Just when you think the world’s going to hell in a handbasket, along comes Buddy Charles.

In the unlikely setting of Niles, Illinois, just northwest of Chicago, in the comfortable sort of place that might once have been called a supper club, the singer/pianist Buddy Charles performs each Tuesday and Wednesday nights in an open run. The place is called The Chambers and it’s on the east side of Milwaukee Avenue, about a half mile south of that god-awful fake stone fountain at the intersection of Touhy and Milwaukee.

Why is Niles an unlikely setting? Well, you’d think that a place where you could cuddle up with a brandy to hear Noel Coward and George Gershwin sung and played with the rarest of wit and pianistic skill would be in downtown Chicago, right? But no. The elegant cognac-and-piano bars—Toulouse and the Gold Star Sardine Bar, for example—are gone for now, largely replaced by places whose sophistication is manufactured. But that’s another story.

In the same way that hearing Louis Prima always makes me happy, hearing Buddy Charles makes me happy. I love jazz, and The Chambers regularly hosts some of the best jazz people in Chicago. Buddy Charles is neither jazz singer nor jazz pianist, however. He is a consummate piano-bar entertainer who performs the best material on the planet.

Correction. “Material” sounds clinical. He performs the best songs, such as “Someone To Watch Over Me,” in the most inventive fashion—straight and sincere at first so you get the potent sweetness of the song itself, and then veering off into piano invention that equates to a multi-movement sonata by the time he’s finished. What’s more, he does the latter without a trace of gratuitous technical virtuosity—something less experienced improvisers sometimes display to cover their lack of real ability. Too Many Notes.

Then comes “Nice Work If You Can Get It.” In an upside-down world, don’t you love lyrics like “Strolling with that one girl and then taking that vow”? That and a good stiff drink will get your head on straight again. As will laughter, something that Buddy Charles generates in spades with his comic gifts: his character acting during songs, his first-rate mastery of accents and his ability to mock without ever being mean-spirited.

Add to this a real nice waitress and a perfectly good meal and I want to climb to the top of the Sears Tower and holler “Where are you, Chicago? Come to the cabaret! Get happy!”

Despite the good meal I suggest arriving after eight-fifteen or so, for drinks. That’s because I felt slightly guilty eating and (quietly) conversing while Buddy Charles played. After eight the crowd is mostly finished eating and is more engaged in the music. And Buddy is fully warmed up, not that he needs it.

Like the word “awesome,” “legend” is a word too freely used. (As a friend of mine says, only a very few things, such as the pyramids, are awesome.) But Buddy Charles can validly be called a legend and he is an enduring one, thank God. A great favorite of Mike Royko’s, he performed for eighteen years at the long-shuttered Acorn on Oak, just off Michigan Avenue, and then for years more at the Coq d’Or in the Drake Hotel. He’s now doing something that relatively few musicians have the genuine skill to do in an age where popular music is often overproduced to begin with and is then “consumed” by way of individual listening devices that separate us.

Without costume, lighting or electronic enhancement and on the strength of sheer talent, he’s holding a roomful of living, breathing imperfect human beings together in rapt delight.

Buddy Charles performs Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 7 to 10 p.m. at The Chambers, 6881 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Niles. 847/647–8282.

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Marie T. (Terry) Sullivan is arts critic for The Chicago Daily Observer whose tastes run the gamut…which she writes about with enthusiasm—and without being stuffy!