Bobby Short, who died yesterday morning at age 80, was a pianist and singer universally recognized as the king of the cabaret world, and one of the all-time great interpreters of the American songbook.

Short died of leukemia at New York Presbyterian Hospital, his press agent said.

For nearly 40 years, Bobby Short was a New York institution; he began playing the Cafe Carlyle in 1968, and since then served as a perennial icon of Gotham at its smartest and most sophisticated. Short’s image was employed by filmakers, like Woody Allen in “Hannah and her Sisters,” and Barry Sonnenfeld in “For Love Or Money,” who wanted to portray an image of cultured, intelligent New Yorkers. He cashed in himself when he appeared in a famous ad campaign for “Charlie” perfume in the late 1970s.

For most of the second half of his career, Short was the performer people everywhere associated with the art form known as cabaret. Complimentary as that might have been, Mr. Short was not only cabaret’s archetype: he was also its architect and its innovator. No one sang like that before him, but plenty of people tried to sound like him after his initial breakthrough in the mid-1950s.

Short always knew that it was easier to put a song over with a strong driving beat behind him. When Short sings Rodgers and Hart’s “The Most Beautiful Girl In The World,” it is still a waltz, a more aggressive waltz than it had ever been. Even the verse isn’t out of tempo, as you’d expect, but has a solid tempo.

Time didn’t always mean speeding things up and sticking a steady tempo, as producer Nesuhi Ertegun, who worked with Short on most of his classic early albums, once observed. “I’ll never forget when he did ‘Bye Bye Blackbird.’ I think we did only one take. It was so perfect, so right, although it was a totally new approach to this standard. Bobby chose a much slower tempo than usual and he imbued the song with melancholy and despair. When he finished I was speechless. It was a triumph, one of the greatest moments of music I had ever heard.” It’s been said that Miles Davis was inspired to do this particular song in this particular tempo after hearing Short’s version.

Bobby Short was born in Dannville, Ill., on September 15, 1924 (for many years he insisted it was 1926). His earliest role model was the great Broadway actress-singer Helen Morgan, another Danville native. He later dealt with his childhood in his first (and more personal) of two memoirs, “Black And White Baby” (1971), which captures Afro-American life in the Midwest in the Depression era and then his experiences on the vaudeville circuit in the late 1930s, where he toured as the 12-year-old king of swing.

Short, one of 10 children born to Randall and Myrtle Short (six lived to adulthood), was a headliner by the time he was 10. At the end of the 1930s, he voluntarily left the limelight to experience what was left of his childhood, but by the war years had gone back to show business.

Columnist Rogers Whitaker, one of Short’s early champions, once wrote that few of his listeners “could ever be persuaded that Bobby was not a big town boy.” Yet for the first 40 years of his life, Short was perhaps even more peripatetic than anyone else in the music business. He worked first in the south and the midwest, and by the turn of the ’50s Short was entrenched in Hollywood nightclubs. Yet even then, Short was a New Yorker in spirit. He played a Hollywood hot spot called The Gala, which Whitaker described as “the only place that expatriate New Yorkers swore was home to them.” He first began to make a name for himself in Hollywood – even landed a memorable movie appearance in the film version of Broadway’s hit revue, “Call Me Mister.” In the mid-1950s he let his coastal sophistication go continental when he worked for an extended gig at the Mars Club in Paris. Even though Short speaks French like a native, when he sings in the language, as on “Bedelia” and “Pilot Me,” he seems like an especially recherche New Yorker.

Back in Los Angeles by 1955, Short was by now working with arranger and impresario Phil Moore, and then the Ertegun brothers, Nesuhi and Ahmet, who owned and ran Atlantic Records. Short was old enough to hobnob with the creators of the Great American Songbook, like Vernon Duke and Dorothy Fields, but he was young enough to be one of the anointed ones who would keep this music alive throughout the dark ages that followed. It’s telling that Short wasn’t recorded regularly until the start of the rock ‘n’ roll era, and that he worked with the same producers who gave us Ray Charles, The Coasters, and The Drifters.

Short kept making classic albums from the 1950s through the 1970s. In 1968, he became ensconced at the Cafe Carlyle, and made a series of triumphant appearances at Town Hall (some with the great diva Mabel Mercer) at precisely the height of the Hippie era. In the 1970s, when this music was supposed to be dead as a doornail, Short was bigger than ever, one of the in-crowd who congregated with George Plimpton and company at Elaine’s. He was the only cabaret singer who was ever positioned at the center of a national advertising campaign, when he told the women of America that they could be as beautiful and desirable as model (and future Charlie’s Angel) Shelly Hack if they doused themselves in Charlie – a product that is mainly notable for the company’s choice of a pitchman.

Short, one of the only blacks in the Social Register, fought bigotry and prejudice on several fronts. He got his picture frequently in the papers when he spent many years hanging out with designer and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, and did TV commercials for her as well. At one point, she was turned down by the board of a luxury apartment building, as she alleged in a lawsuit, because they were afraid she and Short might get married and move in together. He continued to campaign for the cause of Afro-Americans in American culture, and was the primary force behind the statue of Duke Ellington that resides today at the northeast corner of Central Park.

He recorded over two dozen albums, nearly all of which have been made available again in the CD era, including entire songbooks of the works of the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, Noel Coward, and Andy Razaf. In the 1990s, Short reinvigorated his career with a new association with the Telarc label, based in his native Ohio, and he began appearing regularly with an eight-piece little big band – his regular trio plus five horns – under the musical direction of saxophonist and conductor Loren Schoenberg.

“Everyone knows Bobby the performer, but equal attention should be paid to his skills as a pianist and as a creator of his own arrangements,” Mr. Schoenberg told The New York Sun. “They were perfection, as were his shows themselves – as elegantly crafted and transparent as a piece of Steuben glass.”

After nearly 40 steady years as a fixture at the Cafe Carlyle, Short announced a year ago that 2004 would be his last year there, however, he changed his mind and said that he would stay through the Cafe’s 50th anniversary in 2005.

It would have been nice had he lived long enough to make that date. It was the only one of his lifetime goals that he did not achieve.