Laura Nyro

Laura Nyro [niːrəʊ] (born October 18, 1947 as Laura Nigro in New York City , † April 8, 1997 in Danbury , Connecticut ) was an American singer and songwriter . Her colleagues and music critics ascribe her great influence on pop music of the late 1960s and 1970s, with the general public perceiving her more as a songwriter and the professional world as a singer and pianist . Laura Nyro - she chose the stage name to avoid association with the pejorative pejorative Negro and as a tribute to her hometown - was one of the first women in this genre to master everything herself, from the composition to the arrangements to the interpretation of her music, and thereby become one could create considerable artistic independence from the then almost all-powerful record industry.

A “shooting star” between pop and jazz

The daughter of a family with Italian-Catholic and Russian-Jewish roots was born and raised in the Bronx in New York ; her father Louis Nigro was a jazz trumpeter and piano tuner, her mother Gilda, née Mirsky, loved the music of Debussy , Persichetti and the voice of Leontyne Price . The family had owned a 75-year-old Steinway piano since the late 1950s , on which Laura and her three years younger brother Jan learned to play the piano - Laura mostly as an autodidact ; She broke off piano lessons after a short time because she felt too manipulated by her teacher. She also taught herself to play the guitar. She told Life Magazine about her childhood in 1970: “I've always sung since I was able to make sounds. And I've always written short poems; at eight or nine I started writing little songs ”. In addition, she occasionally sang doo-wop songs together with some of the Portorican boys in the neighborhood in the Grand Concourse subway station near her parents' house - "The acoustics there were unsurpassable, and we were thrown out of the entrance halls of office buildings". As teenagers (around 1964) her favorite musicians were mostly African American women, especially Patti LaBelle (see below), The Orlons , Martha & The Vandellas , Nina Simone , but also Joan Baez and Curtis Mayfield as well as the jazz musicians Billie Holiday , John Coltrane and Miles Davis . Shortly before her death, Laura Nyro described her musical preferences in those years as “cross section of different kinds of music”.

1966/67: First recordings, first appearances

At 17, she left Manhattan High School of Music and Art prematurely to live solely for her music. In 1966 she auditioned for the first time in a record studio: Jerry Schoenbaum , the director of the Verve label, was impressed by her lecture because “her melodies [were] so strange and different from everything common at the time - the bar length, the chord progressions , the lyrics, everything was unusual ”. And although Laura Nyro refused to play any other than her own songs, Herb Bernstein produced a long-playing record with her. This was the only production where she was persuaded to make small compromises, no matter how hard Bernstein tried ("If you change the tempo every 30 seconds, you lose the normal listener"), and it was also the only record on which not she, but a studio musician with Stan Free, accompanied her on individual takes on the piano. Even as a newcomer, she showed an enormous will to enforce what she found to be correct against all attempts at smoothing out and commercialization. At that time - especially with women - that was anything but the rule in the music business, as her colleague Janis Ian (“Society's Child”) recalled: “As a singer, you were hardly ever allowed to play an instrument while recording ; Nobody expected that you would write your own songs or even lead the studio band. That's what the boys were meant for. ”In February 1967 the LP hit stores and radio station disc jockeys under the title More Than a New Discovery . Nyro's songs were rarely heard in New York, but songs like Wedding Bell Blues and And When I Die were very popular in Florida and especially on the West Coast . An early enthusiast of their music was Lesley Gore , which at this time along with her brother Michael with Ride a Tall White Horse wrote a but only decades later published song Nyros biographer Michele Kort called "an intrepid homage and musical collection of quotations".

That's why they were in early 1967, a series of concerts at the hungry i , a club in San Francisco , and was designed by co-organizer Lou Adler for 17 June 1967 to the legendary Festival Monterey Pop invited where it on the second day between the Byrds and Jefferson Airplane occurred and performed four of their songs. Contrary to her usual habit, she was supported by two members of the black vocal group Hi Fashions and did not sit at the piano, but stood next to them on the stage; She was also accompanied by the six-member festival big band . The two background singers wore dark blue cocktail dresses , Nyro a black, ankle-length dress that left one shoulder free and produced a wing of fabric when she raised her arm in a sweeping gesture. This acoustic as well as visual appearance in “ bell bottoms ”, ponchos and with little bell chains might have taken some getting used to or - as her first manager Art Mogull put it immediately afterwards - reminded him of “three dancing elephants in the circus”. Donald Clarke puts it a little more politely: "She was hopelessly inappropriately dressed."

The "stroke of luck Geffen"

After Monterey, Laura Nyro found herself in a low mood. She saw her appearance there as a complete flop (on the other hand: see below ) , the first LP was still too commercial for her and her club guest appearance characterized the singer with the black, more than hip-length hair with the words that she would never again "in front of you Bunch of car salesmen drinking a lot and chatting during the songs ”perform. At the same time she wrote numerous new songs, and her records - Wedding Bell Blues had also released a single as a single - weren't top hits, but neither were they slow-moving.

Above all, however, David Geffen, one of the most important men in the US music industry, tried hard to become its agent - an absolutely unsuitable combination at first glance: here the introverted, yes, brittle, artist who picks up on the musical mainstream , there the bustling one later “record mogul” who knew everyone, talked to everyone about everyone and had an unerring instinct for middle-of-the-road trends and business success. Ever since he first heard Nyro on the radio, Geffen was absolutely certain that he had discovered the top artist of the following years and did everything possible to convince Nyro of her as well. When he did that after a short time, the first thing he did was buy back all the rights to their songs and pay off their previous agents (that was worth a total of $ 470,000 to him); in doing so, he took advantage of the fact that Laura Nyro was not yet 21 when she signed her first contracts. He then founded the music publisher Tuna Fish Music together with her and in the subsequent collaboration granted her a degree of artistic autonomy that even decades later was by no means standard in this branch. He also signed a record deal for her with Columbia Records and made sure that there were only people involved in the recordings who tried to work for her and be allowed to play with her. This change was also a step forward in terms of studio technology: the new eight-track recording devices (Verve only had four-track technology at the time) enabled a much richer sound for the sound mix and made it easier, for example, for Laura Nyro's wish to do one herself instead of other background vocal groups to record polyphonic background chorus .

As different as Nyro and Geffen were, they harmonized perfectly with one another; Geffen explicitly names the credits on the covers of their next two records as “agent and friend”. Her second long-playing record, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession , was released in March 1968 , and in October she began recording her third album.

1969: The "New York Tendaberry" at the summit

From 1968, Laura Nyro was in a relationship with Jim Fielder, bassist for Blood, Sweat & Tears , for about a year . Since their drummer Bobby Columby was an ardent admirer of their music - he thought Eli was one of the best pop albums ever - the band rehearsed with her after the departure of their founder Al Kooper . All of the musicians were more than satisfied with the results, and Nyro, who loved the sound of trumpet, horn and trombone, would have gladly accepted the following offer to become a front woman at BS&T. Only David Geffen was finally able to talk her out of this, who realized that her quieter, more mysterious sides would no longer come to the fore. Therefore, the group chose David Clayton-Thomas as the new lead singer instead ; Nyro occasionally attended BS&T rehearsals afterwards.

At the same time she worked on her new LP New York Tendaberry . "Tendaberry" was a Nyro word creation with which she wanted to express the soft (English tender ) core under New York's rough asphalt shell , which was also understood as a synonym for herself. It was to be the most experimental of her early albums - the time for it was ripe: the Beatles' White Album had been released in November 1968 - and she approached every detail with incredible meticulousness, not only musically, but also sketched it herself Record cover. When she wasn't working in the studio, she sat at the piano in her apartment and continued to work on individual chords for hours: “When I record a record, I'm not a person, not a woman. I don't sleep and don't want to talk to anyone. I don't need any stimulants, I'm at hormonal speed . ”The vocal recordings alone lasted until the summer of 1969, although the further improved technical possibilities (Columbia now even had 16-track machines) offered even more space to try out sound effects . Three months later, the perfectionist artist was also satisfied with the result, and on September 24, 1969, her third LP was released, which, like her second, also contained an insert with the lyrics. The cost of production (between $ 50 and $ 60,000) was twice what would normally be estimated. Geffen had to appease the Columbia bosses more than once - also because of the permanent strain on the studio - and his best argument was that the record received brilliant reviews (for example, "Nyro raises pop music to the level of serious art" and "Mit noch not 22 does it compete with the giants of the past, including Gershwin , rather than with the rivals of the present ”) and made it to number 32 on the LP charts; so this musically very demanding record should also become its most commercially successful one.

Laura Nyro was already seen twice on television in January 1969, first in the serious cultural program Critique , in which she sang six songs, was interviewed by the New York Times journalist William Kloman and where host John Daly then had two music critics Had style analyzed. This show showed the two faces of the all-rounder - she was too shy in conversation, but uncontrollable in her music: "Singing for me is the closest thing to flying". This has also contributed to the fact that there are only a few film recordings of her (see below) .
A fortnight later she was a guest with Stevie Wonder , Judy Collins and Buddy Rich in Bobby Darin's NBC special Kraft Music Hall presents The Sound of the Sixties , this time only had to sing and not speak.
During the spring she gave a series of small concerts in colleges on the east coast and accepted an engagement in the "Mecca of singer-songwriters", the troubadour in West Hollywood . She canceled an invitation to the Woodstock Festival in August at short notice in view of the negative memories of the Monterey Festival. Instead, she performed two sold-out concerts in Carnegie Hall on November 29, 1969 , which she opened with the title song of her third LP and then performed her compositions for 90 minutes - supplemented by Spanish Harlem , which, like so many of her own songs, is about their hometown.

In the same week of November, three cover versions of Nyro songs were also in the Billboard Top Ten : Wedding Bell Blues , And When I Die and Eli's Coming .

The development of their musical style

Vocals and instrumentation

Their arrangements and the style of their performance were far removed from the popular pop-hit scheme of those years. On the third LP, New York Tendaberry , for example, there is practically no title that Laura Nyro performs according to the usual stanza-chorus pattern (only Time and Love and Save the Country have approximately typical pop structures); many of her songs on it seem like half-finished drafts in which she associatively strings together her thoughts in dialogue with herself. In terms of instrumentation, they consist almost exclusively of Nyro's piano playing and her once quiet, hesitant, then again room-filling soprano voice ; Percussion and percussion instruments only occasionally and briefly support the performance, rarely do a handful of brass or strings emphasize a few bars. The passages in which a polyphonic background chorus - also sung by herself on this studio recording and added afterwards - accompanies the main voice are also sparse . Charlie Calello, her co-producer at Columbia, said, “After composing a song on the piano, it was complete. I added a bass, and the arrangement was complete - if I had added drums, the song would have been over-instrumented. ”The
rhythm and tempo of the songs are essentially dictated by their piano playing: a few, long-fading chords suddenly turn into a rousing one Boogie-Woogie style, only to break off abruptly after a few seconds and give room for an a cappella , as the individual songs are characterized by repeated musical breaks. What seems like improvisation was actually the product of carefully planned compositions and arrangements. It is difficult to imagine that a number of their titles - albeit in "smoothed" versions by other artists - could achieve high pop chart positions. At the same time she also found recognition in the jazz scene: Down Beat called her "one of the best jazz singers in recent years".

The composer and lyricist

Since the mid-1960s she has been much more commercially successful as a songwriter: she penned a large number of evergreens , including And When I Die (interpreted by Peter, Paul and Mary , then also by Blood, Sweat & Tears ), Eli's Coming (a big one Hit for Three Dog Night ), Stoney End (performed by Barbra Streisand ), Wedding Bell Blues , Stoned Soul Picnic , Sweet Blindness (all songs sung by The Fifth Dimension ) and Save the Country (by Julie Driscoll & The Brian Auger Trinity, among others ) . Her work drew from countless musical sources: she used elements of soul , jazz , blues , gospel , folk music , R&B and even classical music in a way that forbids a simple classification of her music under one of the common stylistic generic terms.

The variety of styles that went into their songs is reflected in the incredibly wide range of artists who recorded Nyro titles: Suzanne Vega , Mongo Santamaría , Junior Walker and The All Stars , Chet Atkins , Frank Sinatra , Linda Ronstadt , George Duke , Thelma Houston and many more. She also composed the title song Broken Rainbow for the film of the same name about the expulsion of the Navajo , which won the 1986 Oscar in the category "Documentation". Ironically, Laura Nyros' best-selling single as a singer, the 1962 Drifters hit Up on the Roof (this release from her fourth LP, Christmas and the Beads of Sweat , reached number 92 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1970 ), was not her own, but a goffin / King composition.

As a token of her appreciation for Carole King's compositions, she performed at her live concert on May 30, 1971 at the Fillmore in New York East Natural Woman and Up on the Roof ; King thanked the "fine lady" three weeks later at her legendary Carnegie Hall concert and put Nyro's interpretations of her songs over those of Barbra Streisand and Dusty Springfield . In 1971 Streisand released an LP with three Nyro compositions, including the eponymous "Stoney End" .

Her success as a composer is demonstrated by the fact that her music publisher Tuna Fish Music was ranked 23rd among all music publishers by Billboard in 1970.

Despite her high musicality and the ability to mix different stylistic elements in her songs and thus to compose successful titles, Laura Nyro, who was able to go out of herself to the point of exhaustion, was extremely reserved and self-critical. Even after her appearance in Monterey , she had the feeling that she had almost failed and had been booed by the audience. Even if their act demanded a lot from the audience, who, "largely stoned, were expecting an endless series of love-and-peace performances", DA Pennebakers show previously unreleased film sequences about the festival, the VH1 in June 1997 - exactly 30 Years later - under the title Monterey Pop: The Lost Performances , but that her lecture there had been well received. But she retained her pronounced shyness in front of cameras until the end of her career, so that there are a few radio interviews, but hardly any films or videos of this woman, who is important for the development of popular music. As recently as the 1990s, she declined to be interviewed on Johnny Carson's and David Letterman's television shows.

Nyros Lyrics

Her early texts mostly dealt with everyday situations and relationship issues, but with an unusual gift of observation for almost 20 years of age and in a language that critics described as mature and which prompted the question of Laura Nyro's sexual orientation to arise. In Emmie, for example, she sings about a girl with the words "You are the natural snow, the unstudied sea, ... you ornament the earth for me" and the refrain 'She got the way to move me, Emmie ", borrowed from Neil Diamonds Cherry Cherry , which she replaced in a later remake with "Mother, my friend, daughter, my friend, sister, my friend, lover ...". There was speculation about whether the text was written from a man's point of view, and whether she meant a specific person (such as her journalist friend Ellen Sander) or whether this was a tribute to her soulmate poet Emily Dickinson ; When asked, Laura Nyro herself said that Emmie was “the eternal feminine”, that is, the description of the “eternal feminine”.
At a time when sexuality was increasingly finding its way into everyday and musical language, even among white Americans, most Nyro texts left the listener room for their own imagination and interpretation. The writer Patricia Romanowski characterized this with the words "She countered the false end-1960s utopia of a promiscuity unclouded by feelings of guilt with a conscious mixture of glowing shame and lustful submission". The songwriter was well aware of the sexual nature of several of her lyrics: during the recording of her second LP, she revealed to a friend: "When this album is finished, my mother will know exactly where I've been".

Maturity is also evident in her handling of the subject of death : And When I Die , which she wrote in 1966, is in no way reminiscent of the dramatic, melancholy, tormenting attitude that featured in a whole series of themed pop songs in the early 1960s ( Teen Angel , Tell Laura I Love Her , Last Kiss , Dead and others - see here for more on this ) and which she undoubtedly heard in her youth. Rather, this song, which is in the tradition of the gospels , radiates lyrically and musically serenity and optimism, which are not necessarily expected from a just 18-year-old, at least on such a topic:

I'm not scared of dying
And I don't really care.
If it's peace you find in dying
Well, then let the time be near.

I swear there ain't no heaven
And I pray there ain't no hell.
But I'll never know by living
Only my dying will tell.

With the verse All I ask of living is to have no chains on me, and all I ask of dying is to go naturally , the song leads over to the refrain:

And when I die
And when I'm dead, dead and gone
There'll be one child born
And this world to carry on.

Nyros biographer Michele Kort explains this maturity in particular with her comparatively early upbringing for independence, the multi-layered stimuli in an art-loving family and her upbringing in the Bronx, which also offered object lessons for the more serious aspects of life.

Explicitly political or socially critical songs were the exception in their oeuvre, but they were also there early on, such as Poverty Train , Christmas in My Soul and Save the Country . The latter title she wrote in June 1968, under the direct impression of the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy ; the song was broadcast once an hour by Los Angeles' radio station KRLA on the August weekend in Chicago, when there were massive police attacks against anti-Vietnam protesters around the Democratic Party building . Later, with Broken Rainbow , The Right to Vote , The Wild World and Lite a Flame (The Animal Rights Song), other songs were added on topics that are currently occupying the US public. For them too, however, as for their texts as a whole, they do not contain any bold political slogans , but lyrically disguise criticized conditions.

On the other hand, she often wrote songs about her hometown, which on New York Tendaberry even form the conceptual backbone of this album. Parallel to her biography, aspects of motherhood (on Nested and Mother's Spiritual ) were also at the center of her work at times.

Laura Nyros status in the late 1960s

Laura Nyro's early LPs sold between 200,000 and 400,000 copies each - rather few for pop albums, but relatively high for a singer who “bombarded the audience with a staccato of surreal associations. She screamed, screeched and moaned in a high-pitched three-octave voice ... and told of the psychological disorders, the perverse dreams and the panic-stricken fear of death of a young woman ”(at least that's the taboo characterization of Graves / Schmidt-Joos). Contemporary critics and numerous rock and jazz musicians, on the other hand, considered Nyro, who was mostly dressed in black velvet on stage, to be one of the most musically groundbreaking personalities of these years; probably one of these gave her the nickname "Bronx Ophelia " in 1969 at the latest . Also singers like Joni Mitchell (“I started playing the piano again because of Laura”), Rickie Lee Jones , Rosanne Cash (“Without their preparatory work and their role model it would have been much more difficult for us female singers and songwriters.”) As well as the Carole King , who was only composing until then , later emphasized the importance that Laura Nyro had for her own careers both as an interpreter and as an author. She was also personal friends with many of them, including older ones like Buffy Sainte-Marie . Even Bob Dylan , whose early texts such as Subterranean Homesick Blues she admired because of their power of speech, asked to be introduced to her in 1969 - she would not have dared to do the reverse. John Sebastian offered her: "If you ever need a harmonica, let me fucking play it." At the end of the year, the trade journal Cash Box dedicated a cover story to her and called her "one of the hottest writers and singers in the music business".

However, it was by no means just the “big names” with which Laura Nyro had a close personal relationship, often described as cordial - she also repeatedly referred to musicians in her accompanying bands, listeners during a concert and people she had met in everyday life uncomplicated way into their artistic and private life. For example, she spontaneously asked a student who was holding up a self-painted Nyro picture from the stage for her telephone number during a performance and then asked her to use this drawing - for a fee - which would then be the front cover of Christmas and the Beads of Sweat graced. Nydia Mata, a Cuban occasional percussionist, met Nyro through a mutual school friend; After a meeting in her New York apartment, at which Patti LaBelle later showed up with her group and everyone was playing music together, Laura Nyro decided that the 19-year-old, stage-inexperienced Mata should take part in the recording of Gonna Take a Miracle - also in the studio or Always having a piece of her home around when touring was very important to her. Jimmy Vivino, temporarily her tour guitarist, remembers: "On the way on the bus she kept looking for a house where she could live with us like a family."

At their concerts it was noticeable that their audience included a particularly large number of young women. The psychoanalyst Ellen Steingart, who became a Nyro fan at 15, gives an attempt to explain this: “She was a soul mate to us who gave a voice to our own inner confusions; she transformed the suffering of a teenager into something beautiful, something regal. ”The undisguised sensitivity expressed in her music and personal demeanor exerted a“ rare magnetism ”(according to the Cash Box ) on the gay scene in the USA.

Musical turning back and private retreat

After her successful year in 1969, the artist was more in demand than ever: she made numerous concert tours, including for the first time to Europe (including Royal Festival Hall in London, February 1971) and several times to Japan (1971 and 1972). Her USA concerts, especially in California and her native New York - for example at Fillmore East (June 1970, May 1971) and Carnegie Hall (February and Christmas Eve 1971) - were regularly sold out. Many colleagues were happy to play and perform with her, such as guitarist Duane Allman , harpist Alice Coltrane and the Miles Davis Quintet . In November 1970 her fourth LP Christmas and the Beads of Sweat was released , co-produced by Rascals singer and organist Felix Cavaliere . Live and in the studio, Nyro also increasingly played foreign compositions, especially soul ballads such as Natural Woman or Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing . In this way, she returned more and more to the musical preferences of her youth in the early 1960s. Although she was a soprano , her vocal range of three octaves and her pronounced ability to modulate enabled her to interpret “black” titles authentically; one editor of Rolling Stone magazine invented the term “blues soprano” for it, another wrote of its “white soul”. At the beginning of 1971, Streisand moved into the top ten with Nyros Stoney End .

A six-month relationship with the musician Jackson Browne increased her need for a perfectly normal family life; In 1972 she married David Bianchini, who was her age, a highly decorated Vietnam veteran whom she had met the year before outside of the music business, with whom she traveled extensively and eventually settled in Connecticut . This marriage did not last long, however: in 1974 the couple separated again, initially on good terms; in the summer of 1976, after legal property disputes, the marriage was divorced. Laura kept the real name Bianchini.

In November 1971 her fifth long-playing record Gonna Take a Miracle was released, on which Laura Nyro, together with the soul trio Labelle , as the Bluebelles recently called themselves, only recorded remakes of rhythm and blues or rock classics and which she herself “ called my teenage heartbeat songs ". The album, stylistically recorded in Sigma Sound Studio in the home of Philly Sound , made it to number 46 on the LP and number 41 of the soul LP bestsellers. Shortly thereafter, she suddenly withdrew into her home and private life. In the following years, however, she continued to write lyrics there; she only kept the melodies in her head: Laura Nyro had an excellent musical memory. She often expressed sounds in nuances of color, as she explained - also to studio musicians during recording sessions - which sound she imagined (" don't play the guitar riff like a chrome and plastic armchair, but like an old rocking chair").

From 1971 there was also a growing estrangement between her and David Geffen. This contributed to the fact that Geffen stayed more and more often only on the west coast, where he founded his own label ( Asylum ), to which he would have liked to take Laura Nyro with him; but she wanted to extend her contract with Columbia out of gratitude for the generous support and the artistic freedom granted to her. In addition, Geffen negotiated - whether at times actually behind her back, is contradicting both portrayed - about the sale of the joint music publisher Tuna Fish Music to Columbia; this was ultimately realized, and Geffen received his 50% of the $ 3 million sale price. In 1972 the singer separated from her successful manager and signed for five more years and five LPs with Columbia.

Twice comeback

1975 to 1978

As suddenly as she had withdrawn, Laura Nyro returned to the “ Big Apple ”, went on tour of Japan again in November 1975, and released a new studio album in March 1976 ( Smile , which was at number 60 in the charts brought) and gave concerts again. Her music in the following years tended even more towards jazz rock or fusion jazz , which can also be seen in the musicians with whom she worked (including Joe Farrell , Randy and Michael Brecker ). In the years of her absence, the music scene had also changed dramatically: with Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Carly Simon , other female singer-songwriters had stepped into the spotlight, women like Patti Smith swapped the piano for the electric guitar and changed the trend more Direction hard rock or punk music . Nyro's style of presentation had also changed: becoming more mature, she performed her new compositions in a still remarkably brilliant voice, a little less intense than in the early years, but more complex and subtle; Graves / Schmidt-Joos rate this with the words "extinct volcano" more negatively. On a concert tour through the USA in 1977 the live album Season of Lights was created , which Columbia only released in a heavily abridged version; Sony Japan was not due to release the full recording until 1993 , which covered the full spectrum of their musical development in the 1970s.

Then she fulfilled her long-cherished wish for children. After visiting an Indian pen pal ten years her senior, she became pregnant. At the same time, she was working on a new album, which was recorded using mobile technology in her private "nest" in Danbury and released in June 1978 under the name Nested . When their son Gil Bianchini was born on August 23, 1978, his sire had long since returned to India, while his mother withdrew again from the music business. Laura Nyro, however, continued to write numerous songs, of which she was also able to make demos from 1982 onwards, because she had a recording studio built into her house that cost $ 200,000. In that year she also met the seven years younger New York painter Maria Desiderio , who soon lived with her permanently. Laura never described herself as bisexual or lesbian until her death and never publicly declared how she always rejected labeling and attempts at appropriation, for example by the women's movement; In her family circle she said - as her sister-in-law later told - about her relationship with Desiderio simply “I found my soulmate. I'm happy ”.

1984 to 1997

In January 1984 she released another LP ( Mother's Spiritual ) , for which her long-time friend and admirer Todd Rundgren had co-produced some pieces and on which she sings mainly in the lower vocal range; rhythmically, more even, calm cadences replace the syncopation and tempo changes that used to be frequent . The vocal change was due to the fact that she had given up smoking and herself had the feeling that she could now hold notes twice as long as in previous years. A journalist from the San Francisco Examiner judged after a live performance: "Your voice is clearer, fuller and more precise than before". And New York Times critic Stephen Holden rated its importance with the words "No other cult figure in pop music has had a longer lasting influence on urban music".

In the same year Laura Nyro founded her own music publishing company for her future songs, after she had fulfilled her writing obligations to Columbia, initially under the name Sushimi , which she soon changed to Luna Mist Music ; the appeal to Tuna Fish Music was probably intentional. But she didn't feel like going to live concerts - not even on a promotion tour for the new album. That only changed in 1988, when she was back on the New York stages and toured the US on several tours. For the first time she played an electronic keyboard instead of the piano, because the audience could see her head-on and she was able to keep eye contact with her audience. This went hand in hand with the fact that she also appeared freer and less introverted when she made her interim announcements. In 1989 she was one of the main acts at Michigan Womyn's Music Festival with the female members of her band, which was newly formed from personal friends. Also in 1989 she performed at the Newport Folk Festival ; A replay of her six presented songs was 2016 LP and 2020 on a CD - EP released.

During the recordings for the LP Tonin ' by Manhattan Transfer , she sang as a guest with the soprano Cheryl Bentyne the lead in La La Means I Love You , a song she wrote. During these years she became involved financially and propagandistically in the animal rights movement, consequently became a vegetarian and with Lite a Flame (The Animal Rights Song) also wrote a song on this subject; in June 1990 she sang on the steps of the Capitol at the end of the first “March for the Animal” .
By one of its earliest concerts after the second comeback was in Bottom Line , a New York club where she performed again and again over the decades, a live recording, which the artist for its own account at the small Cypress label of A & M Records released because Columbia insisted on a contracted studio album ( Walk the Dog & Light the Light ) . Its production took about four years, was highly praised by the critics, but sold much less often than Laura: Live at the Bottom Line . From 1989 she gave an annual sold-out Christmas concert in Greenwich Village and in the summer of 1991 she toured the United States with Bob Dylan , which she considered a great honor. In 1994 she made another guest appearance in Japan; At these six performances in Tokyo and Kyoto, the majority of the audience consisted of teenagers who, at the time of their greatest successes, had not even been born, but had come because of the "new Nyro".

In the summer of 1995, she was diagnosed with advanced-stage ovarian cancer, which had also killed her own mother, grandmother and a great aunt. Despite chemotherapy , Laura Nyro continued to work as much as she could and appeared in public a few times - because of the rapid hair loss with a wig. Around the turn of the year 1996/97 she had one last intensive influence on the compilation of one of her LPs ( Stoned Soul Picnic , a compilation of her best recordings), which Columbia Records released, albeit in numerous, long phone calls at the end the company had not renewed the record deal in 1994.

A few weeks after the release of this last album, Laura Nyro, 49, died on April 8, 1997 in her house in Danbury. On November 6, 1999, she was followed by her partner Maria Desiderio, who suffered from the same disease. The ashes of both women were buried next to Laura Nyro's favorite dog on their property in Danbury.

After Nyro's death

In May 1997 a tribute album was released (Time and Love: The Music of Laura Nyro) , on which Suzanne Vega , Phoebe Snow , Leni Stern and Rosanne Cash can be heard among others . Patti LaBelle, Rickie Lee Jones, Desmond Child and Alice Coltrane appeared at the Laura Nyro Memorial Concert at Manhattan's Beacon Theater (October 1997) . In 1990, Laura Nyro was inducted into the New York Music Awards Hall of Fame; The Recording Academy awarded her very first LP a place in the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999, and the music channel VH-1 put the artist at number 51 on its Top 100 Women in Rock list.

In October 1997 the New York dance company Sensedance performed Art of Love - a tribute to Laura Nyro in the choreography by Henning Rübsam in SoHo. The work was presented to five songs by Nyro.

Alone of 25 of her most famous songs exist in the USA cover versions of at least 70 different artists on vinyl. In addition to the above, u. a. and Sammy Davis, Jr. , Diana Ross , NRBQ , Petula Clark and Frankie Valli added Nyro title, to jazz musicians such as Stanley Turrentine (a purely instrumental version of Stoned Soul Picnic ) and blues singers such as Watermelon Slim (a cappella version of And When I Die ). But their own versions have also found their way onto various samplers since the end of the 1990s , which, for example, present important songs of the 20th century, important singer-songwriters or trend-setting female singers ( see below ).

Under the working title December's Boudoir , named after a song from the LP Eli and the Thirteenth Confession , Patty DiLauria - she looked after the "Bronx Ophelia" in her last few weeks - and Maria Florio made a film about Nyro's life and work; the musical direction was with Jimmie Haskell, who had already been involved in the production of her early record New York Tendaberry . The film was not published at the time because the authors had difficulties with funding in 2008.

The BBC broadcast a documentary Shooting Star - Laura Nyro Remembered on Radio 2 in 2005 , which was spoken by Nyro's friend Bette Midler and which included contributions from David Geffen, Suzanne Vega, Janis Ian and their former co-producers Arif Mardin and Gary Katz was repeated in April 2006.

The LP Eli and the Thirteenth Confession received a place in Robert Dimery's 1001 albums. Music You Should Hear Before Life Is Over. (see below, literature), while New York Tendaberry was included in the 2003 book of the best albums of all time, published by the British music magazine Mojo .

After Laura Nyro had been a candidate for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010 and 2011 , she was finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation in 2012.

last words

• "Many famous artists were later measured against Laura Nyro - she herself was never comparable to anyone else." (Richard Harrington in the Washington Post )
• “As a teenager, I was fascinated by Laura Nyro; their first four LPs - no one has ever created music like this! "( REM guitarist Peter Buck )
• "What Hendrix did with his guitar, Laura Nyro did with her voice and her compositions." ( Louie Pérez , drummer at Los Lobos )
• “People who hear her for the first time in the 21st century often think she is a new, alternative singer. Your music is completely timeless. "(Phoebe Snow)
• "I love art, not show business." (Laura Nyro, 1988)

Discography

Studio albums

year	title	Top ranking, total weeks, awardChartsChart placements (Year, title, rankings, weeks, awards, notes)	Remarks
		US
1966	More Than a New Discovery	US97 (11 weeks) US	First published: February 1966 1969 as Laura Nyro , re-released in 1973 as The First Songs Chart entry in US only 1973
1968	Eli and the Thirteenth Confession	US181 (7 weeks) US	First published: August 1968
1969	New York Tendaberry	US32 (17 weeks) US	First published: November 1969 in Germany on CBS
1970	Christmas and the Beads of Sweat	US51 (14 weeks) US	First published: December 1970
1971	Gonna take a miracle	US46 (17 weeks) US	First published: December 1971 with Labelle
1976	Smile	US60 (14 weeks) US	First published: March 1976
1984	Mother's Spiritual	US182 (3 weeks) US	First published: March 1984

More studio albums:

• Nested (1978)
• Walk the Dog & Light the Light (1993)
• Angel in the Dark (published post mortem, recorded 1994/95, published 2001)

Live albums

year	title	Top ranking, total weeks, awardChartsChart placements (Year, title, rankings, weeks, awards, notes)	Remarks
		US
1977	Season of Lights	US137 (5 weeks) US

More live albums

• 1971 - Spread Your Wings and Fly: Live at the Fillmore East (published post mortem)
• 1989 - Laura: Live at the Bottom Line
• 1990 - Live from Mountain Stage (released post mortem)
• 1993 - Live: The Loom's Desire (released post mortem)
• 1994 - Live in Japan (released post mortem)

Compilations

• 1972 - Laura Nyro sings Her Greatest Hits (released in Japan only)
• 1980 - impressions
• 1997 - Stoned Soul Picnic: The Best of Laura Nyro
• 2000 - Time and Love: The Essential Masters (published post mortem)
• 2017 - A Little Magic, A Little Kindness: The Complete Mono Albums Collection

Singles (without re-releases)

year	Title album	Top ranking, total weeks, awardChartsChart placements (Year, title, album , rankings, weeks, awards, notes)	Remarks
		US
1970	Up On The Roof Christmas and the Beads of Sweat	US92 (2 weeks) US	B-side: Captain Saint Lucifer

More singles

• 1966
  • Wedding Bell Blues / Stoney End
  • Wedding Bell Blues / And when I Die (in Great Britain)
• 1968
  • Sweet Blindness / Eli's Coming
  • Save the Country / Timer
  • Lu / Once It Was Alright Now (Farmer Joe)
  • Stoned Soul Picnic / Sweet Blindness
  • Once It Was Alright Now (Farmer Joe) / Woman's Blues (in UK)
• 1969
  • Save the Country / Eli's Coming
  • Goodbye Joe / Billie's Blues
  • Flim Flam Man / And when I Die
  • I Never Meant to Hurt You / Goodbye Joe
  • Time and Love / The Man who Sends Me Home
  • Save the Country (long version) / New York Tendaberry
• 1970
  • When I Was a Freeport and You Were the Main Drag / Been on a Train
• 1971
  • It's Gonna Take a Miracle / Desiree
• 1990
  • Let it Be Me / The Christmas Song
• 1993
  • A Woman of the World (CD single)

Individual tracks on samplers (selection)

• And when I Die
  • The Ultimate Singer-Songwriter Collection , Realm / Warner, 2003
• Christmas in My Soul
  • Return of Sampler Claus , Columbia ,?
• Eli's coming
  • Rock's Greatest Hits , Columbia, 1972
  • Rolling Stone Women in Rock , Razor & Tie, 1998
  • Women & Songs , Madacy, 1998
  • The Ultimate Power of Songwriters , Madacy, 2002
• La La Means I Love You [with Manhattan Transfer]
  • Soul of the Night , Rounder, 2004
• Let it Be Me / The Christmas Song
  • Acoustic Christmas , Columbia, 1990
• Map to the Treasure
  • Listen to the Music: '70s Females Singers , Rhino, 1996
• Save the country
  • More Heavy Sounds , Columbia ,?
• Spanish Harlem [with labels]
  • Where the Girls Are, Vol. 5 , Ace, 2003
• Stoned Soul Picnic
  • Rock Machine: I Love You , CBS, 1968
  • Pop Music: The Golden Era 1951-1975 , Sony, 1999
  • Respect: A Century of Women in Music , Rhino, 1999
• Sweet blindness
  • Heavy Sounds , Columbia ,?
  • Somethin 'Else Again: 26 Heavy Sounds from Columbia , Columbia ,?
• The Bells [with labels]
  • The Soul of Seduction , Sony, 1996
  • Philly Sound: Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff and the Story of Brotherly Love (1966–1976) , Epic / Legacy, 1997
• Time and Love
  • Great Rock , Columbia ,?
• To a child
  • Til Their Eyes Shine (The Lullaby Album) , Columbia, 1992
• Up on the roof
  • 70s Folk Rock , K-Tel, 1995
• Wedding bell blues
  • Rock's Greatest Hits , Columbia, 1972
  • Rolling Stone Presents: Female Singer-Songwriters , Rhino, 2001

Most successful cover versions by other artists

• Stoned Soul Picnic - The Fifth Dimension - 1968 - Billboard # 3 (and # 1 on the R&B charts)
• And when I Die - Blood, Sweat & Tears - 1969 - Billboard # 2
• Wedding Bell Blues - The Fifth Dimension - 1969 - Billboard # 1 - Great Britain # 16
• Eli's Coming - Three Dog Night - 1969 - Billboard # 10
• Stoney End - Barbra Streisand - 1971 - Billboard Number 6 - Great Britain Number 27
• Sweet Blindness - The Fifth Dimension - 1971 - Billboard Number 13

literature

Texts and notes of their songs

• Milton Okun (Ed.): Time and Love: The Art and Soul of Laura Nyro (The Laura Nyro Songbook). Cherry Lane Music Company, New York 2002, ISBN 1-57560-487-6
• Laura Nyro: Lyrics and Reminiscences. Cherry Lane Music Company, New York 2004, ISBN 1-57560-648-8 (with a CD containing And When I Die and Lazy Susan from their first audition for Verve and an interview that Maria Desiderio did in the last few months before Nyros Death led with her)

biography

• Michele Kort: Soul Picnic: The Music and Passion of Laura Nyro. Thomas Dunne Books / St. Martin's Griffin Press, New York 2002, ISBN 0-312-30318-1

Articles in lexica a. Ä.

• Donald Clarke (Ed.): The Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music. 2nd Edition. Penguin, London / New York 1998, ISBN 0-14-051370-1 , pp. 940 f.
• Robert Dimery (Ed.): 1001 albums. Music You Should Hear Before Life Is Over. Olms, Zurich 2006, ISBN 3-283-00526-5 , p. 137
• Julia Edenhofer: The great oldie lexicon. Bastei-Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1992 ^2. , ISBN 3-404-60288-9 , p. 452 f.
• Christian Graf, Burghard Rausch (ed.): Rockmusiklexikon. America, Africa, Asia, Australia. Fischer, Frankfurt / M. 2003, ISBN 3-596-15870-2 , Volume 2, pp. 1191 f. (supplementary new edition)
• Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel (eds.): Rock-Lexikon. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2003, ISBN 3-499-61588-6 , pp. 658 f. (One-volume special edition)

Web links

• Authorized Laura Nyro homepage (English) with lyrics
• Fansite with lots of photos, quotes, newspaper articles etc. (English) (currently = April 2007 no longer available)
• Laura Nyro at allmusic.com (English)
• Record covers and photos by Laura Nyro at Lycos
• Laura Nyros biography at American National Biography
• Japanese fan page about the artist (Japanese, Navi English) with a singing video

Notes and evidence

1. ↑ lauranyro.net ( Memento of the original from July 19, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ↑ Kort, p. 13 f.
3. ↑ Interview on the CD in Lyrics and Reminiscences
4. ↑ Kort, p. 29
5. ↑ Kort, p. 30
6. ↑ Kort, p. 30
7. ↑ after reviewing Gore's song on wordpress.com
8. ↑ A video of the Monterey performance can be found here
9. ↑ Kort, p. 44
10. ^ Clarke, p. 941
11. ↑ Kort, p. 40
12. ^ Kort, p. 75
13. ↑ Kort, p. 74
14. ^ Kort, p. 82
15. ↑ Interview on the CD in Lyrics and Reminiscences
16. ^ Kort, p. 52
17. ↑ Kort, pp. 105f.
18. ↑ Kort, pp. 42/43
19. ^ Kort, p. 60
20. ^ Kort, p. 61
21. ↑ Kort, p. 62; similar to Graves et al., p. 658
22. ↑ Lyrics and Reminiscences, p. 36 (here: sung version)
23. ↑ Graves et al., P. 658
24. ↑ Kort, p. 102
25. ↑ Lyrics and Reminiscences, pp. 5-9
26. ^ Lyrics and Reminiscences, Preface
27. ↑ Kort, p. 99
28. ^ Lyrics and Reminiscences, p. 120
29. ^ Kort, p. 97
30. ↑ Kort, pp. 114/115
31. ↑ Kort, pp. 130/131
32. ^ Lyrics and Reminiscences, p. 79
33. ↑ Kort, p. 89 f.
34. ^ Kort, p. 105
35. ↑ According to David Geffen, Laura found Miles Davis "sexy and the greatest musician ever" (Kort, p. 121). Davis, who was also repeatedly present at her early recording sessions, dedicates to her in the German version of his autobiography only exactly one, still meaningless, sentence about a joint concert event (Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe : Miles Davis. Die Autobiographie. Munich: Heyne, 2000. ISBN 3-453-17177-2 , page 406). In the English version from 1989 he is said to have characterized her as "very reserved outside the stage"; Davis suspected according to this source that he had "frightened them" (Kort, p. 121 f.).
36. ↑ Cavaliere was connected by a personal friendship and a compositional commonality: like herself, Cavaliere had written a song under the direct impression of the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy; Unlike Nyros Save the Country , People Got to Be Free by the Young Rascals was also a best seller and was number 1 in the US charts for five weeks from mid-August 1968 .
37. ^ Kort, p. 242
38. ↑ lauranyro.net ( Memento of the original from July 19, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
39. ↑ Lyrics and Reminiscences, p. 108, in a slightly different formulation; Kort, pp. 76, 114 and 180 f., With further examples
40. ↑ Graves et al., P. 659
41. ↑ Kort, p. 197ff.
42. ↑ Rundgren sings about them in his song Baby Let's Swing (1970, on the LP Runt ): "Laura, I saw you open in LA ... Now I love to shuffle ever since I heard you sing" (Kort, p. 101)
43. ^ Kort, p. 221
44. ↑ Kort, p. 221 f.
45. ↑ see the track list of the long-playing record at discogs.com
46. ↑ see lauranyro.com
47. ↑ Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation Announces Nominees for 2010 Induction ( Memento of the original dated December 23, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. and Laura Nyro - Nominee for 2011 induction 
48. ↑ see the announcement on rockhall.com
49. ^ Kort, p. 265
50. ^ Kort, p. 269
51. ^ Kort, p. 269
52. ↑ Cover of the Nyro CD Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, which was re-released in 2002
53. ^ Kort, p. 227
54. ↑ ^{a b c} Chart sources: US

This article was added to the list of excellent articles on November 13, 2006 in this version .