Marie Mørck: My One and Only Love

Copenhagen's Marie Mørck releases her third album, My One and Only Love, as a 20-something up-and-comer on the Danish vocal jazz scene. Her well-received earlier projects contained originals and standards, but My One and Only Love stays within the American Songbook.

How would Mørck have us perceive her program in 2025? For Danish television viewers, "Look for the Silver Lining," "Like Someone in Love," "I'm in the Mood for Love" and "Are You Havin' Any Fun" are likely to resonate with the repertoire the character Edward Weyse (played by Jens Jacob Tychsen) sang nightly at the piano in Badehotellet, the Danish TV series that ran from 2013 to 2024, becoming the number-one most-watched TV show in Denmark and gaining American fans as Seaside Hotel when PBS brought the series to the US in 2024. The plot follows owners, workers and guests in a little Danish beach hotel from 1928-1947, a time when, as the promo materials explain, "the world is falling apart." The story concludes two years after WWII.

What were those days like in Scandinavia? As war broke out in 1939, Denmark declared itself neutral right away. German occupation began shortly thereafter, remaining in place until Allied forces came to the rescue in 1945. For a time, the Danish democracy and constitutional monarchy continued to exist, with German Nazis dictating terms. Seaside Hotel imagines what life might have been like then. The cast is small but diverse socially and politically, with everyone under one roof during the summer months. In the evenings, they gather in the salon to hear Weyse sing the latest songs by Cole Porter and other jazz-adjacent American composers. To paraphrase Art Blakey, it was their way of sloughing off the psychic dirt of the day.

"Are You Havin' Any Fun" came out in 1939, as the war was beginning. Jack Yellin and Sammy Fain's tune was a US hit—number 6 on Billboard's charts for 12 weeks. The ethos is in the lyric:

Better have some fun.
You ain't gonna live forever.
Before you're old and gray, still OK,
Have your little fun, son.
Have your little fun.

Mørck sings it unaffectedly—with a bit of irony—over a light bolero beat in a pop-jazz arrangement with an optimistic modulation at the end. The ambience lies somewhere between American jazz club and Danish ballroom. It is a contemporary take on the times, in a retro style. During his piano solo, Magnus Hjorth and his able bandmates, bassist Lasse Mørck and drummer Snorre Kirk, emphasize the American jazz roots of the music. Elsewhere, the refined bolero evokes dancing socialites or perhaps those dreaming to be—could be either Denmark or the US. Mørck makes it easy for us to reimagine the period against a contemporary backdrop: Russia invading Ukraine, authoritarianism growing in the US, war devastating the Middle East. For those of us who live, for now, at a distance, "Are You Havin' Any Fun" is both a balm and a pertinent, if unnerving, question.