jazz Age comedy teams like Smith & Dale. "Doctor, it hurts when I do this," Smith says. "Well, don't do that," Dale replies.

Murphy? He has been a critic's darling for years, a premier jazz singer riding the same vocalese edge as the team of Hendricks, Lambert & Ross. Or today's wildly inventive scat-singing Kurt Elling, who calls Murphy his inspiration. With his first record, 1956's Meet Mark Murphy, he was being positioned to challenge Frank Sinatra and Mel Tormé. He was that good.
But, you know what? A different filament runs through Murphy's head. He hears things differently. Over the years, he swings from lounge to wildly re-worked Nat King Cole standards, to bop, to Brazilian, to readings from Jack Kerouac. He's covered The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" and Johnny Cash's "So Doggone Lonesome." Why? "Why not?" Murphy harrumphs. On his most-recent album in 2007, he did Coldplay's "What If?"

Why not? "Most of my records are a little too mind-blowing for people who don't know about jazz, or don't read Kerouac," he says. "It's a little more advanced."

He's a hipster with a remarkable voice, and a cosmic sensibility. "Jazz really teaches you how to improvise your life," he says. "One door closes, you open another one. I'm a big fan of opening doors."

And now, for the past 1½ years he finds himself in this little room in the Actors Home, at the insistence of relatives who insisted he sell his Central New York home on the Lake Ontario shore because they thought he was losing it. And yes, Murphy admits, he was.

"I was misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's," he says. "So I sold my house to my nephew because they thought I was no longer able to run a house anymore. Some idiot doctor in upstate New York gave me the wrong medicine, and I kind of flipped out for a few months there. I even put myself into a hospital for a while." So he wants outta the home. He recently toured Florida, and now has a few gigs in New York, including Friday at the Harro East Ballroom at the Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival.

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