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Back in the Archives: Joe Henderson and Cannonball Adderley
By: Robert C. Gilbert

I sat out last Record Store Day. I hadn’t intended to but I was out late the night before and the thought of rising early to wait in line on the off chance that what I was interested in was in stock just didn’t seem to be worth the trouble or the bother. Reports that the sneak preview of Frank Tiberi’s tapes of John Coltrane performing live confirmed the fear that the sound was as challenging as thought helped to cool my ardour despite the undeniable historical importance of hearing him stretch out with McCoy Tyner on ‘Giant Steps.’

For the past few years, I have checked out at least a few of the newly unearthed recordings of live jazz from the sixties and seventies that have come out on Record Store Day. Last year, I even wrote about a few of them (read it here). This year, I passed on doing so, mostly because I was neck deep in a passion project (read that here) and didn’t want to divert my attention from it. But, there was one recording that fascinated me after the lines for Record Store Day disappeared into the void.

Joe Henderson may well be the tenor player who most explicitly carried on the banner of Sonny Rollins. It’s a thought that came to me after listening to Rollins in the days after his passing. It became stronger as I thought of some of Henderson’s recordings as a leader and as a sideman from 1963 and 1964 on Blue Note, his striking and stylistically broad introduction on the scene.

On the title track of Horace Silver's Song for My Father, Henderson’s preacher-like volleys sound a lot like Rollins’ onrush of ideas. His distorted growls and brogue-inflected phrases on his solo on Kenny Dorham’s ‘Trompeta Toccata’ recall Rollins’ testing of the limits on his bracing summit meeting with Coleman Hawkins on RCA from 1963.

Henderson’s sound could never be mistaken for Rollins’. It was thinner, perhaps reedy is a good word here, and it could float. But like Rollins, he had an inexhaustible stamina, spinning out chorus after chorus after chorus without flagging in intensity or in ideas.

Here, I think first of his long solo—well, at four minutes, long by Blue Note’s standards of the time—on Dorham’s ‘Una Mas (One More Time)’ and on Forces of Nature, the 2024 release of a tape from 1966 at Slugs’ Saloon on which he improvises on his ‘Inner Urge’ as well as on the impromptu ‘Taking Off’ for more than 10 minutes. And then I think of a recording from twelve years later that arrived on Record Store Day—the one that struck me as a must-listen and a must-buy even as I skipped the annual spring ritual.

Consonance: Live at the Jazz Showcase captures Henderson in February 1978 at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago. It was released on Resonance Records and co-produced by the prolific Zev Feldman—no one has done more to bring recordings like this to light in recent years—with John Koenig, who helmed Contemporary Records after the passing of his father Les. The tape came from the archives of club founder Joe Segal who, when allowed to by the musicians appearing at the club, taped the proceedings on the bandstand from the Jazz Showcase’s soundboard.

What makes the recording feel momentous even before hearing a note is noticing that it consists of nine performances, five of them over 20 minutes. Both CDs contain 80 minutes of music. Not one second of space is left standing.

The most recognizable musician supporting Henderson is pianist Joanne Brackeen with bassist Steve Rodby and drummer Danny Spencer both new to me.

By 1978, the tenor saxophonist had ended his run on Milestone Records, producing a series of recordings that I admittedly have only tentatively explored but from what I have listened, they document how Henderson held tight against the decade’s electric explosion while also exploring it. Consonance bears nothing of this flirtation. It is pure, straight-ahead, long-form jazz.

It was created in the moment and then to be remembered only in the way that such music is often recalled—in the mind, image and sound reconstructed to screen in the head with the scene heightening how it felt rather than how it actually looked and sounded.

Live jazz, more than any other type of music except classical, and when played in a club, has this intended ephemeralness. It exists at a certain moment sandwiched between a lifetime of moments before and a lifetime of moments after. Its’ importance should not be anything more than that. When one of these moments is preserved and packaged, it ascribes a posterity that was never intended.

I suspect I am overthinking things here but I do wonder sometimes if a certain novelty exaggerates the interest in these recordings. In other words, does the desire to hear something that was never meant to be heard more than once result in collecting recordings like these that get a cursory listen or two and then sit in a progressively growing pile attracting dust.

It is undoubtedly fun to travel back in time, to be a fly on a wall to bear witness to something that one hadn’t been around for. I’ve written about why this is. But again, once one has transcended time and space, I’m not always sure it warrants doing so again and again. I think that’s why I sometimes feel conflicted about archive recordings (even as they still fascinate me) like Consonance despite its super-strong lure and worry that they arrive at the expense of jazz that is being made today, the quantity of which is impossible to absorb in any meaningful way.

These ponderings don’t negate that Consonance lives up to its expectation. This is a recording to spend time with. To get lost with and into. It opens with John Coltrane’s ‘Mr. P.C.,’ his salute to Paul Chambers. By the fifth minute, Henderson is fully into a trance, wringing possibility after possibility out of the changes.

The speed with which these ideas out of his horn is breathtakingly fast. He continually adds distortion and takes his sound to the outer edges of its range. There’s a moment about 10 minutes in where Rodby and Spencer coast along—Brackeen long dropped out by then—before Henderson turns it back on for an additional two minutes. Brackeen takes over to rain down a flurry of notes and cascades of dark chords. The effect is often discordant and deeply interior, an inner dialogue that flirts with fury—check out the staccato chords at the 16-minute mark—and approaches the avant-garde without surrendering to it. Rodby and Spencer follow with solo statements that break the tension before Henderson returns for a last statement that includes a long, winnowing volley.

This kind of extreme extrapolation is tricky. Retaining interest is of paramount importance, both for the musicians involved as well as for the listener who is listening to the music without seeing it unfold. There has to be a point to these herculean exercises and on Consonance, it seems to be to bear witness to Henderson and Brackeen’s endurance, and Rodby and Spencer’s ability to keep up. There can’t be any coasting or goofing off or endless repetition. Just intense, hypnotic excavation.

On ‘Inner Urge,’ Henderson almost tempts fate but again, the feeling is absorption in his puzzling through the structure, finding new ways to deconstruct and move through it. Brackeen’s statement is a gradual building of momentum as is Henderson’s on ‘Invitation,’ that arresting standard by Bronisław Kaper.

‘Recorda Me,’ one of the high points from Henderson’s masterful debut as a leader, Page One, is taken as an urgent calypso and it’s here with his burbling solo that the comparison with Sonny Rollins becomes apt. Brackeen’s improvision invites its own comparison with McCoy Tyner and is maniacally propulsive as is Rodby’s statement. Out of it comes a marvellous coda which Henderson builds out of a jaunty riff.

The album’s two ballads: ‘’Round Midnight’ and ‘Good Morning Heartache,’ are enlivening examples of the discursive Henderson working around the edges. Each ends with a lengthy cadenza; sadly, the tape runs out during the one for ‘’Round Midnight.’

‘Softly As In a Morning Sunrise,’ which Henderson memorably recorded with Larry Young on Unity and retains the theme statement against brushes approach and its growing intensity during the solos, is a final extended adventure.

Both discs ends with a set closer; the first has Charlie Parker’s ‘Relaxin’ at Camarillo’ and the second has Henderson’s Monkian ‘Isotope.’ Henderson charges through them. Consonance stands as 160 minutes of potent jazz.

Equally vibrant is a set by Cannonball Adderley from 1972 that was released for Record Store Day in April 2024 on Resonance. Poppin’ in Paris: Live at L’Olympia 1972 comes from a tape made for France’s public broadcaster at the time, ORTF, of a concert from October 25, 1972.

Adderley had long codified his conception of a jazz-rock fusion by this time. It’s worth noting that the alto saxophonist was among the earliest and one of the most adventurous jazz musicians to incorporate straight-time rhythms into the music, culminating on such mind-benders written by long-time pianist Joe Zawinul like ‘74 Miles Away’ and ‘Rumpelstiltskin.’

Zawinul was with Adderley for almost a decade, leaving in 1970 and soon forming Weather Report. In his place came George Duke to join Nat Adderley, Walter Booker and Roy McCurdy.

What makes Poppin’ in Paris remarkable—far more so than the more pedestrian Boppin' in Bordeaux from 1969, also released by Resonance for 2024's Record Store Day—are long performances of Duke’s ‘The Black Messiah’ and Zawinul’s ‘Doctor Honoris Causa’ that each feature extended, spacy improvisations by Duke on both acoustic and electric piano. Whereas Henderson’s Consonance is about length for endurance, length here is used to bliss out on the resonant, ringing sound Duke gets out of his keyboard.

A fiery take on ‘Autumn Leaves,’ a standard that Adderley took as his own after 1958’s Somethin’ Else with Miles Davis, reminds of the edgier sound Adderley’s music took as the sixties turned into the seventies.

Compact revisits of Zawinul’s ‘Walk Tall’ and ‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy’ fill in the portrait of Adderley as adept populist. I’m glad this recording is now available for all to enjoy and discover.

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As usual, there is a mix of genres and most of the albums featured are fairly well under the radar, and as always, I hope you’ll share which recordings captured your ears by leaving a comment.

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Eight New Albums for Later in Spring
By: Robert C. Gilbert

My system for keeping track of my listening of new music is rudimentary. I keep a list in the composition books I use to draft my essays. I number the albums in sequence, noting the artist and album title—not always as legibly as I would like—and then add an asterisk if an album grabbed my attention. Then, after six or seven weeks of listening, I look at what was asterisked and whittle the albums down to a list of about eight or so, offering what I hope is the cream of the crop and trying to favour, as much as may be possible, albums that have received scant attention if any attention at all.

The new album by Sam Beam, who records under the name Iron & Wine, would not be considered one that has fallen under the radar but after seeing it mentioned several times, I was curious to check it out. Hen’s Teeth (Sub Pop Records) has been out since the end of February and is the kind of indie rock I like. It’s meditative and atmospheric, not chasing the easy hooks yet still grounded enough to engage with melody and movement that it lingers after listening.

I think of the descending motion of ‘Singing Saw’ which mirrors a similar cadence on the preceding ‘Robin’s Egg,’ one of two tracks on which I’m With Her guest. The presence of Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan and Sara Watkins provided the welcome to appreciate the album even more, lover that I am of harmony. Their new live album, Sing Me Alive (Rounder Records), is also well worth checking out. And then there’s also the use of fuzz on Hen’s Teeth’s opener, ‘Roses,’ a sound one doesn’t hear much these days.

It also makes an appearance on ‘Centerfold’ the exciting ending of Leah Blevins’ All Dressed Up (Concord), released at the start of spring. Here, the fuzz is prominent as if legendary Nashville picker Grady Martin has been resurrected. It’s the kind of touch that is easily seen as vintage while also being new because, again, it just isn’t something that’s heard a lot these days.

It’s also what makes All Dressed Up a very listenable, not to mention enjoyable, an example of what I would call contemporary nostalgia. There is a sheen that suggests seventies studio slickness and Blevins’ voice is a merger of California cool and Tennessee twang. It’s all ear-pleasing whether it’s heard navigating the dynamics of ‘Leave It Up to Me’ or pondering the philosophical ‘Hey God’ that mulls over the choice between “Jezebel or Jericho.”

Another adventure in contemporary nostalgia comes from Haylie Davis, whose debut album Wandering Star (Fire Records) is being released tomorrow (June 5). Teaser tracks for it have been coming out since last September—six in total—firmly establishing her evocation of the spaciousness of the Laurel Canyon scene. Well, that’s only part of her sound, best heard on the striking, laid-back refrains of ‘Golden Age’ and ‘I Was Wrong.’ These dig into the listener’s ribs. Davis’ voice is light but also lands assuredly on the beat—a kind of laconic sigh that if one is in the right frame of mind, one may surely echo.

There’s also a country-rock feel, with the emphasis on steel guitar on ‘Give Me a Rainbow’ (it’s sing-song quality reminds me of the spiritual ‘I’ll Fly Away’) and punctuating the road rhythm of ‘Lily of the Valley’ (the harmonic motion on this one is something special). A piano-based, decorative singer-songwriter vibe distinguishes ‘Born to Be Blue.’ Wandering Star is a prodigious introduction to a prodigious talent. Haylie Davis is someone to watch. This is one of my favourite albums so far this year.

Just out this past Friday (May 29) is Dwelling (Apple Slices Records) by Tomorrow Tomorrow, the name that musician and engineer Nico L-S has given to her project in which she plays all the instruments as well as writes all the material as well as producing, recording and mixing it—an encapsulation of today’s do-it-yourself, self-production era.

The music is low-fi indie rock but not to such an extent that it is almost deadened inside. A murky psychedelia pervades gems like ‘Giant Steps’ and ‘Indelible.’ Tomorrow Tomorrow’s frequent use of a glockenspiel is a most distinctive element throughout. ‘Obseguy’ is a dalliance with progressive rock and one I enjoyed despite a general aversion to all things prog signifying, I think, that Dwelling is a notable album deserving of a wide audience.

Looking over the track list for jazz guitarist Vladimir Redzic’s First Time Around (self-released), out tomorrow (June 5), there’s a sense of been there, done that, comprised as it is of eight standards, one by Charlie Parker and a blues composition by Redzic. Will it all just be treading the well-worn and deeply creviced path? In other words, why bother with this?

Well, let me tell you, after pianist Steve Ash takes the opening A sections of ‘I’ve Got a Crush On You,’ Redzic takes the B and the effect is startling. His tone is crisp and metallic with minimal decay. It sounds, at least to me, very, very fresh. His favouring of single lines befits someone who cites Grant Green as a primary influence and who has studied with Peter Bernstein. The mood on the album is unhurried, building a kind of sanctuary to luxuriate in rich material like ‘Blue Gardenia’ and ‘I Didn’t Know What Time It Is.’

The first half of the album has Redzic in a quartet with Ash, Jonathan Meyer on bass and Ellingtonian Steve Little on drums. Vocalist Ale Nuñez joins for a smokey yet spritely reading of ‘These Foolish Things.’ The second half of the album has Redzic and Ash in a trio with Neal Miner on bass.

While relying on streaming is a necessity for a deep sampling of new music, I am always appreciative when I can receive review copies of albums. The contrast from the passivity that streams can inculcate—I fight against it as hard as I can—to the immersion that playing a recording on a decent sound system creates was recently reiterated when sampling tenor saxophonist John Sweenie’s new album, Mysticism for Intellectuals (Bent River Records), released in early April.

I first streamed it and it just floated right by me. When Sweenie kindly mailed me a CD copy and I gave it a listen, I wondered if I was listening to something entirely different than what I had streamed. It was the same. It was just that I was hearing the music the way it was intended to be heard and it made all the difference. Recorded live at the Yardbird Suite in Edmonton, Alberta, the album cycles through different feels.

It starts in an avant-funk kind of mood; Sweenie being joined by Rémi-Jean Leblanc on electric bass and Richard Irwin on drums. Of special note here is the 15-minute ‘Additive’ which flows from a boogaloo to something far more ethereal, eventually arriving back to the opening rhythm. It’s exhilarating, stream-of-consciousness jazz.

Mysticism for Intellectuals then shifts to a (mostly) acoustic quartet. Jean-Michel Pilc joins in on piano, Leblanc moves to upright bass (he returns to the electric for ‘Darling, We’ve Grown Apart’ and ‘The Heartford Line’) and Irwin remaining on drums for a series of explorations that retains the same searching style as the beginning of the album. One can feel the collective openness that Sweenie is instilling. This is live jazz as in-the-moment wonder.

Investigating live jazz from another angle is trumpeter Ted Chubb’s Live at the Statuary (Circle 9 Records), released in mid-May. The Statuary is a century-plus-old building in Jersey City, New Jersey, and was initially a sculpture-artist studio. It is now owned by Chubb and his wife, Rachel Ryll, furthering the work of Walter and Margo Parks with the couple making a significant investment in doing so to turn the Statuary into a small venue where musicians and their audiences can almost touch each other.

This sense of mission plus recalling the nights I have spent hearing jazz in clubs that I think cultivate this sense of closeness, deeply resonates, especially as the music on Chubb’s new album, recorded over four nights at the Statuary at the end of winter 2025, is perfectly suited to draw an audience in. This is jazz with memorable lines, concise soloing and some well-chosen pieces from the canon. I especially dig that Chubb covers John Lewis’ ‘Django’ with a nod to Grant Green’s swinging version from his classic Idle Moments.

Chubb is teamed with Bruce Williams on alto saxophone, Oscar Perez on acoustic piano and the Fender Rhodes, Tim DiCarlo on bass and Jerome Jennings on drums. This album is not only about good playing and listening, it’s also about hopeful playing and listening. That’s much needed these days.

Another recording that has caught my ear is trumpeter Jacques Kuba Séguin’s La trilogie des odeurs (Odd Sound), to be released on June 12. The scope of this work is breathtaking. Three suites over three CDs, each exploring different flavours. The first has Séguin with a quintet evoking a very Nordic air. The second is urban and features Séguin with a big band, L'Orchestre national de jazz de Montréal. The third is the grandest and pairs Séguin with a quartet plus the Orchestre symphonique de Trois-Rivières.

There’s a lot to take in and indeed, the press materials that accompanies the recording recommend to “let each work resonate, then allow space for silence. Like a fragrance, the music reveals itself over time.” I can’t imagine a better way to slow down this spring.

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If you haven’t had a chance to read my Laura essay, here are the links to part one, part two and part three. I also wanted to thank my colleague here for pointing me to his interview with her from 1993 (read it here). If you aren’t subscribed to Wayne’s Substack, you should be!

As well, I recently had a chance to chat with for his Six Questions with Matty C podcast and answer his music questionnaire. Matty made me feel right at home and it was great to talk with her about some of my biggest musical heroes (and yes, the conversation included some evangelizing on Laura!). Listen to it here.

Below is a fun essay on crate-digging and finding two gems from the Motown catalogue from 1966. I hope you enjoy it!

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Adventures in Crate-Digging: The Temptations & Stevie Wonder
By: Robert C. Gilbert

Crate-digging is a combination of luck, time and the sense to know when opportunity is knocking and that it may never knock again. That’s a lesson, like all good lessons, that is learned the hard way. I still remember putting back a copy of the Impressions’ People Get Ready in the stacks one day. I’m not sure why did but it definitely wasn’t that it cost a lot. As of yet, I’ve never found it again the wild.

Oh sure, I could head over to eBay and by the time I finish typing this sentence, have a copy on its way to me. But how fun is that? Where is the tease of the hunt, the chase, the dopamine hit when elusive treasure is finally found? Now, don’t get me wrong, I have turned to eBay and other online sources occasionally and now I have, for a few examples, a copy of David Stoughton’s deliriously strange Transformer as well as the Analog Spark reissues of Laura Nyro’s Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and New York Tendaberry in my collection but still, I reman a crate-digger principally and on principle.

Each collector I think hones a method and a rhythm to shopping for records. Mine is more sporadic these days, a necessity driven by the fact that I have precious little space for them (one reason that my focus has switched to cassettes—these I have some space for). What I like is to do is to thumb through stacks which have not been sorted by genre or alphabetically or grouped in any way except perhaps by price—that meaning, used LPs that are relatively cheap.

Here, the hunt is at its purest. There’s no telling what can be found. That’s why I loved Vortex Records, a gloriously dusty institution just north of Yonge and Eglinton in mid-town Toronto and have mourned its closure since the end of the 2015. You’d go up the hard-worn stairs to enter its narrow sanctuary and squeeze sideways past the counter to flip through the milk crates, never knowing what might be there. I still recall the finds: reissued Original Jazz Classics series albums, Sinatra on Reprise, pre-outlaw Waylon Jennings, cheap copies of Cream’s Wheels of Fire and the first Crosby, Stills & Nash album, the Buddy Rich Big Band on Pacific Jazz, Don Ellis at Fillmore as well as his Tears of Joy, the Everly Brothers on Warner Bros., Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Songbook and many, many more.

Keeping the spirit of Vortex alive is Kops Records with two locations in my hometown, Toronto, as well as one where I currently reside, Oshawa, right in the heart of its gritty, rough-hewn downtown—a reminder that suburbia isn’t all picket fences and boredom and praise be for that. Kops is cleaner than Vortex was but it’s just as scrappy beyond the shiny floors and bright lighting.

Kops has space dedicated to what it calls “Vintage Vinyl,” analog originals of the time when music came out on records first and foremost.

Again, the thrill of discovery takes centre stage and combing the stack has unearthed treasures like David Ackles’ one-of-a-kind debut on Elektra, Stoneground’s Family Album, Emitt Rhodes’ Mirror, the Gary Burton Quartet’s Duster, various ECM albums under 15 dollars, vintage Ravi Shanker on World Pacific, Cold Blood and more than a few records from the Motown roster during its halcyon “The Voice of Young America” days.

Those are some of the true gold, important documents of the company’s quick rise from 1963 onwards. Motown then was a singles label. That’s not a knock, considering what was contained within the grooves of those 45s. Tightly coiled pocket masterpieces with the throb of James Jamerson’s bass and the thud of Uriel Jones’ drums that propelled something like the Supremes’ ‘Come See About Me,’ about as perfect a recording from the label’s early years as there was.

If there was an aspect of the assembly line to what Berry Gordy, Jr. and his charges were creating, the method did not obviate the heightened creativity of Hitsville. In fact, it’s what makes exploring Motown during its heydey in LP form so interesting, to hear the canonical hits surrounded by recordings that are marked by their obscurity. So, imagine my glee when I stopped by Kops’ booth at last year’s Canadian National Exhibition, that annual rite of the end of summer in Toronto, and found two Motown albums from 1966, both important documents of artists in transition.

The cover of the Temptations’ Gettin’ Ready has the fellas getting suited up for a show or perhaps a night on the town (maybe both). It was their fourth album, released in June 1966, the group well established as the yin to the Four Tops’ yang who, powered by Levi Stubbs, Jr. and the supporting harmonies of Abdul Fakir, Renaldo Benson and Lawrence Payton, and often sweetened by the Andantes, whipped up such a passionate fervour that even a peppy love song like ‘Something About You’ couldn’t be tamped down too much.

The Temptations operated in that territory too—David Ruffin’s lead on the aching lament of ‘Since I Lost My Baby’ is a prime example. But they could also be playful. Think of ‘The Way You Do The Things You Do’’s suave wordplay gliding along Eddie Kendricks’ falsetto. There were also bold, unironic declarations of love on ‘My Girl’ and ‘My Baby.’ All these were co-written by Smokey Robinson and produced by him as well.

He was the group’s primary songwriter and producer, another part of Motown’s production method in which each group in the label’s staple was assigned a production team.

Robinson’s role was different from say, Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Eddie Holland’s was. He was pulling double duty as front man of the Miracles so other producers and songwriters like Mickey Stevenson and Ivy Jo Hunter would often contribute to the Temptations’ music as well. Norman Whitfield did too, including ‘Girl (Why You Wanna Make Me Blue),’ a top-40 hit for the group. It had a motion that mimicked Robinson’s songs with perhaps a more direct harmonic progression.

The two hits from Gettin’ Ready tell of the eclipse of Robinson’s role in the group and how Whitfield took his place.

The album’s title comes from ‘Get Ready,’ a debonair Robinson song that was one of the very best he wrote for the Temptations. It’s packed with hooks, the sly trick of shifting the responses in the verses from “you’re outta sight” to “it’s outta sight” to “be outta sight,” the use of nursery rhymes throughout, a slyly effortless Kendricks’ lead and those group harmonies with Melvin Franklin on the bottom, another element to their sound that distinguished them from the Four Tops.

Franklin is also prominent on the album opener, ‘Say You,’ a tender feature for Ruffin, whose unparalleled ability to vocally set a romantic mood contrasted with a personal life that was deeply turbulent. That notwithstanding, the interplay between him and Franklin as they trade the lines “there’s none sweeter than you” and “let’s make plans for two” is the kind of deep moment that makes digging into albums as opposed to just singles part of what makes recording collecting such a magnificent obsession.

While Ruffin and Kendricks got most of the group’s leads, Paul Williams was an equally expressive lead singer; his most famous showcase with the group was ‘Don’t Look Back’ and illustrative of his balance of grit and smoothness.

Gettin’ Ready has two notable features for him. Robinson’s ‘Who You Gonna Run To’ and Eddie Holland, Kendricks and Whitfield’s ‘Lonely, Lonely Man Am I’ both have Williams’ full-bodied voice cushioned against the rest of the group. The former has a particularly indelible refrain.

The best-known recording from the album is ‘Ain’t No Proud to Beg.’ Written by Eddie Holland and Whitfield, who produced it as well, it has a swagger and movement into tempo on the verse that brought a toughness that was never Robinson’s forte. Whitfield made a bet with Gordy, Jr. If ‘Ain’t Too Proud to Beg’ climbed further than ‘Get Ready’ on the charts, he could take on the Temptations. It was and Whitfield did.

The recording is an early harbinger of Motown in the late sixties. There was also the heightened intensity of the Four Tops on a trio of hits: ‘Reach Out I’ll Be There,’ ‘Standing in the Shadows of Love’ and ‘Bernadette.’ The tentative dipping into psychedelia that began with the Supremes’ ‘Reflections.’ The grit of Whitfield’s productions on ‘(I Know) I’m Losing You' and ‘All I Need’ for the Temptations.

Another came with a groove tripled on guitar, bass and drums. It’s tight and also tightly wound but soon bursts forth with a shot of glorious brass and a refrain that declares “baby, everything is alright / uptight, outta sight.” There are more punctuations throughout, whether through a drum fill or brass or the Andantes as Stevie Wonder tells of being “a poor man’s son, from across the railroad tracks” wooing “a pearl of a girl … born and raised / in a great big house, full of butlers and maids.”

‘Uptight (Everything’s Alright)’ was written by Wonder (credited as S. Judkins) with Henry Cosby and Sylvia Moy and released in late 1965. It was his biggest hit since his chart-topping ‘Fingertips - Part 2’ two years earlier, one of the least-likely (yet every exciting) number ones in the history of the Billboard Hot 100. It also marked the end of Wonder as a kind of novelty act and the beginning of the one of the most consequential contributions to popular music in the second half of the 20th century.

The recording motors along as only a Detroit recording can. It has maniacally relentless feel that only the Funk Brothers could sustain. That it fades out is the only way a recording like that could end, making it feel as if the groove could on forever.

It closed the first side of Wonder’s Up-Tight, his fifth album and out in May 1966. It starts with ‘Love a Go Go,’ which paraphrases the brass line from ‘Uptight (Everything’s Alright)’ and could be called derivative if the recording wasn’t so in the pocket with a chorus of Wonders, and drum fills and cymbal crashes a’plenty that add to the fervour. Plus, there’s the sudden drop out of the musicians backing Wonder to just a conga drum. ‘Love a Go Go’ is a magnificent deep cut as is ‘Nothing too Good for My Baby’ on which the groove is super-charged. The tempo is supersonic.

‘Hold Me’ is one of four songs Wonder co-wrote on the album and has a harmonically ambiguous ending with Wonder and the Andantes engaging in a brief chorale that comes out of nowhere. The ballad ‘Teach Me Tonight’ is taken at a street beat with Wonder duetting with Stubbs, Jr. and the rest of the Four Tops performing backup vocals.

Besides ‘Uptight (Everything’s Alright),’ the other well-known cut from Up-Tight is Wonder’s hit cover of Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ with Clarence Paul, part of Motown’s roster of songwriters and producers. egging Wonder on like Lou Rawls did with Sam Cooke on ‘Bring It On Home to Me.’

The album’s second side is not as propulsive, padded out as it is with curiousities like ‘Contract on Love’ from 1962 with the pre-Ruffin Temptations and ‘Pretty Little Angel,’ a single from 1964. But still, that’s part of what listening to vintage albums is all about. Hearing how the music that remains known was packaged when it was new. That never gets old as doesn’t digging in the vinyl crates.

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If there is one thing that I didn’t get into the essay, it’s this: in a time where some “music” critics sneer at songwriting and are flippant about the very subject they are supposed to be experts about, and where human creativity is devalued in favour of AI slop, Laura Nyro stands tall as a model of artistic integrity and in her belief that creativity is a sacred, human act that we should hold tight and closely guard against any and all incursions that may dilute it.

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The Laura Nyro Experience (Part Three)
By: Robert C. Gilbert

“Sister
Brother
Are we born to learn
The art of love?”
- from ‘Art of Love,’ written by Laura Nyro

The last project Laura Nyro worked on was a greatest-hits collection. Columbia gave her control over the recordings selected to be spread over two compact discs. She was insistent that her early albums would not overshadow the albums that came afterwards. Everything would be given equal weight. She did, however, relent on agreeing to include the version of ‘Save the Country’ she recorded with Bones Howe in 1968, the one time she consented to “sock it to the people.”

She choose more songs from what would be her final album, Walk the Dog & Light the Light, than the better-known New York Tendaberry or Gonna Take a Miracle. Stoned Soul Picnic: The Best of Laura Nyro was released in February 1997, just before Nyro’s passing from ovarian cancer at 49—cruelly just as her mother had. Notably three years later, a single-CD collection of her music was released, Time and Love: The Essential Masters, that only included one cut made after she returned to recording in 1975 after a three-year absence.

That’s understandable. It’s hard to not want to fix Laura Nyro at that moment in time when her influence was at its height and she was the dark queen of New York, channeling both the joys and travails of living in the city but always headstrong and windswept as she was on the cover of New York Tendaberry.

By the time she was 23, she had recorded five albums, all acknowledged classics and, depending on one’s opinion, some of them masterpieces, all holding up mightily to repeated, even obsessive, listening. How many other artists can this be said? And even as Nyro took a break soon afterwards, she continued to make music, releasing six more albums, although just three after 1978.

They all hang in the background, neglected if not ignored with just one song, ‘To a Child…,’ recorded for both Mother’s Spiritual and Walk the Dog & Light the Light, having the immediate recognition of the dozens of songs she wrote in the late sixties and early seventies. They may even be an urge to avoid these albums lest they tarnish the image of the prodigious, the precocious Laura Nyro.

I know it took me years to eventually buy a copy of Smile and it was exactly that reason why I didn’t do so sooner. What if the music didn’t have the immediacy of Eli and the Thirteenth Confession? What if it was just average? That Nyro’s inspiration gradually deserted her after 1971 is not a controversial point even if it’s one I don’t necessarily share. David Geffen has claimed that after their partnership ended, she never wrote another good song. That’s sour grapes but Charlie Calello, as acute an appreciator of Nyro’s work as there has ever been, once put it this way about the songs she had written for Smile: “I thought she was in a creative mode, but not an exceptional creative mode,” adding: “I didn’t think she had the goods.”

Others thought the goods had begun to flee her even earlier. Todd Rundgren, as passionate a Laura Nyro disciple as there has ever been, wrote ‘Baby Let’s Swing’ about her after seeing her live at the Troubadour in Los Angeles in 1969. It asks her “where did the magic go?” It appeared as the beginning of an Abbey Road-like medley on his debut solo album, Runt. He once explained why write the song.

“It was she was already getting world weary at that point,” he said. “It was the difference between that and the Laura that I had been introduced to through Eli and the Thirteenth Confession. I felt some disappointment. I felt that she was constantly going for one sort of monotonal emotional pitch. It was a fairly low-energy thing that persisted for the entire rest of her career and her life.”

While there was a flattening of the emotional pitch of her music, Rundgren’s timing feels about eight years off, at least to me. But, regardless, what remained and what would always remain would be her gifts of communication; her voice as well as a continued unwillingness to follow conventional songcraft.

It never lost its toughness or its directness even when she employed irony. So when she started ‘The Right to Vote’ from 1984’s Mother’s Spiritual with, “thank you, sirs, for the right to vote / bet you didn’t know I had a voice in my throat,” it may take a moment to hear lyrics that are admittedly less than artful before being disarmed by the moxie of just cutting to the chase and proceeding to eviscerate a system that says “a woman’s place is to wait and serve,” where the choice of electoral politics is no choice at all (not always but the percentage ain’t high) and neither does religion offer much help.

Here, the rallying cry is not “save the people, save the children” but that “my place / is in a ship from space / to carry me / the hell out of here.” Singing such a wish without any apology or disappointment but just putting it out there is funny. It’s the kind of throw-up-one’s-arms-and-to-hell-with-it-all impulse that one would have expected of Nyro in the Reagan era or how she would be feeling today if she were still alive.

The kicker of it all is that the bridge which begins with the lyric: “all the colours in a race riot” of all things is gorgeous—another moment where she dazzles the mind and the ears with her imagination. She switches to that rush in her voice, the same mode employed on ‘Mercy on Broadway’ or ‘California Shoeshine Boys’ or ‘The Sweet Sky’ that cushioned against the notes as she glided through a phrase. It’s such a dreamy sound—a gushy way to put it, to be sure—but as Laura Nyro got older, her tone got richer and fuller. That’s somewhat improbable given how finely tuned her voice already was when she was 19.

She had shorn her voice of its youthful lack of inhibition, perhaps in recognition that she had bared all in her early twenties and needed to evolve. Similar to how, for example, Jagged Little Pill was a snapshot in time for Alanis Morissette, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession was the same for Nyro. However, moving on does not equate repudiation and for me, the joy of digging into the music that came after is to discern the artistic purpose that continually motivated her. It just was no longer the only thing that concerned her.

After giving birth in 1978, Nyro again retreated from the music business; this time, to raise her son, Gillian being shortened to Gil.

This is a distance she would maintain for the rest of her life. “The music has always been in my life, but it goes from the front burner to the back burner, depending on what else is happening in my life. Also, not everybody likes dealing with the music business, certain aspects of the music business,” Nyro said in a 1993 interview with critic and my colleague here on Substack (see Wayne’s full interview with Laura here). “Some talented people can't cut it in the music business, because it's not appealing to them and nurturing to them. I find it very natural and healthy to not always be dealing with the music business.”

In the early eighties, she began a relationship with Maria Desiderio, a painter. They would remain together for the rest of her life. True to Nyro's penchant for privacy, she never publicly addressed her sexuality. Her brother once said she considered herself woman-identified if she even needed to label herself at all.

It’s a term that has fallen into disuse. It originated with a group called the Radicalesbians, founded in New York in 1970. A manifesto from the group called The Woman-Identified Woman was given out at a protest of the National Organization for Women’s Second Congress to Unite Women to highlight the exclusion of lesbians from the burgeoning feminist movement. Essentially, to be woman-identified is to see all women as equal—whether straight, gay or otherwise—and that to be a feminist was to champion all women.

Indeed, Laura Nyro was in the vanguard of such ideology. She sang, “I’m mad at my country / and I’ve been treated bad” and reminding “I’m a woman” on ‘When I Was a Freeport and You Were the Main Drag’ from 1970 and earlier songs like ‘Stoney End,’ ‘Buy and Sell,’ ‘Poverty Train’ and ‘Lonely Women’ were similarly attuned to the lives and circumstances of women as was ‘Emmie,’ Nyro’s hymn to “the eternal feminine.”

It’s within this perspective that lies ‘The Right to Vote.’ The song is also a good introduction to the album on which it appeared, Mother’s Spiritual, released in 1984 and her first in six years. The edges that had gradually been eroded since Smile are almost entirely gone sound-wise although her lyrics remained sharp. Beside ‘The Right to Vote,’ there’s her singing “mama’s puttin’ on some warpaint / for a little bit of combat” on ‘A Wilderness.’

It was the second and last time she recorded an album in Danbury. Recording had become a kind of family affair for Nyro where she chose musicians as much for their chops as for their personal compatibility with her. The primary band included John K. Bristow on guitar, Elysa Sunshine on bass and Terry Silverlight on drums with Nydia Mata back on percussion plus her brother, Jan, on guitar as well as Julie Lyonn Lieberman on violin.

Bristow’s guitar has the kind of synth-y timbre that was prevalent in the eighties. It doesn’t date the album—it is very much as tangible and tactile as Nyro’s previous albums—and it is the primary element that gives Mother’s Spiritual a veneer that not even Nested had.

Nyro would cite it as the favourite of her albums. As pointed as it could be, it is also achingly sincere. I think of the movement into tempo on ‘Trees of the Ages,’ an ode to the omnipresence of trees every bit as rich as ‘New York Tendaberry’ was about the Big Apple. It suggests that Nyro had found tranquility in the country. She once said, “I could feel the spirit of mother and elves and I always feel that anytime I’m around the trees.” Another time, reflecting on writing the songs for Mother’s Spiritual, she called herself, “the Goddess of Creativity.”

The recording of the album spanned two years—over double the amount of time it look to get New York Tendaberry on tape.

At one point, she summoned Todd Rundgren to help. It was not the first time she had wanted him to contribute to her music. In the late sixties, she had asked him to consider being her bandleader. Rundgren, then still with the Nazz, declined. This time, she wanted to see if he could help her get some momentum in making the album. He said yes and went to Danbury.

While Rundgren is credited as playing synthesizer on two of the album’s tracks: ‘Man on the Moon’ and ‘Trees of the Ages,’ as well as lending production assistance, he found the experience disillusioning, feeling that the music continued to lack the fire that had electrified him fifteen years earlier on Eli and the Thirteenth Confession.

That he tried to prod Nyro to think at least a little about commercial potential—to no avail, of course—shows that while his instincts were not wrong in terms of trying to make a record that could get on the radio, he had misjudged her as many others before him had.

Recalling the experience, he once said, “A typical session would be like, just finished take 23 and she said, ‘that was a nice one, let’s do another.’ And by the time she’s done, she’s got 35 takes of a song and then has to figure out which one to use, and quite obviously it’s like she doesn’t even know when it’s working or not.” He added: “I wanted to strangle her and maybe that would have made something happen but, you know, I loved Laura and it was kind of a shame she never got all of the recognition that she probably should have gotten.”

Of Mother’s Spiritual, he felt “you fall asleep listening to the record by the time you get to the end.” He did feel some of the songs were good. There was one he felt was great.

‘To a Child…’ starts the album and is about Nyro’s son, Gil. It is every bit as affecting as ‘Beautiful Boy,’ John Lennon’s ode to his second son, Sean, and full of the kind of observations and painterly imagery that only Laura Nyro could conjure. She sings of her son as being “an elf on speed” while she’s perpetually sleep deprived. She asks, “what is life? / did you read it / in a magazine?,” both a pun and a question with an elusive answer. There is the wish to “kiss the sun hello” and for “God and Goddess / [to] make his life a lovin’ thing.”

Over a light groove, Nyro makes her lyrics soar. One of my favourite moments of her on record is the slight quaver she adds to “is there hope / for a mother / and an elf on speed” and then there’s the pledge, “child I am here / to stand by you.”

Laura Nyro had a strong maternal instinct. Patti LaBelle once recalled how Nyro helped her deal with post-partum depression after she gave birth to her son, Zuri, in July 1973. In Michele Kort’s biography of Nyro, Soul Picnic, LaBelle remembers Nyro with her son rocking him to sleep under a tall tree.

A nurturing essence pervades Mother’s Spiritual. I hear it in the refrains of ‘Late for Love’ and ‘Roadnotes.’ Not to rag on Rundgren here, but the album is another of Nyro’s where the willingness to listen to several times, ideally once a day over the course of a week, unlocks its secrets. Never once did it induce me to slumber.

One of its delights is ‘Talk to a Green Tree.’ There’s a harmonic shift that may be the one time that Nyro dipped into Joni Mitchell territory (compare it to Mitchell’s ‘For Love or Money’). One verse has her contemplating a fantasy of getting a guy to trade places with her to provide “child care at home” and that it’s “no disgrace,” warning though that “after you’ve done it all / being daddy / be ready for the midnight hour.” Whether that means having to get up in the middle of the night for the baby or because mommy needs some loving is up to the listener to decide.

The title track illustrated the growing unity of all the facets of Laura Nyro’s artistry from its New York opening (“on a street corner where the kids boogie all night”) to more rural imagery (“wonders that take you, rivers that give”) to unity (“feel this love, my brothers and sisters”) to affirming love, not war (“it’s not war, it’s life she gives”). In ‘Mother’s Spiritual,’ all can find solace. It’s not all that different from ‘Save the Country,’ the hopeful, graceful message is just expressed meditatively as opposed to as a call to action. Call it spacey, call it new age-y or whatever condescending terms come to mind but to me, it expresses the abiding fearlessness of Laura Nyro.

Of all the blind spots I had in Nyro’s discography before this writing this essay—everything she recorded after Nested—Mother’s Spiritual is the one that most moved me. In a way, it represents her last truly grand artistic statement though there was more music to come, much of it which continued to fill in her worldview and wishes for this planet, and led to a convergence of everything that Nyro revealed of herself in her music.

A hint of that is in the medley that opens Laura: Laura Nyro Live at the Bottom Line, recorded in 1988 at the New York club and released in 1989 on Cypress Records, an indie label, after Columbia passed on releasing another live album by her. It pairs ‘The Confession,’ the most exhilarating moment on Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, with ‘High Heel Sneakers,’ a rhythm-and-blues hit by Tommy Tucker, the stage name for Robert Higginbotham, from 1964. It is followed by the ethereal ‘Roll of the Ocean’ which name-checks John Coltrane and then ‘Companion,’ a swaying ballad that could have been recorded by a group like the Chiffons 25 years earlier. R&B, jazz, girl groups were three of the formative influences on Nyro. There was also soul. Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and Leontyne Price. Mary Wells too.

The first 45s Laura Nyro bought were ‘Bye Bye Love’ by the Everly Brothers and ‘Mr. Lee’ by the Bobbettes. Don and Phil’s blend of country and rock and roll did not meaningfully move her beyond their harmonic blend but it’s easy to see and hear her taking the lead on ‘Mr. Lee’ when she was young and singing all over the Bronx.

Curtis Mayfield and, by extension, the Impressions loomed large and it’s neat to ponder the possibility of her music being beamed back to her through the shuffle of ‘Wherever You Leadeth Me’ or the voodoo of ‘Madame Mary.’ There was, of course, also Motown as well as soul in general. A great what-if is if Nyro and LaBelle had tackled, as planned, the Intruders’ ‘Cowboys to Girls’ for Gonna Take a Miracle.

Her frame of reference never tangibly shifted from the music of her youth. That was the foundation. What was built upon it all came from her. No chasing of trends, just an ongoing negotiation with her art.

I find that heroic. It’s one reason why I haven’t dwelled or even mentioned how her albums and singles charted. I don’t think it’s germane to telling why Laura Nyro is important, so hypnotic, so mesmerizing. “I’m just, I’ve always been a rebel in society. I always will be,” she once said. And, in a sense, to not discuss the numbers is to take up that rebel spirit and resist playing the easy game.

Her live recording at the Bottom Line, the most elusive of her recordings, long out of print and not included in Madfish’s 2024 boxset, has her slipping into hip middle age. When someone in the audience blows a noisemaker, she quips, “Happy New Year” even though it’s summer in the city. Later on, she notes she’s up past her bedtime—she usually got up early and was in bed by around nine o’clock in the evening.

These are snapshots of the last time Nyro toured with a full band. The group was compact: a rhythm section of Jimmy Vivino on guitar, David Wofford on bass and Frank Pagano on drums with Nydia Mata again on percussion and Diane Wilson adding dimension to Nyro’s vocal leads.

The adventurousness of the Seasons of Light group has been replaced with something more straightforward. The love is still there, both between the musicians and Nyro, and between her and her audience, but the feel is looser, a kind of reverent party.

Among the new songs Nyro debuted, the one that stuck the longest in her repertoire afterwards was the one that reassured that while she had left New York for 15 years by that point, the city never left her as it never does for those who truly love it. Now that may seem like a strange observation to make when it’s about a song called ‘The Japanese Restaurant Song’ with its set-up of a family—a rather rambunctious clan—and their meal at, you guessed it, a Japanese restaurant. Nyro had a fondness for Japan and the Far East as well as sushi and yet what I hear as she sings, “just another night, a day in the life / just another foreign film in black and white” is that street sensibility in full force and fully intact, both in the words and in the way she sings them, bending the notes, subtly teasing the time.

The sequence where she pretends to grab the attention of the restaurant’s waitress—on the Bottom Line recording, an audience member plays along, another moment of the convivial feeling caught on tape—telling her, “as you can see, the situation is still a little bit out of hand” and sharing how she had just quit smoking—true, Nyro had just kicked a 25-year habit—but, she says in the sensual way only she could, that hunger had taken over her and pretends to order, she pauses here for a long moment, “a big bowl of chocolate ice cream,” bringing the house down.

In the years that followed, as Laura Nyro returned to playing regularly solo with a small group of female harmony singers, she kept count of how many years she had been cigarette free and how since then, she remained very hungry. After the Bottom Line, she began to perform most of the song as spoken word, a reflection that ‘The Japanese Restaurant Song’ is a simple one. It opened the door for me to better understand the whole arc of Nyro’s music.

It connects everything together. She never abandoned the spark that made those early years of record making so intense, the sounds she sent out into the world and the devotion that was sent back to her from those who received them.

The Bottom Line recording also signified Nyro was moving into a new chapter. The beat became prominent. Her voice sounded more resonant and she latched onto the beat again like she used to in the early days, a by-product, no doubt, of her becoming a non-smoker. When she applied this sensibility, still earthy yet urban too, to ‘The Descent of Luna Rosé,’ her ode to waiting for her period, with clean-sounding comping from a guitar and Bernard “Pretty” Purdie on drums, it’s all to marvel anew at her nerve.

It was included on Walk the Dog & Light the Light, recorded and released in 1993. The front cover of the CD had a pensive portrait of Nyro. Inside the booklet was her, dressed in silks holding a portable keyboard with her left hand as if getting ready to walk to the studio with it, looking like the working musician-slash-mother she often was, touring again as frequently as she did between 1969 and 1972, yet remaining a Goddess.

If the music sounds a little bit like Steely Dan, it’s not just because it’s Purdie behind the drum kit. For the album, Nyro worked with Gary Katz, who helped steer the run of albums Donald Fagen and Walter Becker made in the seventies. There’s the nice use of a harp at the beginning of the bridge and the horn riffs that add dimension to ‘The Descent of Luna Rosé’’s percolating groove. Its refrain of “lighten up baby” is catchy as heck—again, the kind of daring that made Laura Nyro one of a kind.

There’s a sheen to Walk the Dog & Light the Light but it’s not too shiny. It situates the album’s beginning and end—both dedicated to what Nyro called “teenage primal heartbeat songs of my youth”—in the here and how while still casting a nostalgic shadow.

The eight compositions in between were collectively the strongest she had written since Christmas and the Beads of Sweat. Two were older: ‘To a Child…’ had been re-recorded for a collection of lullabies released in 1992 and ‘Broken Rainbow’ had been written for the Oscar-winning documentary of the same name about the forced removal of Navajo Native Americans from Arizona in the seventies. Nyro sings the lyrics of the latter with deep feeling which, save for some spare percussion, is just her and her piano, making the injustice of the displaced acute.

‘Lite a Flame (The Animal Rights Song)’ makes a similar statement. It’s a little more on the nose but Nyro’s observation that “it’s like prejudice / for the colour of your skin / prejudice for a woman / prejudice for an animal” is hard to argue with as is the implication of the scene she sets of birds flying free, children playing in a playground while an “elephant child [is] hiding / behind a tree.”

That’s the kind of thoughtful, deep empathy Laura Nyro had. It makes Walk the Dog & Light the Light ultimately a hopeful album. ‘Louise’s Church’ is a celebration of four “kick-ass women artists”: Sappho, Billie Holiday, Frida Kahlo and Louise Nevelson. The place of worship referenced in the title is the Chapel of the Good Shepherd Nevelson sculpted for St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in New York. Nyro chronicles the wisdom she had accumulated on the affirming ‘A Woman of the World’ and of being a working mom on the title track.

It is not surprising that the year after the album—such an energizing listen—came out was one of Nyro’s busiest and most prolific.

In 1994, she made plans with Eileen Silver-Lillywhite, a big fans of hers who worked in academia, to launch her own record label, Luna Mist Records, after she parted ways with Columbia. One of the albums she planned on releasing was of recordings made of her Christmas Eve shows in 1993 and 1994 at the Bottom Line—her way of celebrating the season was to perform her songs as well as her old favourites at the small New York club. Twenty-four performances from the two shows would be released as The Loom’s Desire, an indelible word combination from her ‘Emmie,’ in 2002.

It, along with recordings from Japan and the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco that have also been released posthumously, document the intimate ease of her shows. Often, he used a portable keyboard as opposed to a grand piano so that she could face her audience.

She would begin with her group of harmony singers whom she called the Harmonies to replicate the background she sung on her records and then she would play solo, bringing the singers back for a few more songs before performing a solo encore. She featured the recent songs she had written but selectively dipped back to those she had written, as she said, “many moons ago.” Only ‘Wedding Bell Blues,’ often paired with ‘Blowin’ Away’ in a medley, would be played as it had always sounded with that instantly recognizable piano figure, sending a shiver of bliss through the body.

Like Bob Dylan, who in late 1969 sought Nyro at a New York party Clive Davis held for Janis Joplin, and Paul Simon, who appears twice in Kort’s biography in anecdotes that indicate an unexplained antipathy towards her, Laura Nyro continued to be a contemporary artist and the documents of her live in 1994 contain some of the most enjoyable moments of her captured on stage. The venues she played were usually small but what she sent out from her piano remained undiminished.

Nineteen ninety-four also saw Nyro begin recording a new album. It would be one she never got to finish.

In the summer of 1995, Laura Nyro was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Stage four. Her mother succumbed to it as did two of her relatives. She was not surprised. In Kort’s bio, her brother, Jan, says, “Laura definitely felt she was going to get it. I remember more than once when she made some dark comment about it and I scolded her about being depressing. But in the end, she was right.”

Nyro underwent a hysterectomy as well as chemotherapy and did one last recording session for her planned new album in New York in August 1995. The demos and tracks she was working on would be polished early in the millennium and released as Angel in the Dark in 2002. Some of Nyro’s closest friends and colleagues thought it shouldn’t have been released, that she wouldn’t have wanted something incomplete out in the world.

As it is, the album has almost everything that formed the fabric of Nyro’s artistry. The one thing missing are the obstacle courses that acted as a dare for the musicians that worked with her as well as for the listener to undertake the adventure of navigating through them.

Angel in the Dark does not feel like a swan song. Its vitality suggests that Nyro was in the middle of an artistic renaissance. ‘Serious Playground’ has her asserting “my boss is the muse,” that “I’m here for the music of my life” and, more pertinently, that it is “more, more than stress or strain / more, more than just capital gain.”

At another point, she sings of songwriting as “building houses” and that it is “sound architectural tools I use.”

In 1995, Nyro’s partner, Maria Desiderio, made a short film about her. It was called Musical Architecture. At the beginning, she is wearing a floral blouse and sitting on a chair that is upholstered just as florally. She quips that she hopes that it doesn’t all look “too dweeby.” But, then, with its interspersing of moments of her talking about her life and music with snippets of her recordings and stills of her focusing on her halcyon days in New York, Musical Architecture does feel like the valedictory it was intended to be.

The most subtle sign of her ongoing treatment for cancer is the wig she is wearing which mirrors her hair in the nineties. She notes her age, 47, and that “it’s been quite a life.” She also lays out her philosophy of songwriting. “I use everything,” she says softly, “Feminism, my spirituality, motherhood. You use your intelligence, you’re using an important part of your being. You just have to work every single day.” At another point, she compares singing to flying.

The film concludes with Nyro at the piano singing ‘Angel in the Dark.’ When she gets to the bridge, she notes it still needs work. She look at the camera to assure that she will complete it.

In early 1996, Laura Nyro’s cancer was in remission. Six months later, it was back. The prognosis was grim. If she undertook another round of chemotherapy, she may have had 18 months to live. Without it, she would likely have six. Not willing to undergo more chemo, she tried alternative medicines and treatments. True to her nature, she kept her health battle relatively private, dealing with it stoically. It was during this time that she worked on selecting the recordings for the two-CD collection Columbia wanted to release anthologizing her music.

At a memorial concert held at the Beacon Theatre in New York six-and-a-half months after she passed and organized by Desiderio who herself would be diagnosed with ovarian cancer soon afterwards and who passed away in 1999, a group of her musical colleagues and musicians influenced by her gathered to pay tribute. Among them was singer Kenny Rankin who met Nyro in 1966. He spoke of a time when he felt about as low as ever felt. He called her and she asked him to come to her apartment. They talked, she made him tea and she cradled him in her arms so he could cry out his pain. He noted at that moment that he was the Billy in ‘Billy’s Blues,’ one of the countless high points from More Than a New Discovery. He then offered a deeply felt rendition of the song to memorialize her whom he called “incredible” and “salt of the earth.”

Fourteen years earlier, they had recorded a duet of a song written by Nyro’s brother, Jan, called ‘Polonaise.’ A few promotional copies were pressed as a single before the record label it was on, PCM Records, went bankrupt. A few enterprising YouTubers have uploaded the recording.

‘Polonaise’ is the rarest Laura Nyro record. It’s a soft ballad with lyrics that seem to luxuriate in timelessness. The pairing of Rankin’s poetic phrasing with Nyro’s soulful replies cushioned upon Richard Tee’s lustrous electric piano is a fever dream of sublimity. She sings with the expressive range that she had long ago dialed back. It’s one of her most ravishing performances. To hear it is to swoon and since first hearing it just a few days ago, I can’t stop thinking about it or wanting to hear it once again.

But, that’s how it goes when you continually punch your membership card to Laura Nyro fandom. Call it obsession, call it infatuation, call me a Nyromaniac. I’ll take any or all of these labels. In the weeks that I have spent writing this essay, I’ve been deeper into her vortex than I have ever been. The playlist I have been building on Spotify of her music, the music that influenced her, recordings that operate in the same territory as her and the sounds created by the legion influenced by her tops ninety hours and has over 1,400 pieces of music. It has been a constant soundtrack as have been her albums in my record room.

I crave variety in my listening but this constancy has made me feel happier, more balanced and more at ease than I have been in a long time. My mental health is better too. I have latched onto some of the Zen she mentions in ‘The Japanese Restaurant Song.’ But, that’s also how it goes when you let the music of Laura Nyro into your life.

My wife bought me a decal of her that includes a portrait of her taken when she visited Buffy Sainte-Marie’s home in 1969. It now has pride of place on my laptop. I also bought a T-shirt with the advertisement of her show at the San Diego Community Concourse Convention Hall in December 1970 with Jackson Browne opening. It includes a photo taken by Columbia’s Bob Cato during the shoot for the cover of Eli and the Thirteenth Confession.

I’ve worn it twice, once on a day I headed into the office of my day job, something I do once or twice a month. You never know with such things, someone may recognize whoever or whatever is on a graphic tee and you may chat for a moment or more or you’ll never hear a peep. I wore a cardigan over it—I don’t like feeling cold and have gotten increasingly iffy about exposed arms—but I made sure it was open enough so that it was clear who I was repping.

How I wanted someone to recognize Nyro so we could trade that knowing look that would say all that would possibly need to be said. How I longed even more to be asked, “Laura Nyro? Who is she?” or something similar, the warm-up for me to offer my evangel. To tell of the finest singer-songwriter who ever was, to say that you may know her songs and here I am to tell you of who wrote them, who designed them out of her head, who recorded them and who made music better that I could ever possibly fathom, who knocked me out the first time I heard ‘Eli’s Comin’’ and twenty-two-and-a-half years later, still knocks me out when I hear it and to recommend the next time he, she or they fire up their streaming service of choice to type up Laura Nyro, press play and be prepared to enter the vortex where I have been, to kiss goodbye to the before time and to kiss hello to the after time. I wouldn’t be offering music discovery, I would be offering a lifeline to salvation. If I believe anything, this is one of my beliefs.

I think of seven days before my first true exposure to Laura Nyro’s music and recall the night I spent at the Blue Note in New York. Playing was an all-star band to toast Dizzy Gillespie. The front line was jazz’s version of murderers’ row: Roy Hargrove, Jon Faddis, James Moody and Slide Hampton plus Clark Terry joining in on a few numbers. The rhythm section was Dennis Mackrel on drums, a bassist whose name I don’t recall and on piano was Billy Childs, a long-time fan of Laura Nyro.

That night as the band offered up contemporary bebop—I especially remember a blazing version of ‘Manteca’ that opened the second set—I doubt Childs was thinking about her but he knew, he had the secret, he had gotten the goods.

In 2014, he worked with Larry Klein, a bassist and songwriter, to create Map to the Treasure: Laura Nyro Reimagined with a cast of singers and guest musicians. It remains the pearl of the many tribute albums made of her.

Childs recently said of her: “I discovered through listening to her lyrics and just checking out her entire body of work that she was a profoundly deep composer and conceptualist.” He added: “I had vivid conceptions of all of those songs so it made reimagining it not difficult for me.”

Childs’ charts explore the complexity and depth of her compositions, using them as springboards to offer the intricate, layered and opulent shrine in sound deserving of Laura Nyro. It is, for lack of a better adjective, a beautiful record, eliciting awe at how he, with Susan Tedeshi and altoist Steve Wilson, matches her fervour on ‘Gibsom Street’ and doing the same with Lisa Fischer on ‘Map to the Treasure.’ Rickie Lee Jones pokes at the rawness of Nyro’s tale of addiction ‘Been on a Train’ with Chris Potter on tenor saxophone, and Esperanza Spalding and Wayne Shorter deepen the aura of ‘Upstairs By a Chinese Lamp.’

Tears are close by as Childs features Chris Botti’s trumpet prior to Shawn Colvin’s tender reading of ‘Save the Country’ followed by a flute choir ushering in Dianne Reeves on ‘To a Child….’ It’s an album that impresses me and sweeps me up more each time I listen.

As with anything to do with Laura Nyro, nothing less than one’s A game will do. A tribute like the one Elton John and Brandi Carlile created to open their 2025 collaboration, by comparison, falls short of its target. ‘The Rose of Laura Nyro’ relies on name-dropping as many of her songs as possible.

It’s not that they didn’t have good intentions, it just doesn’t feel like Nyro or her music or at least it doesn’t to me. Singer Mary Brown’s ‘Laura Nyro Passed Away Today’ falls into a similar trap. It does, however, offer this image: “fly through the sky / soar past the stars / bring back the child to be born who will carry on,” that envisions Nyro out there amongst us and above us, still working her magic. And then there’s Tennis’ ‘Mean Streets’ which tells of her as a teen in the Bronx on the streets and of her summers in the Catskills.

It comes as no shock that her father, Louis Nigro, named Laura after the theme David Raskin wrote for Laura, Otto Preminger’s adaptation of the novel by Vera Caspary. It is a haunting piece of music, complex and beyond the garden variety. It sticks after it is heard.

These things come to mind when I turn to a recording of Laura’s that isn’t much celebrated. It’s ‘Art of Love’ from Walk the Dog & Light the Light. I love it. It’s one of my favourites. The message is focused on love and of wishing a happy holiday, a salutation that is given not to be unoffensive but in recognition of the universal meaning of the word, that each individual celebrates something or someone in their own way. Nyro asks “sister / brother / are we born / to learn the art of love?” with her adding a thick vibrato on the last word. When she wishes “happy holiday,” she pauses before adding and drawing out “with love.”

One may say that what she is doing here is doing what she had promised to never do again. She’s socking it to the people. There are no surprises, no mysteries to decipher, just a sincere, heartfelt message. That’s OK. More often that not, I believe those who receive it and like it will come to Laura Nyro.

I hope you enjoy the continuation of this passion project. If you missed the first part, click here to read it before diving into the second part. And, as always, I would love to know what you think.

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The Laura Nyro Experience (Part Two)
By: Robert C. Gilbert

“Money, money, money
I feel like a pawn in my own world
I found the system and I lost the pearl.”
- from ‘Money,’ written by Laura Nyro

Laura Nyro was an album artist with a twist. She put together, almost always painstakingly, fully formed and precisely programmed statements on two sides of twelve-inch vinyl. These albums should be listened to uninterrupted and in order so to gain the fullest appreciation of her rare gifts.

And yet, I recall that all it took were individual recordings for me to be utterly shaken by her and to be certain that Laura Nyro was in a category all her own. I hear ‘Gibsom Street’ from New York Tendaberry for the umpteenth time and still, when the musicians backing her erupt after the first line of each verse, I catch my breath. It’s no longer a surprise that they suddenly appear to disturb the holiness of Nyro, solitary, just her and a grand piano. But what gets me every time is the nerviness to include this briefest of rock-and-roll colour and then to immediately narrow the musical lens back to her. After hearing it, I smile, and once again give thanks that of all of the arts, I have devoted most of my energy to music and to hours upon hours of that time listening to Laura Nyro.

I think of other individual moments and turn to ‘Timer’ from Eli and the Thirteenth Confession. There is so much to savour like how she slips into tempo at its beginning only to slip out of it in such a dramatic way only to then resume the walking pace for the start of the first verse. And then there’s the bridge, which—I think I got this right—changes key, time signature and tempo, and one can almost see her sway as she sings. It disarms me every time and then I am disarmed again just 25 seconds later as Nyro switches to falsetto to sing, “if you love me too, I’ll spend my time with you.”

When Alice Cooper met her, she was incredulous to learn he was such of fan of hers. She asked, “you listen to my music?” Cooper responded, “I devour it.” When he appeared on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs, he included ‘Timer’ as one of his eight selections.

Devour is right. How else to think of listening to the bridge into the second verse of ‘Brown Earth’? It’s a song that further fills in Nyro’s vision of a world of harmony, being in touch with nature and delighting in the small details. ‘Brown Earth’ is a portrait of that special time in the morning when the city moves from the placidness of dawn to settle once again into the hustle and bustle of the day.

Her lyrics in this section of the song are some of her tenderest: “hold me by the light / kittens run the neighbourhood through / ragamuffin boys.” She sings them just above a whisper, her voice ringing softly, the line never breaking.

It has the effect of feeling as if the listener has to bend his or her ear as she continues: “all the world is new”…listen just a little closer…“by the light of day”…Nyro stretches out “day”…keep listening hard…“give with your heart and love will come to you”…she lets the words “come” and “you” last and bends the last note upward…she’s talking just to me…she then picks up steam…“kids come in all shapes and colours / to the cool morning dew.”

Her phrasing here is delicate and gentle, suffused with hope and divine love.

If to listen to Laura Nyro is to be repeatedly staggered by her originality, her almost savant-level mastery of songcraft, her smashing of the barrier between artist and audience, how to even describe how this moment from ‘Brown Earth’ makes me feel. Maybe it’s enough to argue in being able to feel whatever it is I feel—in truth, it can move me to tears—and to have a chill go out of my body as I hear it is to be reminded that to be living is to be feeling and to not be clinical or mechanical in going about day-to-day life or rely on the assorted adjectives that go along with that way of living and that are ground into dust by mention of the name Laura Nyro.

‘Brown Earth’ is the start of her fourth album, Christmas and the Beads of Sweat. Of the five LPs that marked the first chapter of Nyro’s career, it’s the one that is most overshadowed by what came before it and what would soon come after it. It’s understandable to maybe get lost in comparing it to its immediate predecessors: Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and New York Tendaberry, both masterpieces—it could also be argued, and I will get to that argument later, that those albums are also albatrosses in Laura Nyro’s discography, forever fixing her in a particular moment in time—but doing so completely misses its point.

What the album needs is not an intellectual framework measuring it against an unreachable benchmark but time and patience. I’ll admit that it took longer for me to appreciate Christmas and the Beads of Sweat than what came before. There’s the seeming incongruity of Duane Allman backing her on ‘Beads of Sweat’ and hearing what resulted. At first, the sound of the very Southern Allman supporting the very New York Nyro seemed wrong, perhaps even a betrayal. But I kept at it and the dots eventually connected. They were two musicians who loved Miles Davis and created music with a strong jazz flavour. The sting of Allman against the fire of Nyro on a song that recaptures the magic of ‘Eli’s Comin’’ then becomes the most natural, daring thing to have done.

‘Beads of Sweat’ is a Laura Nyro rock-and-roll record. The only one she ever made. I hear it now and thrill to its energy. Ponder the musicians who backed Nyro: Cornell Dupree joining Allman on guitar, Chuck Rainey on bass, Dino Dinelli of the Rascals on drums and Ralph MacDonald on percussion. That would be a supergroup to end all supergroups if they had decided to make this one-time-only pairing an ongoing concern.

That is all to say that once any hang-ups are kicked to the curb, Christmas and the Beads of Sweat emerges as a continuation in the evolution of Laura Nyro’s brilliance, and not its diminution or distortion.

It took only a fraction of the time it took to record New York Tendaberry with sessions for the album beginning and ending in May 1970. This time, Rascals’ front man Felix Cavaliere was at the helm and he brought on veteran producer and arranger Arif Mardin to help, primarily to assist with working with Nyro who remained steely minded and extremely protective of her music. Even as she was not credited as a producer here, there was no doubt that she was calling the shots.

Cavaliere characterized the sessions as being as tough as he thought they would be with any effort he employed to try to edge Nyro into more commercial territory easily deflected. Notwithstanding, they became close friends. Mardin, for his part, compared her as a composer to Aaron Copland.

The album has two distinct feels. Side one featured the players from Muscle Shoals: guitarist Eddie Hinton, bassist David Hood, vibraphonist Barry Beckett and drummer Roger Hawkins. Whereas many of the artists who played with them went to Alabama, here, they came to New York and whereas other artists would fit into their sound: funky, earthy and in-the-pocket, here they fit into Laura Nyro’s sound: increasingly ethereal yet remaining grounded in the soul of the New York streets. While one would be hard pressed to know instantly who was backing her on ‘When I Was a Freeport and You Were the Main Drag,’ a rollicking, tough-minded feminist cri de cœur, they do add a cosmopolitan luster that delicately complements her.

Side two featured New York players with the notable addition of Allman and is dedicated to a suite of four songs, each one about a season, moving from spring to winter. It’s Nyro at her most ambitious and experimental.

It is an exhilarating 25 minutes of music with three impressionistic pieces plus one far more direct. ‘Upstairs By a Chinese Lamp’ starts with Nyro on the piano playing a free introduction blissfully, setting herself up to sing a rich urban scene. There’s a “market in the cool white mornin’.” It’s spring. A woman wakes and in that moment between sleep and waking, she thinks of her paramour—gender unspecified—”who takes her sweetness / by a chinese lamp upstairs.” She makes tea and the song ends with the couple as “they softly take in the cool spring air.”

Except for a brief moment in tempo as Nyro’s wordlessly sung line dialogues with Dinelli’s backbeat, ‘Upstairs By a Chinese Lamp’’s momentum is built upon her imagery. Joe Farrell decorates the scene on flute and English horn, making a return to the Nyro universe after memorably guesting on ‘Poverty Train’ from Eli and the Thirteenth Confession. Oud, played by Ashod Garabedion, and cimbalon, played Michael Szittei, add additional colour.

The scene dissolves into a shimmering harp line by Alice Coltrane as Nyro offers up one of her most unforgettable lyrics: “Where is your woman? / Gone to Spanish Harlem?” She wonders if the woman has gone there to buy her lover books or perhaps pastels. These thoughts hang over ‘Map to the Treasure’’s middle section. If ‘Captain for Dark Mornings’ from New York Tendaberry was Nyro at her most seductive, what can possibly be said of her here?

The steady acceleration of an unbridled piano motif builds emotional intensity that bursts with her singing a series of lines oriented around “the treasure of love.” For most, this would be sufficient but not for Laura Nyro. There are two additional climaxes in the music. The second has her breathlessly calling out, “come to me baby / you got the look that I adore, that I understand / my pretty medicine man.”

What is it like to be witness to such an honest, intimate moment and, more importantly, how should it be described? I’m no language policeman (beyond decrying the overreliance on jargon in just about every mode of communication) but a confession like the one Nyro sings here leads to the charge that she should have held herself back, not been so in one’s face, not been so…female and to toss around adjectives like purring or an expression like coming on too strong.

Now, in fairness, Nyro herself would eventually feel that compositions like ‘Map to the Treasure’ were too personal, relics of when she was a “wild teenage banshee.” She rarely performed any of her earlier songs later in her career but even as she cast those aside, they were replaced by songs like ‘The Descent of Luna Rose’ which was about, as Nyro put it, “a woman's monthly cycle of renewal” so those mollified with not having to endure, say, ‘Captain Saint Lucifer’ were likely to not to have been all that mollified after all.

‘Map to the Treasure’ is a triumph because it is honest and real, and I’ll admit when I hear it, I get hot and bothered, a cheeseball expression but I think it works here. Again, to truly hear Laura Nyro is to surrender wholly so that one can, repeating what she said in 1968, “come to her.”

The explosive ‘Beads of Sweat’ follows and the suite then concludes with ‘Christmas in My Soul.’

It’s the most challenging segment of the work. While it may be more polemical than poetic, though she did perform it initially as a poem, it still is daring with its complete disregard for melody. It is a prayer like the concluding movement of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and it ends with the benediction, “joy to this world,” and Nyro holding the last note for 12 seconds. She would end ‘Mother Earth,’ never recorded in the studio but performed at the Fillmore East in 1971, similarly, leaving the audience with “peace and joy to the world.”

How can one argue against such things? Her songwriting had evolved into the profoundly personal with her not so much a songwriter as an auteur with peace, not war; praise for everyday pleasures and rage at everything that didn’t nurture or sustain mother earth; and an unapologetically female point-of-view all weaved throughout her songs.

By my count, there were only two covers of any of the eight songs she wrote for Christmas and the Beads of Sweat in the early seventies. One was by the group who digged the deepest into her songbook.

‘Blackpatch’ may not have been a natural fit for the 5th Dimension with its textured tale of a marijuana party that ends with a woman who has “lipstick on her reefer / waiting for a match” but it works majestically, concluding with an extended coda based on its very New York piano riff and a solo by jazzman Bill Perkins on tenor saxophone. It was the group’s tenth, final and most memorable cover of a Laura Nyro song. That the lead vocal is shared between all five group members: Billy Davis, Jr., Florence LaRue, Marilyn McCoo, Lamonte McLemore and Ron Townson, is very fitting.

Their path only crossed once with Nyro. It happened in San Francisco in the days after her appearance at Monterey. They were staying in the same hotel and ate a takeout dinner together one night with critic Ellen Sander and the Hi Fashions, the singing group Nyro used to back her at the festival. Later that night, the Hi Fashions joined Nyro to sing the songs that would eventually become Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and the sound of them wafted out of their balcony window as the 5th Dimension listened in.

Of the artists who popularized Nyro, the 5th Dimension were the most important and the one who, more often than not, filled in and underlined the magic in her compositions. Part of that came from Bones Howe’s expansive productions, which mostly worked, but it primarily came from the group whether it was the chorale of harmonies that ended their version of ‘Blowin’ Away’ or the interplay between McCoo and LaRue, and the fellas on ‘Wedding Bell Blues’—that McCoo married a Bill, Davis, Jr., added emotional weight.

And it was only hearing LaRue take the lead on ‘Stoney End,’ which starts a medley of Nyro’s songs on a live album the group recorded at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas in 1971, that I finally got its ode of yearning to return to an innocence that had been lost. The medley segues into a truncated ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’ where under an admittedly slinky groove, the group holds nothing back as they ask those important existential questions: “can you surry? / can you picnic?” It’s hard not to get caught up in the feel, to happily sing along at full volume and maybe even do their choreography of pretending to grip the reins of a horse-driven surrey.

If Albert Murray was right—and I think he was—that American culture is a gumbo of Black and white, the linkage of the 5th Dimension, whose members hailed from Missouri and New Jersey and whose following included both Black and white people, with Laura Nyro, a New Yorker of Italian and Jewish heritage whose primary influences were Black, is the whole thing in action.

Christmas and the Beads of Sweat is also where Laura Nyro as a song interpreter begins. Her version of Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s ‘Up on the Roof’ ends side one. She takes it slowly with minimal backing from the guys of Muscle Shoals, the top of the apartment building becoming a sanctuary amid the city. She invests each word with hard-earned compassion and a promise of renewal—just hear her on “at night the stars put on a show for free / and darling you can share it all with me” (don’t miss how she stretches out “darling”). There is a glimpse of a vulnerability that she rarely revealed before—not surprising then that this time even her usual detractors couldn’t deny the power of her performance. Even so, the ache that begs to be soothed only becomes heartbreaking because it is felt by someone who had hitherto been confident and brash. In other words, it was Nyro’s unwillingness to hold back that makes her version of ‘Up on the Roof’ so unforgettable.

It had already been recorded definitively by the Drifters in 1962 with Rudy Lewis on lead. Nyro’s is just as good. Her interpretative power came in part from her bringing the emotions of a song to the forefront such as on versions of ‘Walk on By’ and ‘O-o-h Child’ at the Fillmore East in May 1971 and when she joyfully barrels through ‘Tom Dooley’ as part of an encore medley with her ‘California Shoeshine Boys’ five months earlier at the same venue after asking the audience if they’d like to sing a song with her (the answer obviously was yes!).

Laura Nyro made good songs even better. She also made great songs even better. She did both when she went to Philadelphia to record with Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, then building the Philly Soul sound, and bringing Labelle: Patti, Sarah Dash and Nona Hendryx, with her. A covers album may be, the live album excepting, the ultimate stop-gap measure for the singer-songwriter whose inspiration is running on low but while it was true that Nyro wasn’t as prolific in the spring of 1971 as she had once been, she was still writing songs of depth: in addition to ‘Mother Earth,’ there was the anti-war ‘American Dove’ and the gritty ‘I Am the Blues,’ she wanted to make an album about soul, and rhythm and blues, and the songs she loved, and to record it with Patti LaBelle whose Blue Belles were one of her favourite girl groups growing up. Journalist Vicki Wickham introduced Nyro to LaBelle—she had an interview with Nyro and brought LaBelle along to Nyro’s apartment. Nyro and LaBelle took to each other right away, talking about music and eventually moving to her piano to sing. Wickman’s interview was an afterthought.

‘The Bells’ was the newest song she covered for the resulting album, Gonna Take a Miracle. It was first released at the beginning of 1970 by the Originals, a Motown group who were the male equivalent of the Andantes and steered by Marvin Gaye, who co-wrote and produced the recording. It sounds like the kind of record Gamble and Huff would soon make with Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes. One can easily hear Teddy Pendergrass taking the lead. The recording was a hit although largely forgotten. Its’ power is rooted in its bridge, a slowly rising tempest in which the singer tells the object of his affection—unrequited—”I hear the bells ringing in my ear” and then asks “do you love me like I love you?”

The Originals offer it with bravado twinged with resignation. It’s a romantic Hail Mary. It is as well in the hands of Nyro and Labelle but they make its failure hurt so much more. That Laura Nyro could make romance a matter of life and death was not new. It’s part of what makes New York Tendaberry unlike any other album I have ever heard.

As she and Labelle layer their voices on “I hear the bells” and then add “ringing in my ears” there comes that ache of authenticity not only in believing what they are singing but also in bringing up moments that recall when you felt the same way. That culminates with the repetition of “do you love me,” with Nyro at the top of harmony with full vibrato that shifts to “like I love you” and the crying out of “oh baby” before she sings, “if you ever leave me I believe I’ll go insane,” a declaration so real that the kicker that “I’ll never hear the bells again” compels an impulse to want to cradle her until the hurt goes away and quite frankly makes the Originals’ recording of ‘The Bells’ superfluous.

I wouldn’t say the same about Ben E. King’s recording of ‘Spanish Harlem’ but Nyro scales its height and vaults over it. It’s that good. The horn arrangement—the charts for the album are credited collectively to Bobby Martin, Lenny Pakula and Thom Bell—echoes her phrasing as well as cushions her on the resolution on lines like “I have to beg your pardon.” It adds an urban yearning to her telling of Jerry Leiber and Phil Spector’s tale of an alluring rose of the New York neighbourhood.

She alternates between singing softly and adding that tough thickness, one of many weapons in her arsenal of vocal tricks. She ends with a choir of Nyros repeating the opening line, “there is a rose in Spanish Harlem,” as sweet a way to close it as could be dreamed.

Once again, I can list all the reasons and choices that I think explain why Nyro’s ‘Spanish Harlem’ is so beautiful and can elicit tears, and still, I can only get so far in explaining why it is so good which is also trying to keep filling out a rhapsody in words explaining why of all the female singers of that time; and by 1971, there was an explosion of deeply compelling female voices: Karen Carpenter, Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, Dory Previn, Carole King, Pamela Polland, Merry Clayton, Judee Sill, Candi Staton and Valerie Simpson and the list goes on and on, Laura Nyro continued to stand apart.

I’m sure that my predilection for her music is a factor here but as I hear Gonna Take a Miracle and the rush of her and Labelle’s re-imagining of Motown stalwarts like ‘Jimmy Mack,’ ‘Nowhere to Run’ and ‘You Really Got a Hold On Me’ or Major Lance’s (by way of Curtis Mayfield) ‘Monkey Time’ or the haunted quality of her take on the Diablo’s ‘Wind,’ it all strongly argues that it’s not just personal taste. On the recordings of her solo shows in the early seventies, she has her audiences in the palm of her hands. No one dares make a sound as she sings and plays and when it’s encore time, audience members shout out requests, declare their love for her and ask her to play one more song.

The snippet of her performance of ‘Stoney End’ from her filmed appearance in 1971 for BBC’s In Concert (sadly, the rest of the performance is lost) shows the introversion of her Kraft Music Hall performance two years earlier had been honed into a beacon of intimacy, inviting all who wish to bend their ears and be privy to her secrets to draw close.

It’s good to have one of her shows from this era officially released. Spread Your Wings and Fly includes Nyro’s May 30, 1971 performance at Fillmore East where she appeared on a bill with Spencer Davis and Peter Jameson. There’s also a radio-broadcast recording from her stand just before Christmas 1970 with Jackson Browne, the last professional musician she would date, opening. Audience tapes from other shows are out there for those who know where to go (spoiler alert: YouTube).

Sadly, there is nothing from the four nights in June 1970 when Miles Davis opened for her at Fillmore East. The tapes were rolling for Davis’ sets, first released in frenetically edited 20-to-25-minute segments by his producer Teo Macero and then the whole shebang coming out in 2014.

The hall was packed for Nyro; it has half full for Davis and band as they played some of the boldest, wildest music of his chameleonic career. I imagine that being there for the whole night would have been like going to war, testing one's capacity to absorb Davis’ embrace of rock music (I find these recordings mind melting in the best way) to then come across a shelter where the external blitzkrieg changes into an internal shield with the masses ready to be ministered by a musical healer in her sanctuary. And then it would be time to exit onto Second Avenue after evening had long descended on New York to walk and feel deliriously happy to be alive wondering if God had at one point stood among the crowd.

That’s of course a flight of fancy twinged with a nostalgia of longing to have been alive at that time and at that place. Nights when one had a chance to hear Miles Davis and Laura Nyro in the same building and on the same night were commonplace back then. But still, I hear snippets of a concert she gave in Tokyo in November 1972 and know with certainty that I would have left Fillmore East flying high, whether figuratively, literally or both, for days, for weeks, for months, for years, forever, never again touching the ground.

Captured on an audience tape are two covers of soul classics that she never recorded in the studio. One is ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.’ Nyro improbably captures the grandeur of Diana Ross’ recording by singing at the beginning Ross’ part as well as the Andantes’ part.

Even more passionate is her version of ‘Love on a Two Way Street,’ originally recorded by Lezli Valentine and then a hit for the Moments, morphing it into a streetwise lament—hear the slant she gives to the word desperation in the lyric “held me in desperation.” Most recordings of it stick to a slow groove that would one day be called quiet storm. Nyro echoes that feel while emphasizing the song’s desolate quality.

About three minutes in, she switches gears and sings the main refrain in a keening falsetto. The expectation is then that a singer would continue in that mode of big-throated bravado to end the recording. But, as usual, Laura Nyro had a trick up her sleeve. She starts: “I found love on a two-way street / and lost it on a lonely”—then pauses—“highway”—returning to the middle register for that final word and allowing it to softly decay. She twice repeats “lonely highway” just as wistfully and then sings a wordless line up the musical staff, and once again, creates a musical moment of startling intimacy. Soon after, Laura Nyro took an extended break from performing and recording.

Why did she?

In Michele Kort’s biography of Nyro, Soul Picnic, her decision to step away is chalked up to being burned out and being tired of dealing with “a bunch of people breathing down my neck.” It was something she could afford to do through the money she had made from song publishing but it’s important to note that even before the period of time—between 1968 and 1971—when hit covers of her songs were regularly on the charts, she was utterly disinterested in celebrity or the obligations of publicity or the rigamarole of the rock-and-roll lifestyle.

Preceding her withdrawal from the whirlwind was her break with David Geffen. There is no doubt that Geffen was bewitched by Nyro like so many others were. David Crosby once recalled that witnessing Geffen’s genuine devotion to and love for her was the deciding factor in hiring him, with Eliot Roberts, to manage his musical partnership with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash (and soon after Neil Young). Photos of the two from 1968 in New York are almost too precious to bear.

The protracted negotiations over a new record deal with Columbia that started in 1971 and stretched into 1972 was a defining and souring event in Laura Nyro’s life and career. It involved the label wishing to purchase Tuna Fish Music, the publishing company whose ownership was split fifty-fifty between her and Geffen, with five new albums to be added to her new contract for essentially nothing. Reports that she would leave Columbia for the new record label that Geffen was starting, Asylum, disturbed her. Even more alarming was the payment coming Geffen’s way—one not necessarily seen as being deserved—as well as was the sense that Nyro was being pitted between her loyalty to Clive Davis and to Columbia, and the deep connection she had forged with Geffen.

In Kort’s biography, Richard Chiaro, her road manager at the time, gave a glimpse into her frame of mind: “anytime a business decision invaded her privacy, she shut down and turned away from it.” She eventually signed the deal. She only spoke to Geffen a few more times in her life.

Contrasting the machinations of the record business was the start of her marriage to David Bianchini, a Vietnam veteran. They met in 1971 and married a year later. She pursued him; once, when she went to Japan and he decided not to come with her, she called him from there while he was in Cape Cod to ask him to rendezvous with her in Ireland. They travelled in the early days of their union. India. New Orleans. They lived primarily in Massachusetts while Nyro kept an apartment in New York; in 1970, she bought an apartment in the Beresford on West 80th Street and then later moved one block north. In 1973, she bought a small house in Danbury, Connecticut, having known the city from staying at Felix Cavaliere’s house there. It became her main abode for the rest of her life, effectively concluding her New York years, although her connection to the city remained strong. Like many, she loved the country and also loved the city.

Nyro and Bianchini separated after seventeen months of marriage. In Kort’s biography, he pinned the failure of their union on post-traumatic stress disorder from his harrowing experience serving in Vietnam where, among other things, he was wounded multiple times. Chiaro thought it was also related to the uneasiness of a working artist—even while she had stepped away from the business, Nyro continued to work on her songwriting—being married to a non-working artist.

That the dissolution of their marriage would eventually have both suing the other no doubt contributed to Nyro clinging even more strongly to her privacy and becoming essentially an itinerant musician.

In 1975, she returned to music making. Smile, which came out in February 1976, represented a bridge between her early albums and what would follow. It begins with her saying “strange” and hearing her not on piano but on guitar. It’s initially jarring but once she begins to sing ‘Sexy Mama,’ another song from the Moments, it’s like hearing from an old friend after not talking for a while. Her voice is softer, the peaks and valleys are narrower, but the feel was very much the same.

The inclusion of ‘I Am the Blues’—one of two songs from the album that she had performed live in the early seventies, the other being ‘Children of the Junks’—was the most vivid call back to her rise, especially when she wordlessly brings on an interlude spotlighting Randy Brecker on trumpet.

It’s the one recording on Smile that Charlie Calello, who reunited with Nyro to help oversee the album, felt recaptured their dynamic from Eli and the Thirteenth Confession. She was fully in charge and he was there to realize her vision even as she continued to express it cryptically—he recalled her once wanting a piece of music to sound like an old wooden chair she had in her house in Danbury.

The vision was as unique as it had always been. She used the rhythm of ‘Blackpatch’ to tell the tale of a feline by the name of Eddie who “sleeps with one eye open,” is content to be petted even as he would prefer “to get me my breakfast” and observes the humans around him lost in day-to-day life as he is “on my merry way.” It was called, unostentatiously, ‘The Cat-Song.’

The title track was her turning to mysticism refracted through the floating, sensual atmosphere of Nyro at her best. Again, the sound of her voice rising on the refrain, “Mars in the stars / Mars is a risin’,” imprints in the mind, another moment of pleasure that only Laura Nyro could summon.

It also had one of her patented twists with its shift to an extended improvisation with Nyro on voice, George Young on flute, Richard Davis on bass, and Reiko Kamota and Nisako Yoshida on koto. It may not have the daring of the rapid twists of, say, ‘Once It Was Alright (Farmer Joe)’ but it is adventurous and earthy.

Smile is the sound of Laura Nyro changing. It has a slicker sound—although not too slick, there is still room for feel and ambience—provided by a roster of musicians that blurred the boundaries between rock, pop, soul and jazz like guitarists John Tropea and Joe Beck, horn players Randy and Michael Brecker, and bassists Bob Babbitt and Will Lee. Nyro is still exploring the pain of love such as on ‘Stormy Love,’ about her failed marriage and it being “the last dance,” but it also has her affirming that “I ain’t gonna fly away / and I ain’t gonna cry all day” even as others may knock, for example, her appearance—in fashion, as in every other aspect of her life, Nyro did her own thing.

‘Money’ has another side of her emerging: the battle-hardened sage who while still believing that luck may be taking over, we can save the world and in being empathetic to the downtrodden, warns matter-of-factly that “a good friend is a rare find” and “a good pimp’s gonna rob you blind” in the manner of Randy Newman. But then she characterizes herself, in a way that only she could, as “like a pawn in my own world / I found the system and I lost the pearl” and that in spite of this realization, she will continue to do her own thing even if she may “bleed a little.”

A second verse has Nyro pulling the perspective back, painting the city as beset with pollution and then asking of the listener, “do you feel like a pawn in your own world / you found the system but you lost the pearl?”

As propulsive as the version Nyro cut of ‘Money’ for Smile, it is dwarfed by the drive of the version that appeared on her next album, Season of Lights…Laura Nyro in Concert, which documented the tour Nyro gave to promote Smile. It was the first time she appeared with a hand-picked band. The group was John Tropea, Michael Mainieri on vibraphone, Richard Davis and Andy Newmark on drums with a horn section of Ellen Seeling on trumpet, Jean Fineberg and Jeff King on flute and tenor saxophone plus Carter ‘C.C.’ Collins and Nydia Mata on percussion. The group balanced being tight while remaining ethereal. They played a jazz that to my ears was edgier and even more experimental than what Joni Mitchell was playing around the same time.

As with Smile, Nyro’s present is dialoguing with her past. ‘And When I Die’ is re-arranged as a New Orleans Second Line strutter. The opening of ‘Sweet Lovin’ Baby’ is changed from “I belong to the man” to “I belong to myself.” The urgency of ‘Captain Saint Lucifer’ is dialed back to something more fluid. The moments when Nyro performs solo on piano are greeted with rapture from the audience. Whether the album is heard in the truncated single LP issued in 1977 or in the expanded CD reissue that better represented how Nyro wanted the music presented, the warmth of the rapport between her and her group affirms that her dynamism as a performer was not dependent on her being alone on the stage with just a piano.

There’s a picture included in the collage that forms the album’s inner gatefold that resonates. It’s found on the lower right-hand corner. Everyone in the group is in a single line. Everyone is smiling. Everyone’s arms are around each other. Nyro is second from the left. She is in a customary long dress, her head is tilted to the left. She looks very content.

She does as well with a flower in her hair on the cover of Nested. The album was released in June 1978 and recorded in a home studio she built in her home in Danbury. It again starts with her saying a single word. This time, it’s “hello?” It’s a greeting from Mr. Blue, Nyro’s suitor in ‘Mr. Blue (The Song of Communications).’ Here, love is seen as a union of two misfits—co-pilots as opposed to a captain and his woman—and a form of communication not unlike trying to make contact with an extra terrestrial.

It’s the first of several songs that Nyro would write that could be called cosmic. She calls herself here “a fucking mad scientist,” a pointed summation of her addictive alchemy or a shorthand to explain that as Nyro got older, she became ever more her own artist.

Nested has the feel of an album recorded at home. The loose, almost easy, feel of ‘Rhythm and Blues,’ with a tasty harmonica part by John Sebastian, is a country sequel to ‘Sweet Blindness’ and ‘The Sweet Sky’ has Nyro bringing her New York strut to the Danbury trails. Here, she admits, “I’m a little mixed up / like a teenager” and that “these rules make me bored / the same old rap, the same old gap.” ‘Light’ has a summery quality, the closest Nyro got to a dance track.

It is also a direct album. It marked the first time Nyro made a record without horns or orchestration. The band supporting her included stalwarts like John Tropea, Will Lee, Andy Newmark and Nydia Mata as well as Vinnie Cusano on guitar, Sebastian and Cavaliere guesting on ‘The Sweet Sky’ and ‘The Nest.’

That doesn’t mean it isn’t reflective as well. ‘Crazy Love,’ just Nyro on piano and ‘Springblown,’ with its cry to “love me again,” continue the emotive thread of her music while ‘American Dreamer’ is an expansion of Smile’s ‘Money.’

Here, Nyro is “autumn’s child” who is “catching hell.” Over a catchy refrain of “oh, oh / shoot ‘em up, cops and robbers,” she comments on her marriage (“too naive to tell property rights from chapel bells”), David Geffen (“I signed his strange contract / with the transparent lines”) and possibly the passing of her mother, Gilda Nigra, from ovarian cancer in 1975 (“the doctor’s sighed / she’s imagining things”).

‘The Nest’ closed the album and was the most explicit reference to Nyro being pregnant while making the album—she toured for Nested while in her third trimester. The song starts, “Brown and shiny nest in a tree / maple and warm like the nest in me.” The father was someone her brother, Jan, and his wife, Janice, had met in India. Harinda “Hari” Singh came to Danbury and lived for a time with Nyro. The relationship did not last. She was in labour for over 20 hours and on August 23, 1978, gave birth to a son whom she called Gillian. She phoned a friend, Patty Di Lauria, to share the news. Before she hung up, Laura Nyro added, “and men should be on their knees!”

Read part three of The Laura Nyro Experience.

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For the past month or so, I have been re-discovering her early albums, hearing what came after 1978’s Nested, pouring over Michele Kort’s biography of her, building a massive playlist on Spotify of her music and everything that circled around her universe, all to ponder why her music moves me so much as well as so many others and to try to write an essay that pulls it all together. It’s the kind of project that seems tailor-made for Substack, breaking all the rules of online writing and letting the muse run wild. It is the most invigorating thing I have done here on Substack.

The below is the first part of what will be a three-party essay on Laura Nyro, and it is the longest piece of writing I have ever done. Part one is about 6,400 words. Because of the length, I’ve only included a few music clips. I hope you enjoy it and I also hope you’ll tell me your thoughts about Laura Nyro too.

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Collaboration April: Since I was last in touch, collaborations with two of my favourite MusicStackers have dropped. I took part in ’s Five for Friday sharing my pick for a diabolical earworm. I also took part in ’s Vital Records series and filmed myself last fall walking and talking in New York about three albums that radiate my love for NYC. Both pair very nicely with the start of my Laura Nyro essay.

The Laura Nyro Experience (Part One)
By: Robert C. Gilbert

“I don’t want to sock it to the people. I just want to put my music out there and if they like it they’ll come to me.” - Laura Nyro to producer Bones Howe, June 1968

Once, and only once, did Laura Nyro go along with the emerging formula that was turning her songs into hit records. It was the middle of June in 1968 and the song was one she had written in the aftermath of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

‘Save the Country’ is a call for and a belief in deliverance, of the hope of being baptized in “the glory river” where Dr. Martin Luther King presides, of collectively pledging “to keep the dream of the two young brothers”—Robert F. and President John F. Kennedy—and channeling anger to “take me to the glory goal.”

Its imagery is far beyond the simple platitudes of peace and understanding but it is also free of cynicism. It foreshadows how Nyro would increasingly focus on social and political issues like women’s and animal rights as well as the environment and also how her writing during her first glorious era, a time period stretching from 1966 to 1972, cut as deep into the marrow of life as anyone ever had before or since.

For reasons not entirely clear, Nyro agreed to go to California to record ‘Save the Country’ with producer Bones Howe and the musicians known today as the Wrecking Crew, including bassist Joe Osborn and drummer Hal Blaine.

It was Howe who was at the helm when the 5th Dimension, a male-female harmony group whose music defied easy categorization (was it soul or was it pop or was it even jazz) and who were the first to popularize the songs of Jimmy Webb, a songwriter whose songs also resisted easy labelling, recorded Nyro’s ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’ and ‘Sweet Blindness.’ Days before she entered the studio with Howe, the group’s version of ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’ peaked at number three on the Billboard Hot 100. It was the first of many times that a Laura Nyro song would ride high on the charts, her songbook becoming a fount of good luck for artists looking for a hit single save for Nyro herself.

The 5th Dimension’s recording of ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’ is faithful to the version Nyro recorded for her second album, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession. It retains the primary motif, although it is played on organ as opposed to piano, as well as her knotty harmonic shifts. The sound is broader with more prominent parts for strings and brass as are the group's harmonies. Even with these differences, the feel of the two recordings is similar. Both are sublime. This general faithfulness to Nyro’s original vision proved to be the exception and indeed, Howe’s reimagining of ‘Sweet Blindness’ takes her ecstatic celebration of being buzzed and twisted it into a fairly conventional pop song with peppy brass and exaggerations of her tempo and meter shifts, ultimately turning her song into a kind of burlesque. It’s a decent recording, to be sure, but one that is a cheap imitation of the rich material Howe was adapting.

‘Save the Country’ was even richer and it is fascinating to hear Nyro sing against Blaine’s cheery drums and bright brass declarations. The beat positively skips, especially on the refrain and Nyro’s vocal echoes that almost innocent cadence.

Amidst the gloss there are some startling qualities: the two measures after the first and second verses where Blaine plays a fill on brushes and the rush of the tempo as she sings, “keep the dream of the two young brothers” with ”dream” sustained for an extra bar or two. Here are two more: the horn lines underline rather than comment on what Nyro is singing and the piano part, played by either her or another musician, is indistinct (it’s barely audible). Howe’s ‘Save the Country’ is then a recording by Laura Nyro that didn’t sound like how a recording by Laura Nyro was expected to sound.

She characterized Howe’s approach as trying to “sock it to the people.” What she wanted to do was something far different: “I just want to put my music out there and if they like it they will come to me.” ‘Save the Country’ was released just over two weeks after it was recorded. It did not chart. Years later, Howe admitted he had approached working with her all wrong: he tried to shape Laura Nyro’s music as opposed to her music shaping how he could realize it on record.

Her sole appearance on network television, an episode of Kraft Music Hall from mid-January 1969, further illustrated this tension between trying to place Nyro within the mold of the female singer and realizing that the mold had nothing to do with Laura Nyro. She sings two songs. The first is ‘He’s a Runner,’ which she sings to the backing track recorded for her remarkably assured debut album, More Than a New Discovery, released on Verve Folkways in early 1967. She is seated at a white grand piano at a ninety-degree angle.

As she offers ‘He’s a Runner,’ she frequently closes her eyes, never looking directly at the camera, fully enveloped in the song. At the end of the bridge, which climaxes on a final, held note, she raises her left hand. As the song ends, the audience applauds and she stands up, bows almost imperceptibly and then moves slowly, lifting her long, flowing dress off the ground, to the middle of the piano bench. Her hands touch the keyboard. She pauses for four seconds. As she tosses her hair away from her eyes, she starts to play a syncopated pattern.

She repeats it and then she sings. “Come on people, come on children…” The start of ‘Save the Country.’ The camera catches her attack of the chords on the piano that conclude the first verse. It moves to tightly focus on her. Again, Nyro never breaks, so to speak, the fourth wall. She occasionally shakes her head in time. As she begins the fourth verse, she sways in time. She gives a furtive smile as she ends and then turns away.

There is a sense of complete interiority here. Nyro is engaging with her music and only her music, and in so doing, poses an urgent question to the viewer: are you in or are you out?

About three weeks after Nyro was on television, she played the first of a series of solo concerts. Just her and a piano. These shows helped build a growing fervor around her. Becoming and then being of fan of Laura Nyro meant something that the word fan only hinted at. That’s why the footage from Kraft Music Hall is so important. It’s the one opportunity to not only hear but to see what it would have been like to have been among the throng at one of her solo shows.

Introducing Nyro to television viewers was Bobby Darin. His brief preamble focused as much on her as a songwriter as on her as a performer. It’s offered with a solemnity that I’d like to think was motivated by a recognition of the privilege the viewing audience was soon to be accorded. If Darin’s words are taken at face value, they represented a 180-degree turn from his first meeting with her in the mid sixties.

Laura Nyro then was still Laura Nigro—she changed her last name, in part, because her given last name could be easily mispronounced as negro. There was no doubt by then that the Bronx-born-and-raised Laura had a gifted way with both words and music whether it was through the poems she wrote for school, the nights she spent harmonizing with a group of young Puerto Rican guys in the 170 St. subway station along the Grand Concourse or during one of the summers she and her family spent in the Catskills when she wrote the music for her team for Song Night, part of Color War to mark the end of the season.

In Michele Kort’s indispensable biography on Nyro, Soul Picnic, her brother Jan Nigro remembered what she composed for the night: “The inspirational songs were so powerful, so exquisite. She had worked these soaring harmonies that left the audience stunned. Her songs had such passion [emphasis Kort’s] extolling the virtues of the green team.”

When she met with Darin, who owned the publishing company Trinity Music, she had graduated from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and had a portfolio of songs she had written. Of them, only ‘He’s a Runner’ and ‘I Never Meant to Hurt You’ would be recorded by her. All Darin would offer on hearing her sing some of her songs was to encourage her to write something like ‘What Kind of Fool Am I?,’ a pop song from the last gasp of tunes that got passed around the stylists of the day and that was more melodramatic then melodic. That Nyro returned to serenade Darin with a song she called ‘What Kind of Fool Are You?’ was a sign that she was an artist not for turning.

Her audition with folk-music impresario Milt Okun in mid-1966 was more auspicious. It was arranged by publisher Artie Mogull—he was the first to sign Bob Dylan—after he hired her father, a jazz trumpeter and highly regarded piano tuner, to tune his piano and listened to Louis Nigro telling him all about his songwriting daughter. The tape of her tryout was recorded and was officially released by Omnivore Recordings in 2021 as Go Find the Moon: The Audition Tape.

The most revealing moment of the tape is when Mogull speaks to Nyro and says, “Laura, I never asked you this, do you do any songs other than those you have written?” She softly answers “no” and after ‘Stardust’ and ‘Moon River’ are offered as suggestions for her to perform, she continues: “yeah, I know some of them. Of course I know there are other songs and I know a few lines from each one, I mean, I know a few, maybe.” Mogull jokes, “there is Irving Berlin,” to which she zings him with “and there’s Bob Dylan” to which he can only say, “yeah, I heard of him.”

For the next minute and a half, a flummoxed Nyro tries to give Mogull and Okun what they seek to hear. She plays and sings the first two lines of ‘When Sunny Gets Blue,’ then tries a starkly reharmonized ‘Kansas City’ and after singing the opening of ‘I Only Want to Be With You,’ Dusty Springfield’s first big hit, she stops and says, almost despairingly, “I can’t do that, I don’t know the other words.”

Reflecting thirty years later, Mogull winced at this whole exchange. “Can you imagine being stupid enough to ask her if she could do Irving Berlin? I was dumbstruck by her talent,” he said. He then added, “but we didn’t get along so well.”

Mogull soon got Nyro signed to Verve Forecast Records and into the studio with producer-arranger Herb Bernstein to record More Than a New Discovery. A big point of contention was the decision to not have Nyro play piano during the album sessions. There was also the decision to market her as a jilted-bride-not-to-be for the single release of ‘Wedding Bell Blues’ which looks comical in hindsight.

Laura Nyro represented something very new in music. She arrived out of nowhere—she didn’t do the obligatory rounds of the New York clubs, for one example—and fully formed. She stood apart from the emerging counterculture but was most definitely part of popular music’s rapid maturation in the mid sixties.

She was all of 17 when she wrote ‘And When I Die’ and only two years older when her first album hit stores. Nyro’s music slipped right past the Beatles and Dylan, honing in on, in part, the girl groups of the early sixties. Norma Tanega, whose Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog was also produced and arranged by Bernstein, and Janis Ian, whose debut was produced by Shadow Morton who had guided the Shangri-Las, another important Nyro harbinger, were two singer-songwriters who were also creating a female-centric, tough kind of music that defied categorization. Neither LP, though, stood out quite like More Than a New Discovery even as it had nowhere the initial success that both Tanega and Ian enjoyed. And even as Bernstein pigeon-holed Nyro into fairly conventional arrangements, there is no denying her songs as well as her herself easily outwitted any attempt at conformity.

It is an addictive album, begging to be played over and over again to experience once again the 12 songs and, more pointedly, to hear Nyro sing them again. And that remained so for each album that followed. The question here then is why.

I think the best answer can be found in two places. The first is offered by producer and arranger Charlie Calello. The second must come from the listener—in this case, I.

Of all the stories of how encountering Laura Nyro could have a transfiguring effect, Calello’s is the most cinematic and, to me, the most heartfelt and resonant.

He first met Laura Nyro in late 1967. By then, David Geffen, still at the William Morris Agency, became her first dedicated champion, managing to get her out of her contract with Okun and Mogull and getting Clive Davis, then just starting his presidency of Columbia Records, to sign her to his label. All it took for Davis—notice the trend emerging here—was to meet her at Columbia’s offices on 52nd Street and to hear her play and sing her songs.

Calello was then a creatively stifled staff producer and arranger at Columbia, and known for making hit records with the Four Seasons, Lou Christie, Shirley Ellis and the Toys that were sonically rich and grounded in a pop sensibility often accented by brass and powered by a rhythm that had and compelled movement.

Davis arranged for Calello to go to Nyro’s small apartment at 888 Eighth Avenue as part of Nyro and Geffen’s search for a producer and arranger for her planned second album. Calello knew of her. If it weren’t for a scheduling conflict, he would have overseen her first album. He was eager to meet her.

Of all the times Calello has recounted his first meeting with Nyro, the one he wrote for Madfish’s box set of almost everything she recorded, Hear My Song: The Collection 1966-1995, is the most evocative.

Calello arrived at 52nd and 8th between seven and eight o’clock in the evening. After Nyro buzzed him in, he entered a room lit by candles and scented by incense. He described Nyro as wearing a short-sleeve blouse with a sunflower pin in the middle of it and a sarong. She asked him to tell her and Geffen, who was there too, about himself. He told them about the records he had made. Nyro interrupted him, “That’s not what I mean. I already know what you’ve done with your music. We want to know who you are. Just tell us about yourself, the stuff we don’t know.”

Calello started by telling her his dad played trumpet. She quickly replied that her dad played trumpet too. It was the beginning of a common ground between the two. They kept talking. They discovered they both loved jazz as well as Motown, and that they both had chosen music as their profession very early on. Geffen then sternly told Nyro to cut the conversation and play the music Calello had come to hear.

She dutifully moved to the upright piano in her apartment, sat down, paused and then began: “Yes I’m ready, so come on Luckie.” From that, the opening of ‘Luckie,’ came 12 more songs, ending with ‘The Confession.’ Calello recalled that as she finished, Nyro looked visibly exhausted.

As she played, Calello was astonished by what he heard. “I felt a powerful flow of emotion coursing through my body,” he wrote. Other times he has told this story, he has mentioned he was moved to tears.

Continuing with his account for Madfish in 2024, after Nyro had finished playing, Calello wrote “I was afraid to move. How to respond after experiencing such a moment? I was paralyzed.” He got up and went over to the piano. Nyro stood up, smiled and took Calello’s hands in hers.

He composed himself and told her, “Laura, you’re brilliant. What you just played is the finest piece of music I have listened to in many, many years. I feel speechless. I just want to thank you for sharing it with me. I promise I will never forget this evening.”

What Calello heard was Eli and the Thirteenth Confession in its entirety and in the order it would be released in March 1968. After getting the job he desperately wanted to oversee the album, he would spend January and February working with Nyro, whom he ensured received a co-producer credit, capturing on record that unforgettable evening in her mid-town apartment.

Even as Nyro would eventually believe that she was rushed during its recording, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession remains her breathtaking breakthrough. Guitarist Hugh McCracken, among the New York musicians Calello enlisted to back Nyro, called it the equal of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Todd Rundgren, part of the Nazz when it came out, once said, “Anyone who was paying attention, and who was around at the time, was just stunned by the depth of this record.”

Trying to find the words to most vividly capture what it is like to hear the album even today, fifty-eight years after its introduction into the world, is necessary, especially here; after all, it is an essay I am writing.

And yet, superlatives, even those that are sincerely offered and richly deserved, can flatten and make commonplace what is tactile and the exception to the norm. I recall here that Calello once said that what Laura Nyro wrote was not songs but experiences. The tagline for one of the ads Columbia put out to promote Eli and the Thirteenth Confession put it this way: “She doesn’t explain anything. She fills you with experience.”

I could choose to go on here about the album and tell of the whirlwind of key changes, harmonic transitions, the climaxes upon climaxes of ‘Eli’s Comin’,’ ‘Timer’ and ‘The Confession,’ the suite-like structures of ‘Once It Was Alright (Farmer Joe)’ and ‘December’s Boudoir,’ the inscrutability of asking “can you surry?” or telling one to “go live as long as an elephant,” the glorious shuffle beat that recurs throughout, the dark, joyous romanticism abutting against the realities of loneliness, poverty and sweet cocaine and the exhilaration of one great song after another after another after another after another Ad infinitum.

You got an afternoon to kill? I’ll kill it with you talking your ear off about why everything that has ever been said about Eli and the Thirteenth Confession is absolutely true and more than you can possibly imagine and that it just may be the thing you need to change your life. I will proselytize any day, anytime, anywhere for this music and for Laura Nyro like Leonard Bernstein taking up the cause of Gustav Mahler.

But, what I really want to tell you about this album is that while digging as deep as I could to write the best essay on Laura Nyro I could possibly write, I listened to Eli and the Thirteenth Confession twelve times and never once did listening to it feel like a formality or a rote exercise in due diligence. Each time, I was reminded of discovering it and hearing music that was good beyond all comprehension, a glimpse at what I hope the promised land may sound like.

Like almost everyone, I had heard of Laura Nyro before I heard her music. It was her reticence to do any publicity once Eli and the Thirteenth Confession was released, partly the result of her complete lack of interest in the game of being a pop star and partly that the few times she did accede to the game seemed to not go well; in particular, her performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival where the story went that she was out of place (not so—check the full festival bill) and was booed off the stage (the footage tells otherwise), that helped lead to the covers that became commonplace until Nyro’s temporary retreat from recording and performing at the end of 1972. It also, of course, had to do with the quality of the songs.

As it has always been with me when it comes to music, my curiousity naturally led me to want to hear these wonderful songs I knew by others: ‘Wedding Bell Blues,’ ‘And When I Die’ and ‘Stoned Soul Picnic,’ by the woman who wrote and first recorded them. The first Laura Nyro recording I heard was the latter. I liked it but it wasn’t the best introduction given, again, how closely the 5th Dimension’s hit version mirrors Nyro’s recording. The second time came at the best possible time.

It was the morning after I returned home to Toronto in late October 2003 after my second trip to New York. I was there with a friend for a week and a half full of days of walking the city, reading the Village Voice and the New York Times on various park benches, making the occasional visit to Smalls or the Blue Note, feeling the same abandon I had felt six months earlier when I first visited and fell in love with New York’s relentless urban rhythm.

For whatever reason—it may have been that I had seen a Nyro greatest-hits collection as part of a CD listening station at a Barnes & Noble—I decided to seek out ‘Eli’s Comin’’ on my computer the way music lovers typically sought out such things in 2003. After a few minutes, I pressed play and four minutes later, pressed play again and four minutes later, pressed play again and…well, you get the picture.

I knew ‘Eli’s Comin’.’ Three Dog Night recorded it in 1969 and put it into the Billboard Top 10. They turned it into a foot-stompin’ number while maintaining its intriguing rubato opening but removing any nuance, leaving no place for the music to breathe and soar. No worries. Now I would have no need for it. I had finally heard the real thing.

Of all the things that flabbergasted me about Laura Nyro’s recording of ‘Eli’s Comin’,’ two stuck out. The first was its jazz touches, particularly the muted trumpets that punctuated the slow, slinky, sensual ending in which the song’s urgent warning that “Eli’s comin’, better hide your heart girl” is laced with ambiguity.

The second was the 20-second sequence that began at the two-minute, three-second mark: ‘Eli’s Comin’’s second pre-chorus. The music climaxes five times, each one more hair-raising than the last one and save for the final one which crests on a beefy Chuck Rainey bass line, all are fueled by the back-and-forth between Nyro’s lead and the chorus of layered Nyros.

The recording is manically propulsive and yet it is not burdened by its momentum or its largess. When it touches the ground, it is only to use that temporary contact with terra firma to once again head towards the skies.

The next song I heard was ‘Luckie,’ the ecstatic opening of Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and my most welcome introduction to the Laura Nyro shuffle. Here again was music that overpowered me, so many things of which to take notice but what totally caught me unprepared was that ‘Luckie’’s gait and the way Nyro sang lyrics like “Luckie’s taking over and his clover shows” and “dig them potatoes if you never dug your girl before” with emphasis on that last word felt like how I felt just a few days earlier walking in the Battery and ending up in Tribeca on the kind of crisp yet sunny autumn New York day where it feels like the movies and you point a camera anywhere and get a great picture and you feel like a million bucks, without a care and open to any and all possibilities that a day in New York can hold.

And then came ‘Lu’ with its street dance and effervescent chorus and then more and more—each recording as interesting and addictive as the last one—until I could fill an 80-minute CD and for the next few weeks, it became my soundtrack going to and coming home from work. I was wholly disarmed, and completely and utterly enchanted.

This is the way Laura Nyro fandom goes. There is, at least it’s what I have found, no such thing as being a casual fan of hers. To answer that question: are you in or are you out?, the answer can only be one of two things: I am in as deep as can be or I am stuck on the outside, peering in, wondering what it is that I am not getting if Laura Nyro ever even crosses one’s mind.

The intensity of attraction that her music can inspire is a constant in the litany of testimonials by those who have become Nyro devotees. Fans would travel to New York in the late sixties and early seventies in search of her. That’s how Nyro’s brother Jan would meet his wife and how percussionist Nydia Mata became a life-long friend and musical colleague of Nyro’s, and then there’s the sketch that superfan Beth O’Brien drew of Nyro that became the cover of 1970’s Christmas and the Beads of Sweat.

There were also her peers who were trying to capture her sound: those intoxicating chordal patterns that mashed up gospel, Broadway, jazz, soul and pop, and her adventures playing with song form, whether it was Carole King (‘I Don’t Believe You’) or Lesley Gore (‘Ride a Tall White Horse’) or Peggy Lipton (‘Lady of the Lake’ care of King and Toni Stern).

It’s all part of a parlour game I’ve been playing for years, trying to weave the essence of Laura Nyro within the music that was happening around her, feeling a charge of electricity whenever I have found an album or even a song that has a trace of her fearlessness. It’s been a rewarding and, let’s face it, necessary search—another sign that to fall under Nyro’s sway and remain so is an ongoing devotional—and one that requires digging deep for that is the only way to discover Chi Coltrane, Lily & Maria, Air with the force of nature that was Googie Coppola, the early Melissa Manchester records, Wendy Waldman and Essra Mohawk when she was still known as Sandy Hurvitz.

There’s also Nyro’s place among idiosyncratic male songwriters like Van Dyke Parks, Randy Newman, Kenny Rankin, Tim Hardin, Jimmy Webb, Harry Nilsson, Michael Brown of the Left Banke, Ron Elliott of the Beau Brummels, Arthur Lee of Love and David Ackles, perhaps him most of all, who shucked whatever may have been expected of them to create their own collages of whatever influences grabbed them.

Think of Laura Nyro and place something like the second Blood, Sweat & Tears album on the turntable and hear it anew not only in light of that brief moment when she flirted with joining the band after Al Kooper left—they rehearsed briefly once at the Cafe Au Go Go on ‘Eli’s Comin’’ (if only a tape had been running)—or that she dated Jim Fielder, the group’s bassist, for about a year but focus instead on hearing a common purpose, adding new colours and expressions to so-called popular music, making the most of the moment when the major labels had moxie and the dough to cough up to match it.

Of course, there’s also their famous cover of ‘And When I Die,’ arranged by Dick Halligan. Its’ ubiquity—beyond the 5th Dimension's chart-topping version of ‘Wedding Bell Blues,’ it’s the most famous of the hit interpretations of the Nyro songbook—obscures how Halligan ingeniously transforms it. Nyro’s recording of it for her debut is an urban hoedown as she sings lyrics which still startle in their profundity, “I swear there ain’t no heaven / but I pray there ain’t no hell / but I’ll never know by living / only my dying will tell,” for one example. Halligan writes a chart that imagines, if in a conventional way, how the song may have sounded had it been part of Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, full of twists and turns.

And there’s Elton John’s piano breakdown on ‘Burn Down the Mission’ from Tumbleweed Connection, his most explicit homage to Nyro among the many that were recorded in the late sixties and early seventies. The most moving of them for me is from the Argentinian singer-songwriter Litto Nebbia. ‘José, Laura & Los Chicos’ begins as a piano ballad and then swerves into a two-handed, barrel-house exclamation that ends with a chordal amen. Nebbia repeats the sequence two more times.

When the tempo shifts and that piano begins to rumble away, I hear an impassioned love letter to Laura Nyro, a declaration of the excitement and revelation of the possibilities her music gave to others. To me, it is a hymn of celebration of her New York years and of the five albums that marked them.

It is a run of long players every bit as magical as, say, the Beatles from Rubber Soul to Abbey Road or Stevie Wonder from Where I’m Coming From to Songs in the Key of Life or Miles Davis at various points in the fifties and sixties.

The apex of Nyro’s run is New York Tendaberry which came out in September 1969 and took ten months to record. Davis himself came by the Columbia studios on 52nd Street in July 1969 as Nyro wanted him to play on one of the album’s tracks. He declined, feeling there was nothing he could add to what was already a complete recording.

It is during the New York Tendaberry sessions when Nyro’s uniqueness and eccentricities weren’t tempered. She used analogies, colours especially, to express what sound or feel or mood she was looking for and she would not be rushed to put on tape her song cycle about New York.

Photos taken during the sessions show her as both confident, almost smirking as she poses with her arms resting on top of a mixing console, and deeply serious as she kneels beside a string section, her right arm raised, prodding the musicians to play what was in her head or in the control room with Roy Halee, who co-produced and engineered the album, with her head in her hands as two candles burn between her and Halee.

My favourite of these photos is her in a customary long, black dress, simple at the top but flowing at the bottom like a flower blooming upside down, her feet nowhere to be seen. Her head is tilted, her hands held away from her and her eyes are closed. She appears to be both singing and dancing. Maybe she is lost in a favourite by the Shirelles or Martha and the Vandellas or any of the other girl groups that were a bedrock of her sound. It’s the kind of pose not associated with her, especially in 1969, but to me captures the deep yearning and sensuality of New York Tendaberry.

Back when I first heard the songs that make up the album, I imagined being in Halee’s shoes, working with Laura Nyro to create her hymnal to the city. Of all the things I thought I would do if fantasy had been reality, the one thing that would have felt most necessary—beyond question really—was that, before arriving to the studio each day, I would go for a long walk. The route would always begin in Central Park, be meandering and I would exit the Park wherever my wandering led me and then I would hustle to 52nd Street with New York newly in my heart and in my soul.

I was then properly stunned when I learned that Nyro’s ritual during the album sessions was to take a hansom cab through the Park—by then, she had moved from 888 Eighth Avenue to a penthouse apartment at 145 W. 79th Street—to get to the studio. Each night, she would also make sure there was a catered dinner to enjoy.

The idea of ceremony feels right. To make the decision to listen to New York Tendaberry is to set aside the next 45 minutes to enter into Nyro’s vision of New York as a panorama of individual stories against a soundtrack that deepens the quietude of longing. It begins and ends with a chime, making what is in between not so much music and lyrics but instead a liturgy; Nyro does, in the concluding title track, sing of New York that “you look like a city / but feel like a religion / to me.”

Her phrasing of these lines—one of her most beloved couplets—is dynamically riveting. It starts off soft, rises to elongate the word “feel” and pulls back as Nyro climbs up the register and ends on a prolonged “me,” her voice breaking into a cry. At other points on ‘New York Tendaberry,’ she is whispering.

Contrast, more than any other quality, is New York Tendaberry’s signature. Nyro and her piano are the album’s centre. Arranger Jimmie Haskell, he of the evocative string parts for such recordings as Bobbie Gentry’s ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ and Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Old Friends’ and hired by Nyro after her initial choice of Gil Evans never responded to the letter she sent him—spent a feverish few weeks writing charts that, like Charlie Calello’s for Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, support rather than contort Nyro’s compositions. The big difference here was that Haskell’s were for specific moments rather than throughout the entirety of Nyro’s songs with the exception of Calello’s writing for ‘December’s Boudoir.’

The effect is often volcanic as on the short bursts of brass, organ, bass and drums on ‘Captain for Dark Mornings’ or atmospheric with brief parts for acoustic guitar and woodwinds on the album opener, ‘You Don’t Love Me When I Cry.’ They heighten the emotional intensity of Nyro’s stories of romantic struggle and gallant proclamations of devotion.

As she full-throatily declares “I would lay me down and die” and then softly adds “for my captain, yeah,” it’s virtually impossible to hear her and not feel…seduced. At least that’s how I feel but I suppose it’s how Nyro approaches this line as she does many others on the album as a singer that the label “shrill” became attached to her. It’s utter nonsense of course. Nyro used volume in service of the lyric always. It’s best to just surrender and get taken away in the thrill ride of her performances as she, for example, volleys through the epic put-down of ‘Tom Cat Goodby.’

It starts sweetly and nautically, becomes a romp as she questions her rapscallion of a lover. After the crash of a piano chord and the fleeting use of strings, Nyro sings slowly, “you know you’re never going to make a movie maker, Tom,” repeats it and this time yells out “Tom” and in a second repeat, a waltz begins to materialize punctuated by dissonant strings. She then transitions to an extravagant revenge fantasy where she dreams of “killing her lover man,” moves back to the romp section and ups the intensity and tempo as she catalogues her man’s essential flaws before stopping and asking “can I find him?” and, more pointedly, “can I kill him?” and pauses before an exuberant “my man,” repeating it and ending in a final flourish of chords.

Just as extraordinary is ‘Captain Saint Lucifer’ in which the protagonist leaves home to join her lover. As on ‘Tom Cat Goodbye,’ there are multiple sections, different moods and an acceleration of musical velocity as, here, she announces, “meet me, Captain Saint Lucifer / darling, I’ll be there / don’t you know,” as pure an expression of youthful love as I have ever heard. There’s also the aching move into tempo as she sings of her “sweet lovin’ baby” on the song of the same name or how she packs so much into just the 138 seconds of ‘Mercy on Broadway’ or the jaw-dropping bridge on ‘Gibsom Street.’

Her songs here are so profound and luminous. It’s not a surprise that only the two songs on New York Tendaberry that speak of Nyro’s vision of sisterhood and brotherhood: ‘Time and Love’ and ‘Save the Country’ were covered extensively after the album was released. None of the covers, with the exception of George Duke’s groovy version of the latter, capture much of how Nyro linked the ideals of both with music that matched them. The inescapable urge to turn ‘Time and Love’ into a hokey, Up-With-People, gospel hand-clapper was so pervasive that not even the 5th Dimension avoided it.

The version of ‘Save the Country’ that Nyro recorded for New York Tendaberry was light years removed from the earlier one she cut with Bones Howe. The first section is just her like the performance of it she gave for Kraft Music Hall. It ends with her singing “save the country” and then “NOOOOWWWWW!!!!!”

What follows is an extended coda with a chorus of Nyros repeating “save the country, save the children / come on down to the glory river.” A turnaround bass line adds a soulful amen. A chorus of trumpets begins to play a riff. After a multi-tracked Nyro makes one last proclamation, they take over for a fanfare. True to her meticulousness, it was a taxing one and the players on the session played it over and over to the point where their chops were too busted to play a final, sustained note.

Lew Soloff of Blood, Sweat & Tears happened to be in the studio, trumpet with him and stepped in to nail the final clarion call so that this time, Laura Nyro did ‘Save the Country’ exactly her way.

Read part two of The Laura Nyro Experience.

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April this year for me is going to be about collaborations and two passion projects. For the former, stay tuned for three things in the hopper with members of our great MusicStack community. For the latter, one is outside of Substack (Kevin Alexander of On Repeat Records alludes here to what I will be up to) and the other will be right here: writing a long essay on an artist Rolling Stone recently called “unsung,” asking if anyone remembers Laura Nyro.

Long-time readers know that Laura Nyro is my favourite singer-songwriter and I have written about her music twice before (read my essays here and here). I recently purchased Madfish’s 19-CD box set collecting almost all of her recordings as well as Michelle Kort’s biography on her and feel compelled to try to put together my attempt to explain why she continues to matter and why her music moves me as much as it does. I’m not sure how long the essay will be or how many parts it will be. There will be at least two and they will be arriving on April 17 and May 1. I want to take a little more time here because I want to push myself to write as well as I possibly can. No shortcuts here!

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

Eight New Albums to Dig Into
By: Robert C. Gilbert

How can one cope in these frenzied days? So much seems to happen but how much of it is of consequence, how much of it is really worthy of attention? At what point is simply tuning out the noise a survival mechanism as opposed to sticking one’s head in the sand?

All pretty heady thoughts for the latest edition of my round-ups of new and upcoming albums but they are close to mind as I have been exploring Bill Callahan’s latest My Days of 58 (Drag City), released at the end of February. As with a lot of my listening of current music, Callahan is an artist that I hadn’t heard of until preview tracks from his new album began to trickle out, including the epic ‘Stepping Out for Air,’ in which at one point he sings, “now hand me down my riding crop / hand me down my gliding cape / hand me down my black boots that bebop.” What imagery, ominous yet strangely commonplace when sung through Callahan’s deep yet conversational voice, imparting a style that is impossible to shake.

Loneliness, aging and death are woven throughout My Days of 58. The hollowness of our digital age is also a preoccupation. ‘Computer’ likens the machine to “the village guillotine,” pillories autotune and proclaims, “I am not a robot and never will be.” I’ll say that’s as suitable a rallying cry as can be for these days that also acts as a balm.

On occasion, the music of harpist Mary Lattimore has been as soothing. It resists categorization. New age, ambient, neo-classical, etc. don’t really capture the experience of hearing it. Labelling it as healing music may be more to the point. It would also serve as a sufficient descriptor for the work of singer and keyboardist Julliana Barwick and it seemed inevitable that they would team up to record a full album together. The result, Tragic Magic (InFine), out since mid-January, is a succession of motifs and melodic fragments within each composition. The repetition of them creates a calming sensation such as on ‘The Four Sleeping Princesses’ with a graceful part played by Lattimore or on the opening, ‘Perpetual Adoration,’ with Barwick offering a soaring lead vocal.

‘Stardust’ is the most expansive composition. Barwick’s technicolour synthesiser chords dominate a soundscape that also soon includes a shimmering contribution from Lattimore, a drum machine and Barwick wordlessly floating on top. Again, categorization fails here. What is it? Ambient dance music? Beats me. It is music that follows its own mysterious logic.

Equally challenging to label is singer-songwriter Pearl Charles’ newest, Desert Queen (Taurus Rising). It has a gloss that is burnished by Charles’ double-tracked vocals creating a sound that instantly differentiates it from the cacophony that sometimes can be felt when trying to keep a reasonably firm pulse on what is new and exciting in music.

How reassuring it is then to hear something familiar, something that provides an easy entryway. That is not to say that Desert Queen is an insubstantial listen. It’s more to say that Desert Queen is an impressive harkening back to the good-sounding singer-songwriter albums of the seventies with the occasional psychedelic flourish as on ‘Smoke in the Limousine.’

‘Jackie Paints,’ one of the tracks released to preview Spencer Cullum’s just-released Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection 3 (Full Time Hobby) is another instance where its connections make it stand out. There’s a loose rhythm played using brushes, two flutes, steel guitar, an echoing keyboard line among other atmospheric touches that bring to mind Pentangle and other groups that took a leisurely, rustic approach to folk.

The whole album has this feel. It’s the kind of approach that seems to often interest me, old soul that I am. It strikes the important balance between commenting on the past while also saying something about the present day. What an intriguing album to have stumbled upon.

I wouldn’t say that it was also serendipity that brought Zimbabewan guitarist Mark Greenwood’s second album, Daybreak (self-released) to my attention. It was instead Greenwood getting in touch with me and kindly offering to send me a CD copy of the album my way.

I’m grateful he did for it’s an often soaring album of guitar-driven jazz with a light fusion touch. If you have dug Pat Metheny’s newest, Side-Eye III+, you’ll also dig Greenwood’s music. On Daybreak, he’s joined by Mike Downes on bass, Mark Kelso on drums and on two tracks, Othnell ‘Mangoma’ Moyo on percussion. What I especially like about the album is the more introspective moments such as on ‘Paper Planes’ and ‘La Damoiselle élue.’

Another musician who recently got in touch with me was saxophonist and composer Joel Miller. He’s based in New Brunswick and he wanted to share with me news on What If? (self-released). It’s been out digitally since last September and received a physical release early this year. The album features Miller on multiple saxophones with Silvio Pupo on piano and the ensemble Resonance New Music with his brother Andrew Reed Miller on bass, Dani Sametz on violin and Joel Cormier on percussion. The aim here is to capture a kind of chamber jazz and Miller succeeds mightily.

Compositions by Debussy, Chopin and Pachelbel as well as Bob Thiele’s ‘What a Wonderful World’ rest along furtive originals by Miller, the most intriguing of which is the subtle blues of ‘Wait For It.’ Andrew Reed Miller’s arrangement of Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’ is a good example of why I like What If? so much. It doesn’t go all in to wring every ounce of majesty out of the sweep of one of Debussy’s most famous pieces but instead treats it as material to investigate and improvise upon. In here, I find a happy resistance of the obvious. What If? offers a contemplative breather for our modern age.

Offering up some action is a new album coming from New York pianist and singer Champian Fulton that’s arriving on April 10. She’s an artist keeping the flavour of the Great American Songbook alive. Fulton may not be breaking new ground but she’s not offering anything glib either and that’s what counts.

Her new album, House Party (Turtle Bay Records), was recorded live at the home of producer Scott Asen and is meant to evoke the live-in-the-studio albums that Dinah Washington recorded in the fifties. Fuller is heard with her triomates: Hide Tanuka on bass and Fukushi Tainaka on drums with Klaus Lindquist on alto saxophone and Cory Weeds on tenor saxophone also joining in.

There is a relaxed atmosphere here and plenty of room for improvisation. The program has a mix of the familiar: Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust’ and Charlie Parker’s ‘Billie’s Bounce’ with other gems from the repertoire, including (yes!) Wayne Shorter’s ‘One by One.’ House Party is one enjoyable session.

As if answering a need, there’s also a new addition to the parade of top-notch albums recorded at the Village Vanguard. It’s actually the first of three volumes from the club by alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins. Volume 1 (Blue Note) came out in March and the subsequent volumes are following in April and May. This first hit of music is explosive and exploratory—no track is under 10 minutes.

In Wilkins’ quartet is Micah Thomas on piano, Ryoma Takenaga on bass and Kweku Sumbry on drums. My favourite of the first volume is the closing ‘Eternal’ which begins as a knotty original and then settles into an ambient, hypnotic repeat of a spectral line for over 10 minutes. What a bold, exhilarating thing to do. That’s one way to make it through these modern times.

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Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway: Soul Simpatico & Beyond
By: Robert C. Gilbert

It strikes me as inevitable that Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway would eventually have recorded together. This hunch is unrelated to Hathaway contributing as a songwriter to Flack’s debut, First Take, or as both a songwriter and musician on her follow-up, Chapter Two. It’s more that both even as they were categorized as soul artists created music that resisted any requirement to be categorized at all.

Yes, Flack would record music that rested easy within the soul label whether it be her low-key version of ‘Compared to What,’ written by Eugene McDaniels, or the slinky groove of ‘Go Down Moses,’ co-written by the just-passed Rev. Jesse Jackson but these were part of her broader aesthetic that also included, for example, Leonard Cohen (‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’) and Man of La Macha (‘The Impossible Dream’).

Hathaway was similarly broad in the repertoire he selected to record: ‘Misty’ (Erroll Garner), ‘I Believe in Music’ (Mac Davis) and ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’ (Bobby Scott) immediately come to mind.

There’s also the feeling that their voices could complement each other. Flack’s understated, conversational delivery would be a foil to Hathaway’s broader yet equally personal approach. Both, and I think this is the most critical consideration, could play with timing and melody. In other words, both had jazz chops.

Flack and Hathaway’s interest in music both started in the church and both took to the piano at a very young age. Both also studied music at Howard University. In an interview for the 2013 Hathaway collection, Never My Love: The Anthology, Flack recalled that it was at Howard in the late sixties when they first met.

Hathaway’s career began quickly after university with him signing a deal with Atco in 1969. Flack’s began after years of paying dues, including teaching, being an piano accompanist for opera singers and playing in clubs. It was in one of them that Les McCann heard her and used his pull to get signed to Atlantic in 1968. With Atco a subsidiary of Atlantic, Flack and Hathaway were labelmates.

It was Jerry Wexler, according to Flack, who first brought the two together to record. They duetted on a cover of Carole King’s ‘You’ve Got a Friend,’ a chart-topper for James Taylor, and it was released as a single with Flack’s recording of Hathaway’s ‘Gone Away’ from Chapter Two as the flipside. It was a top 30 hit in the summer of 1971: the first for both Flack, who eight months later had her first number one with ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ fueled by its use in Play Misty For Me, and Hathaway, whose only visits to the top 40 were when he was paired with Flack.

As per the custom, they were joined on ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ with a crack team of musicians who, like Flack and Hathaway, were wide-ranging: guitarist David Spinnoza, bassist Chuck Rainey, drummer Billy Cobham, percussionist Ralph Macdonald and flutist Joe Gentle with strings arranged by Arif Mardin.

It’s a transformative interpretation that with Spinnoza’s acoustic guitar still nods to Taylor’s version as well as King’s recording for Tapestry. The bridge is reharmonized, the move from the verses to the choruses is accentuated and then there’s the climax that comes with the assurance that “I’ll be there / yes I will.” These elements would also appear on Hathaway’s solo recording of ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ at the Troubadour on his live album from 1972 with he and audience making an impromptu choir and his off-the-cuff comment that “this might be a record here.”

His version with Flack is understated but clearly delivers on Wexler’s hunch that they should record together. Their voices blend as well as suspected: Flack is the anchor, Hathaway is the adventurer, recomposing King’s melody on the fly. For the final chorus, their voices layer over each other, tracked multiple times. The promise of that sound would be further explored on a full-length duet album recorded later in 1971 and released in the spring of 1972.

Titled simply Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway and with a stunning photo in the inner gatefold of the two, Hathaway seated and Flack on a window ledge with her hands around him—a warm, beautiful, inviting moment, the album is as bold as is most famous cut, ‘Where is the Love,’ is as yearnful as Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell on ‘Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing.’

That’s a tempting comparison to make, especially as it is not hard to imagine Gaye and Terrell recording something like ‘Where is the Love’ had their musical partnership not been so tragically fleeting. The William Salter-Ralph Macdonald ballad was the third Flack and Hathaway duet issued as a single. Prior to it was a moody, late-night take on Phil Spector, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil’s ‘You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’,’ which charted modestly. That recording, as opposed to ‘Where is the Love,’ a smash hit and, to be sure, an exquisite record where Flack and Hathaway’s harmony is so close they become one and with a sensual interlude, is a better representation of the album’s dynamic.

The operatic fervour of the Righteous Brothers’ famous version is dialed back to a kind of midnight confessional between two lovers, both of whom are reckoning with the malaise that has calcified in their relationship. The movement is slow and methodical, the resolution is far more uncertain than Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield left listeners. Like ‘You’ve Got a Friend,’ Flack and Hathaway treat the melody not like a text but as a reference point as they narrow the intervallic leaps over the course of the song. On the recording was the album’s core group: Rainey and Macdonald returning with Eric Gale on guitar and Bernard Purdie on drums with Joe Farrell guesting on soprano saxophone.

It closes out the album’s first side, an evocative bookend to the equally evocative opening of ‘I (Who Have Nothing),’ well-known through recordings by Ben E. King and Terry Knight and the Pack. They make one aesthetic direction of Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway. ‘Where is the Love’ is another and is followed on the second side by ‘When Love Has Grown,’ a sentimental, soft ballad written by Hathaway and Eugene McDaniels.

It’s a song that contrasts the end of a love affair with the promise of one that may grow. Flack and Hathaway trade lines and unite for the end of the verses. The interlude is majestic with strings arranged by Hathaway plus a paraphrase of the melody by him on piano and Hubert Laws on flute adding to the feeling of elation. For me, it’s the high point on an album with many of them (it was one of the recordings included on the playlist my wife and I put together for our wedding reception). Just as romantic, in a socio-political way, is ‘Be Real Black With Me,’ co-written by Flack and Hathaway with Charles Mann. It’s a celebration of Black love, of “your hair, soft and crinkly” and “your body, strong and stately” but has a universality in its assurance that “you don’t have to change a thing.”

More rollicking is a cover of “Baby, I Love You,’ Aretha Franklin’s third big hit on Atlantic, that is as country as it is soulful. It appears mid-way through the first side and is the initial hint of Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway’s astonishing variety. Side two, though, is where this versality goes into overdrive.

It begins with Hathaway solo on a standard, ‘For All We Know,’ written by Sam Lewis and J. Fred Coots. Backed by just Flack on piano and after two choruses of the verse, strings and woodwinds, he sings behind the beat, stretching out certain notes (check out his second “so love me tonight”) and always personalizing the melody. It’s an extraordinary example of these prodigious gifts he had as a singer. An almost-classical coda functions as a suitable benediction, a feel that returns on side two after ‘Where is the Love’ and ‘When Love Has Grown.’

Flack recalled how she had to call her mom to thumb through her hymnal to remind her and Hathaway of the lyrics of the second verse of ‘Come Ye Disconsolate.’ Their performance of it is stately, the cadence of their vocal is how it would sound if it were sung at Mass although I doubt congregants would elongate phrases like they do here. It’s another stylistic twist and the album closer, ‘Mood,’ credited to Flack, is a final one to savour.

It’s a seven-minute improvisation with Flack on piano and Hathaway on electric piano, both playing impressionistically. On a lesser album, ‘Mood’ could seem like filler but here, it’s another expression of the dimensions of Flack and especially, in this instance, Hathaway, who loved classical music.

They would continue to record together. ‘The Closer I Get to You,’ from 1977, marked Hathaway’s return to recording after years spent dealing with growing mental-health issues. They began a second duet album at the end of 1978 but only two performances: ‘You Are My Heaven’ and ‘Back Together Again’ were completed before Hathaway’s untimely death. That makes Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway even more of a treasure than it already is.

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Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

A Love Letter to the Humble Cassette
By: Robert C. Gilbert

The tape has never had the cachet of the vinyl record or the ability of that medium to rise from the dead. It also doesn’t have the compact disc’s durability as the vehicle for super-deluxe editions or, even more impressively, the classical-music mega box set.

Should we pity the poor cassette? Its case is puny. The majestic twelve-inch by twelve-inch album cover is reduced to virtually nothing.

And how about care? Treat a CD like a coaster and you won’t hear a thing the next time you load it up into the player and press play save for the machine whirring endlessly trying to gloam onto the music reduced to digital data. Toss an LP like a frisbee and all you’ll get is the sound of a bonfire once you place it on your platter and lower the stylus. With a tape, you takes your chances, hoping the day won’t come when your deck begins to eat it without remorse as you helplessly witness the carnage.

It’s not really the lowly cassette’s fault. Well, actually, lowly isn’t the right word here. Humble is more like it for after my father’s records, tapes were my immersion into the worlds of owning music and enjoying albums.

It was through them that I discovered the music of the Beatles. I started with 20 Greatest Hits, a collection released in 1982 and given to me by my parents in 1987. It included all of their Billboard Hot 100 number-one hits. I played it over and over again on my Lloyds V444 dual tape deck with four speakers in the front and a graphic equalizer to customize the sound so that it become my sound, part of my never-ending search for what I call “pure sound.”

It was on this noble machine that I first heard the pierce of the sitar on ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown).’ The wild orchestral escalation into oblivion on ‘A Day in the Life.’ The big medley on the second side of Abbey Road. It also meant first hearing With the Beatles with ‘All My Loving’ as the lead-off track and Please Please Me starting off with ‘Misery’ of all things, a function of album running orders sometimes being re-jigged for tapes so that there was close to an equal amount of music on both sides (similar to the truly lowly eight-track tape where running orders were often brutally changed to meet the need to have four sequences of music roughly the same length).

Having two decks also started me on building compilations from my tapes—in addition to the Beatles, I quickly built up a big Elvis Presley tape collection. It was all very exciting, the idea being planted that music was an active pursuit, even if one was just a listener of it.

The ease—setting aside the question of legality—of taping off the radio also meant that I could add songs to my collection faster than I could stretch my modest allowance. There was the feeling of being an archivist here.

But, even as tape fueled my love of and curiosity about music, there was something lacking in them. They seemed adolescent. It’s what one bought when you were in the minor leagues of record collecting. Vinyl was for the adults. Kids would just ruin them and indeed, there is a stack of my grandparents’ records that bear the brutality of my attack on them as they gave me free reign of them and of their hi-fi when I was all of six years old.

I think it was some sort of latent guilt over that, though my grandparents never seemed to care let alone mind what I did, so that when I received a Magnavox combination system of a record player on top, dual tape deck at the bottom, a graphic equalizer in the middle and two speakers to connect in the back, I would take care of my records. And I did.

Buying records in the late eighties, just as the death knell was sounded for vinyl (prematurely, of course), meant replacing my cassette collection of Presley and the Beatles with the same albums on vinyl. That seemed right and exciting, and once I received a Panasonic discman a few years later, I did the same thing with CDs.

Tapes were still important. Creating mixtapes. Building compilations out of what I taped off the radio. All of it an effort to try to organize and make coherent my broadening musical tastes, branching out into classic rock, soul, seventies singer-songwriters and jazz—especially jazz. That was the biggest sign that when it came to music, I was determined to be anything but conventional. That also applied to following the NBA instead of the NHL—a Canadian cliché that held no appeal to me—reading Shakespeare before my teens and generally ignoring any and all contemporary music. To paraphrase the Rolling Stones, “baby, baby, I was out of time.”

By the late nineties, the death knell that had rung for vinyl rung as well for cassettes. Building a jazz collection meant buying CDs with the occasional LP. Tapes? Are you kidding me?

And so they sat unloved as my Magnavox system was succeeded by an increasingly sophisticated adult stereo system with an amplifier, turntable, CD changer and four speakers. Along the way, I added a tape deck, a Sansui, which came in super handy for continuing to make mixtapes but, by the turn of the millennium, that began to feel too time consuming. I also recall the dismay when one of my carefully assembled tapes was chewed up by my Walkman.

CDs were the focus for about a decade and then by 2009, as the vinyl revival began to rumble, I began to build an LP collection full of rock, soul, country, Sinatra and other pop stylists, and eventually classical too. Tapes? What are those?

As a lark, I bought the cassette version of the 2022 release of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s concert at Royal Albert Hall from April 1970. A few months later, my wife got me a tape copy of Leonard Bernstein’s Greatest Hits from recordings on RCA Red Seal. That was another fun novelty.

And then there’s a few weeks ago. I went to my thrift shop on a Friday afternoon in need of some retail therapy on a budget. The shop is hit and miss when it comes to albums. Sometimes, there are wonderful stacks of country and classical records. Other times, there’s nothing. This visit was an example of the former. A sealed Joe South album, So the Seeds Are Growing and one sealed by the Hollyridge Strings, Hits of the 70’s (something I need some easy listening). Artur Rubenstein playing Beethoven, Murray McLauchlan's Sweepin’ the Spotlight Away and Billy Graham stalwart George Beverly Shea (it’s Lent, after all).

Next to the records were a small collection of tapes. The Byrds’ Greatest Hits, first released in 1967, caught my eye. Now, I’ve had all five of their albums from the David Crosby era for years so this collection is completely redundant. But after much hemming and hawing, I left the store with it, got home and fired up the old Sansui to give it a listen. Ahhh, that warm, punchy analog sound that only a tape can deliver as Roger McGuinn, Gene Clark and Crosby wordlessly soared at the end of ‘The Bells of Rhymney’ and McGuinn weaved Coltrane-like on his twelve string on ‘Eight Miles High.’

These are recordings I already knew well but as I usually find, hearing overly familiar music in a new context is the closest one can get to hearing it again for the first time. The experience created an itch so off I trundled to the thrift store the next day to see if I could get more tapes. There weren’t many but I did snag copies of Roy Orbison’s Mystery Girl, the too-soon conclusion to his late-eighties resurgence and Barbra Streisand’s The Third Album, an artefact of her rise pre-Funny Girl.

I then perused Amazon to see if there were any tapes there for sale. Cassette sales are growing although they are only a fraction of vinyl sales. Still, I found a few options and the next day, McCartney III arrived as well as a long-unopened copy of an RCA compilation of recordings on the label from the sixties called Nipper’s Greatest Hits - The 60s, Volume 1. Next up was to head to our laundry room and clear the debris to dig out the box of most of my old cassettes (the remainder are somewhere at my parents).

I picked out a few albums I never replaced on CD or LP like Cream’s Fresh Cream and Eric Clapton’s Timepieces: The Best of Eric Clapton. I listened to both a lot in the early nineties when my obsession with Slowhand was at its height and I spent the hours needed to master his guitar parts on ‘Cocaine,’ ‘Badge,’ ‘White Room,’ ‘Lay Down Sally’ and other classics. Disagree with Clapton’s politics or his swerving into soft rock but “Clapton is God” was spray painted on London walls for a reason. Hear the stinging of his solo lines on ‘I’m So Glad,’ ‘N.S.U.’ or ‘Cat’s Squirrel’—three of the high points from Fresh Cream. They still cut with the unmistakable blade of burgeoning genius. I revisited both albums with pleasure.

I also digged out Collectors Gold, a three-volume collection of Presley’s from the RCA archives that was released in 1991. Now, every last outtake he recorded that wasn’t destroyed or recorded over has been released (most of it more than once) but back then, very few had. In fact, Collectors Gold was the first significant tranche of outtakes from the sixties with one volume dedicated to his recordings in Nashville and another to his soundtrack sessions. The other volume included selections from his return to live performances in the summer of 1969 in Las Vegas.

As someone who has always felt that Presley was at his peak in the sixties, Collectors Gold was an exciting release and as I went through each volume once again, I recalled all the moments of studio back-and-forth, including a wild sequence from the recording of ‘Goin’ Home,’ consigned to a bonus track on the Speedway soundtrack, in which Presley ruins a take by launching into ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’

As I get older, my ability to remember things ain’t what it used to be, including music. Back when I was buying tapes, everything seemed to stick, both in the head and in the heart. It’s been good to be reminded of these halcyon days. Here’s to the humble cassette.

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I re-listened to the album for the below essay and loved every minute of it. As the needle reached the end of side four, I felt revived and transformed. It’s that good an album and I hope that what I have written makes the music as exciting as it is to hear.

Please let me know your thoughts and until the next time I am in touch, may good listening be with you all!

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Let Chicago Work on You
By: Robert C. Gilbert

Some of my favourite music is based on the short moment. A few seconds—maybe more—of concentrated, sudden inspiration.

There’s the interlude on Rita Coolidge’s recording of Steve Cropper and Otis Redding’s ‘The Happy Song,’ where Booker T. Jones takes a riff from Redding’s original recording and pours all of his heart out to play it. Jim Keltner layers on a backbeat, thick on the bass and heavy on the snare. They repeat it. Jones pumps the organ harder and Keltner matches him. Twenty seconds of ecstasy.

How about Bill Withers’ ‘Harlem’ where Jones and Al Jackson, Jr. lock in on a thundering triplet while Withers warns of a “crooked delegation, wants a donation to send the preacher to the Holy Land” and to not “give your money to that lyin’, cheatin’ man.” It’s power is in the sudden breaking of the groove and the shudder of Jones and Jackson, Jr. meeting on the downbeat. Sixteen seconds of righteous fury.

That’s two Booker T. Jones references in a row? You may think that’s the lead in to an essay about him and the MGs. It’s not—that will come someday. But, here’s another moment.

It comes after two verses and choruses of what would one day be labelled a power ballad. A horn section of trumpet, trombone and tenor saxophone play a declarative set of figures and the music shifts. The tempo goes up, the beat breaks into a dance and the horns comment on this most sunny of turns. And then the exaltation really starts.

Maracas are added as the horns play a three-note motif and repeat it. It’s admittedly a throwaway thing, less interesting musically that what both precedes and proceeds it but not emotionally. This moment—all of 11 seconds—sounds like being on a date with your first crush or in New York for the first time or just a time where no care, no worry, no deadline dare intrude on one’s joy.

It occurs at the three minute, eight second mark of ‘Questions 67 and 68,’ the numbers relating to the years in the 20th century of the relationship that is the subject of the song, written by Robert Lamm and one of three hits, none of them right away, from the debut album by Chicago, then still called Chicago Transit Authority although not for much longer.

‘Questions 67 and 68,’ with its big, ballad sound and a lead vocal by the group’s bassist Peter Cetera, doesn’t sound too far removed from ‘Hard Habit to Break,’ ‘You’re the Inspiration’ or ‘Baby, What a Big Surprise,’ recordings that can inspire a wince or a shrug as if it’s the only way to excuse oneself for having a penchant for such emotive, power balladry.

That’s what Chicago became. That’s not what Chicago initially was. Chicago was loud. Chicago was brash. Chicago was outspoken, political and the leading practitioner of horn-rock, one of the ways in which the sound palette of rock broadened in the late sixties. Horn sections were, of course, nothing new. They were commonplace in blues, soul and jazz but not so much in rock except, perhaps, as a novelty such as on the Outsiders’ ‘Time Won’t Let Me’ or the Beatles’ ‘Got to Get You Into My Life.’ But then came the Electric Flag, the Buckinghams, Blood, Sweat & Tears and arguably even Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, and rock with horns became a stylistic device, part of what signified rock and pop’s maturation.

Chicago, first known as the Big Thing and then Chicago Transit Authority, came to prominence after these groups did and endured long after all of them. Their ubiquity was important. Hearing those horns: Lee Loughnane on trumpet, James Pankow on trombone and Walter Parazaider on reeds, offered confirmation that rock, or really, music in general, need not be limited to guitar and drums and three-minute songs. I know that, for me, discovering Chicago was a big part of the broadening of my musical outlook and they became, for a time, an obsession with me as I stayed glued to the radio to hear them, whether well-known numbers like ‘Make Me Smile,’ ‘Saturday in the Park’ or ‘25 or 6 to 4’ or something deeper in the catalogue like ‘In the Country’ or ‘Fancy Colours’ or to be truly shaken when hearing ‘Make Me Smile’ shift to ‘So Much to Say, So Much to Give’ as part of Ballet for a Girl in Buchanan which also included ‘Colour My World,’ sung by guitarist Terry Kath. The suite was also a showcase for drummer Danny Seraphine. It was they, even more than the horns, that gave Chicago in its early days an edge.

And yet, even by their second album, on which Ballet for a Girl in Buchanan is the centrepiece, first titled Chicago and then re-named Chicago II and thus initiating a tradition, broken only once, of numbering each album, there was a nagging tension over whether the band was a crafter of songs or a crafter of albums. It didn’t help that the two other suites on Chicago II were alternatively earnest and syrupy (Memories of Love) or abrasive if still thrilling as an experience of pure, wide sound (It Better End Soon).

And while I am generally leery of anyone ever saying that an artist’s early work is the only worthy portion of their career with the rest being a steady decline, from Elvis Presley on down, as if it’s not even worth checking out what came afterwards, I might cut anyone some slack if he or she is making this argument about Chicago. Just listen to their first album, Chicago Transit Authority, and not be grabbed by the feeling of paradise soon to be progressively lost.

It may seem ominous that they start the album with the quite literal ‘Introduction.’ It’s not as on the nose as ‘(Theme from) the Monkees’ but more like a preview of the 70 minutes to follow and a statement of artistic purpose as Kath sings, “so forget all about your troubles / as we search for something new / and we play for you.”

That “something new” is illustrated in the song’s lengthy interlude: Loughnane, Pankow and Parazaider are featured in a staccato dance with Seraphine, a smoky, romantic sequence with Pankow on top, a ballad feature for Loughnane and, after a blistering solo by Kath—the first of many on the album—a triumphant volley of brass and reed. It is all played with assuredness, making for a collective, audacious hello.

What follows are those three hits from the album I mentioned earlier. The last is ‘Questions 67 & 68.’ The first is ‘Does Anybody Really Know What Time Is?’ After an improvised introduction by Lamm on piano, the horn section enters. Like the thrill of moving from a straightforward opening credit sequence of a movie—white type against a black background, say—to an establishing first shot (I see, incongruously, Manhattan from Brooklyn Bridge Park), their emphatic lines announce something momentous and indeed, what follows is that and more.

It resolves into an addictive shuffle. I would call it the classic Laura Nyro shuffle; hence, my association of the song with New York. Lamm wrote and sung ‘Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?’ It’s a good feature for his classic, versatile pop voice. Not as keening as Cetera’s or as soulful as Kath’s but direct, conservational and observational. He captures the rush of modern life, of “being pushed and shoved by people / trying to beat the clock.” Sound familiar?

‘Beginnings’ follows, also written and sung by Lamm. It’s also about the anxiety of life but here focusing on the timidity of taking the leap to start a new relationship but then considering the ecstasy once it has begun and pondering if it could be, as Steve Allen once put it, “the start of something big.” That emotion is the beating heart of ‘Beginnings.’ It’s in the sudden rush of the horn section as Lamm sings the start of the second verse, “when I kiss you / I feel a thousand different feelings,” the wordless refrain that appears throughout and the extended coda that keeps building and building and then decays into a percussive jam, everything picking up whatever is at hand to join in.

After ‘Questions 67 and 68’ comes the compact ‘Listen,’ another Lamm song and another that is a statement of purpose for the group. “Listen,” it starts, “if you think that we’re here for the money / you couldn’t be right” and eventually, implores to the listener that “it could be so nice, you know / if only you would listen.” It’s all a little too earnest, especially as it is tough to envision anyone who has made it up to this point—a side and a half of music—and not be at rapt attention, so compelling has been the 27-and-a-half minutes of music that have transpired.

To my ears, ‘Listen’ can be seen as the conclusion of a kind of unintended suite where Chicago both explain themselves and explore their expansive take on the pop song. The rest of side two and all of side three form an unintended counter-suite to all this sweet accessibility.

It begins with ‘Poem 58,’ again written by Lamm and with a lengthy solo by Kath that shifts from working out a riff to improvising on a groove anchored by Cetera and Seraphine to him building to a climax that stops on a dime. Out of the silence, Cetera plays a bass line that is echoed by the horn section, first Pankow then Loughnane and finally Parazaider, ushering in a teasing vocal by Lamm and another Kath solo. The table is being turned here.

It is then flipped over completely in a shroud of feedback and noise. It is, as its title states, ‘Free Form Guitar,’ six-and-a-half minutes of Kath creating a maelstrom of sound. With the hindsight of 57 years now, it is the most un-Chicago-like Chicago recording. Ditching the present and situating one’s mind and ears in the spring of 1969, when Chicago Transit Authority was released, the provocation of a group issuing a double album out of the gate with a guitarist, of whom Jimi Hendrix was an ardent admirer and who was among the most prodigious and fluent of his generation—save for Hendrix, Duane Allman and Michael Bloomfield, no one could play at length and maintain interest as Terry Kath—‘Free Form Guitar’ feels inevitable.

A gutsy blues then emerges, ‘South Californian Purples,’ with meaty horn lines and more of that Kath prowess. The energy that has been steadily built crests on a lengthy cover of ‘I’m a Man,’ a maniacally propulsive hit by the Spencer Davis Group from 1967. Whereas that version rests on unrelenting rhythm, Chicago’s rests on power and its explosion halfway through in an extended solo by Seraphine, an indulgence that works majestically.

Yes, Kath, Cetera and Lamm often sing lyrics that are nowhere near what Steve Winwood sang—admittedly, his blues- and jazz-inflected phrasing makes it hard to know what the lyrics are at all—and it’s hard for me to get past their innanity (take for example when Lamm sings “I’ve got to keep my image, while I’m standing on the floor / if I drop upon my knees, it’s just to keep them on a my nose”). When hearing it, however, as part of listening to the album in full, ‘I’m a Man’ comes off as another brazen announcement of something very special happening in music.

The final side of Chicago Transit Authority is, in a sense, a recapitulation of the first five cuts. ‘Someday (August 29, 1968),’ which includes a prelude taped during the imbroglio of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in the Windy City where, to paraphrase the chant included, the whole world was watching, heralds the political turn Chicago’s music would take, only occasionally interesting, over the next three studio albums.

The grand conclusion of ‘Liberation,’ begins with a Herculean Kath solo and a brief collective improvised freak out before a slow, burning horn line written by Pankow and then one last explosion by Kath and then Seraphine. The only words sung on ‘Liberation’ are very apt: “ohhh, thank you people.”

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There’s a bit of a gimmick at play here with these releases, forcing fans as they do to buy the same music again in order to get some previously unreleased goodies. But it’s also a chance to revisit music long canonized in a new context, and that’s the focus on the below essay which I hope you will enjoy.

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

Wes Montgomery and Bill Evans Revisited
By: Robert C. Gilbert

To be a record collector these days can be at times pretty grand. I’m thinking here about the continued growth and girth of releases that exhume and exhaust the archives, if not occasionally the listener, and give the most comprehensive overview of an album or albums.

What this can result in is the collector purchasing a record over and over again in order to hear whatever previously unreleased material has been added to a collection that may have already been claimed to be complete. Some may call it a racket, others may call it a joy. Whatever appellation is chosen likely depends on whatever boxsets or expanded reissues are calling out for one’s wallet.

By my count, the two studio recordings of Bill Evans’ trio with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motion: Portrait in Jazz and Explorations, have been reissued at least twice in progressively expanded editions prior to Haunted Heart: The Legendary Riverside Recordings that arrived last fall. Here is the true motherlode: 17 newly issued alternate takes and outtakes in addition to nine already issued during the rise and the fall of the CD era plus, and let’s not forget this, the original albums newly remastered.

They are bedrock recordings of fifties and sixties jazz, quietly revolutionary, with Portrait in Jazz easier to be enraptured with and Explorations taking a bit longer to get under one’s skin but worth the wait (I chalk this up primarily to repertoire with Portrait in Jazz’s more immediately recognizable than Explorations’).

No surprise then that I splurged for the LP version of the set, eager to re-immerse myself in music that was a big part of my early jazz education and to hear variations on performances I know so well. And certainly, placing the needle on the first side of Portrait in Jazz to hear that abrupt beginning of ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ as if play was pressed on the session tape mid-performance, was to fondly recall how it felt to hear it for the first time.

It’s of course the chance to finally delve into all of the session material that makes Haunted Heart essential. To hear Evans attempt different staccato attacks on the theme of ‘Witchcraft’ and to savour a second trio version of ‘Nardis,’ a little more formal than the telepathic flow of the master from Explorations (my favourite recording by the group).

The greatest revelation for me from Haunted Heart had been to dig into multiple takes of Harry Warren and Mack Gordon’s ‘I Wish I Knew’ and to fixate on a recurring figure that appears in each take. It’s a chordal pattern played by Evans with a romantic ascent that sounds very familiar in retrospect. I never noticed it from the times I’ve played Explorations prior to getting Haunted Heart. I say it’s familiar in retrospect for it sounds like a key melodic phrase in Thom Bell and Linda Creed’s ‘Betcha By Golly Wow’ that was written and first recorded in 1970. It’s a startling thing, regardless if there is any connection or not, the kind of discovery that occurs when one re-engages with a musical artefact that one has engaged with before in a different configuration.

While there has been some hype that has accompanied the release of Haunted Heart, it’s been muted compared to the ongoing series of John Coltrane archival releases, for example (speaking of Coltrane, something big is coming our way come September). Slipping fairly unnoticed in 2023 was the full release of the recordings Wes Montgomery made at Tsubo, a coffee house/club in Berkeley. Six recordings were released as Full House. An additional six had previously been made available although save for a 12-CD boxset of Montgomery’s recordings for Riverside, they hadn’t been collected together (the [Orrin] Keepnews Collection version of Full House released in 2007 had them all excluding an alternate version of ‘Blue ‘n’ Boogie’).

So, that Craft Recordings, which now houses the Riverside catalogue, issued the remaining two recordings in a three-LP or two-CD set in 2023 is, of course, not the revelation that Haunted Heart is. That being said, The Complete Full House Recordings is still indisputably interesting.

Orrin Keepnews of Riverside had a knack for capturing jazz live and for doing so in a way that added dimension to a musician of which the studio could only capture so much. Think of Cannonball Adderley with whom Keepnews made six albums from the stage and how his preacher-like pronouncements abutted increasingly lengthy, adventurous pieces, abetted undoubtedly by the presence of Yusef Lateef in Adderley’s band in 1962 and 1963. Think also of the Evans trio’s Village Vanguard recordings from June 25, 1961, an unbeknownst epitaph to his partnership with LaFaro, who would die tragically twelve days later, and how the longer, more involved performances heightened the group’s impressionistic lyricism so that it cascades like ripples after skipping a rope on the water.

What of Wes Montgomery then? If Keepnews’ original notes for Full House are to be trusted, it was his idea to record the guitarist live and it was up to Montgomery to come up with the band he wanted to record with. In 1962, he was a thoroughly small-group player whether with his brothers or fronting astutely-picked, studio-only groups.

For the latter, the results were always masterful. Occasionally, they were transcendent, such as The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery with its perfectly sequenced program and the simpatico of Tommy Flanagan with Percy and Albert “Tootie” Heath as well as Bags Meets Wes!, a summit meeting with Milt Jackson and the spritely groove of Wynton Kelly, Sam Jones and Philly Joe Jones, especially on the motoring, modal ‘Jingles.’

Kelly was the anchor of the group Montgomery picked for Full House. According to Keepnews, it was the result of serendipity. The pianist was in San Francisco playing with Miles Davis and with Kelly came long-standing musical partners Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb. Also in town was Johnny Griffin. All four were off on a Monday (June 25, 1962) and so on that day, Keepnews with engineer Wally Heider set up shop to catch the one-time-only quintet on tape. The repertoire was kept to seven pieces. Consider the night at Tsubo a live session with the coffee house acting as the recording studio.

Montgomery pairing with Griffin on the front line was inspired. Both were extremely fluid players but contrasted in their attack. The guitarist famously used his thumb instead of a pick to play and that gave a grounded feel to his sound even as he fired off a flurry of notes or octaves or chords. The beat was always felt.

Griffin, whose tenor tone was slightly thinner than his peers, played lines that floated, skirting quickly up the musical staff and resolving with a choked cry. His second chorus on the master of the title track with a Montgomery solo spliced in is a good example of Griffin’s in-the-pocket pyrotechnics.

‘Full House’ was a waltz composed by Montgomery. The rhythm section lock in on it not unlike how they do on Davis’ ‘Teo’ from his Someday My Prince Will Come album. The harmonic progression is the kind, with its shift to the B and the momentum into the final A, that is made for a soloist to explore at length and to enjoy the pleasure of improvising on such a fertile form.

That’s what it sounds like, for sure, as Montgomery, Griffin and Kelly take turns soloing. At just over nine minutes, the spliced master of ‘Full House’ still feels relatively brief with the constraint of building a twelve-inch album the only barrier preventing them from spinning out more choruses, finding more to play on and to extol even more on the riches of the guitarist’s composition.

The album Keepnews built from the group’s one night at Tsubo balances this stretching out, within reason, with more compact performances. Full House is powered by the former; in addition to the title track, there’s ‘Cariba,’ another Montgomery original plus the aforementioned ‘Blue ‘n’ Boogie.’

The latter is the night’s most fiery performance. Montgomery and Kelly’s solos build in intensity while Griffin’s starts red hot and remains at peak ignition. As he piles on blues chorus upon blues chorus, hear how the crowd begins to respond in kind. ‘Cariba’ has little harmonic motion and is fueled by Cobb’s cross-stick beat which sits somewhere between a bossa nova and Afro-Cuban. Griffin is particularly energized here, alternatively teasing off riffs and playing rapid, darting lines. Montgomery cuts deep into the beat, especially when he switches to octaves and Cobb increases the intensity of his attack on the drum kit.

The three shorter performances hit the mark too. An up-tempo ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ has Griffin, Montgomery and Kelly gliding through the changes. The guitarist’s theme statement is interesting in that its thrust and in the choice to paraphrase, both melodically and rhythmically, Harold Arlen’s music both mirror Bill Evans’ approach on Portrait in Jazz.

The closing ‘S.O.S.,’ the third and final Montgomery original for Full House, is a sprint with a motif that recurs throughout the solos. The one ballad, ‘I’m Getting Accustomed to Her Face,’ is a feature for the guitarist with Chambers and Cobb, and has Montgomery playing dense chords throughout; in its way, it’s a foreshadowing of the commercial turn his music would take in just over two-years time.

The bonus material totals an extra hour of music. As mentioned, almost all of it has been previously released. There are more leisurely takes of ‘Blue ‘n’ Boogie’ and ‘Come Rain or Come Shine.’ Montgomery really digs into the octaves on the alternate ‘Cariba’ which starts out loosely and then gets real tight.

One of the two previously unissued performances is the take of ‘Full House’ where most of the master comes from and with Montgomery’s original solo. It’s a brief statement and far less assured than the solo that was patched in. Whether that came from a separate complete take or an insert take is a question that isn’t answered or even addressed in the supplemental liner notes. A curious thing to leave hanging. The other new track is the first take of ‘S.O.S.,’ which is a tad faster than the master.

Two takes of Mel Tormé and Robert Wells’ ‘Born to Be Blue’—a rapturous composition with a breathtaking modulation on the B—rounds out the extras and is a nice chance to hear Montgomery’s ballad playing at length.

While there isn’t a whole lot new in the re-packaging of Montgomery’s one night at Tsubo, it does provide an opportunity to re-immerse in one of the guitarist’s high points on record. That’s a good enough reason for me to buy Full House for the third time.

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This year, my approach is a bit different. I’m listening to more new albums than ever before and being as selective as possible so that what’s below are albums that I truly believe are worth your time, attention and ultimately, hard-earned cash. So far, I’ve found seven gems that I am excited to share with you. All but one are already out and all are fine examples of music-making today. I hope you check them out and enjoy them as much as I have.

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Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

Seven New and Upcoming Records to Dig
By: Robert C. Gilbert

Another year, another round of trying to keep tabs on new and exciting music. I say trying because there’s no way to approach this work other than as an attempt to try to sample as many releases as possible without getting lost in an impossible-to-distinguish stream of music where discernment of what is good has flown out the window.

I don’t think I’ve fallen into that trap just yet. Yes, I’ve listened to lot of new albums in 2026 already—over 85—but I’m also trying to be more selective in what I recommend in these round-ups. Consider then that anything I write about as being the best of the best. Here goes.

I had the chance to see pianist Craig Taborn at a recital at Columbia University the last time I was in New York. Opportunity knocked but I didn’t open the door. I don’t regret it even as he and his music fascinate me. Just a few weeks ago, Taborn released a new album, Dream Archives (ECM), teaming up with cellist Tomeka Reid and percussionist Ches Smith.

The recording starts off as a compelling, unsettled avant-garde album and then ends as an often-spooky, hallucinatory and mesmerizing voyage into deep space on ‘Dream Archive’ and the concluding ‘Enchant.’

I always find albums that traverse to the outer edge while maintaining a feeling of serenity fascinating. Dream Archives certainly does this while also continuing Taborn’s mastery of circling the jazz cosmos.

If that sounds up your alley too, you’ll also likely want to buckle up for drummer Willy Rodriguez’s In the Unknown (I Will Find You) (Sunnyside), coming out on March 13.

The range of expression here is astonishingly wide. The album is primarily centred on free-form dialogue between Rodriguez, and keyboardist Leo Genovese and tenor saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock. The album, Rodriguez’s meditation on the loss of his mother to cancer, really gets interesting with the addition of vocalist Allan Harris on the opening composition and ‘The Perplexity of Eternity.’ His spoken-word contributions—his great The Poetry of Jazz: Live from the Blue LLama from last year showed he has a knack of this—add a veneer of urbane polish as if Johnny Hartman partnered up with Albert Ayler.

The album also periodically switches to dense layers of electronic sound courtesy of Genovese on ‘A Room Full of Confusion’ and ‘Follow the Light.’ Come mid-March, you’ll want to check it all out.

What struck me most about bassist Kelsey Mines’ Everything Sacred, Nothing Serious (OA2 Records), out since mid-October, was the cover. She is holding her double bass with her left hand and appears to be holding a bouquet of flowers in her right. Behind her is a wall painted a pastel orange that then switches to a light purple.

Everything Sacred, Nothing Serious is the Seattle-based musician’s first jazz recording and it is soothing and bucolic. The front line is comprised of Beserat Tafesse on trombone and Elsa Nilsson on flute. Mines is joined in the rhythm section by John Hansen on piano and Machado Mijiga on drums—guitarist Danilo Silva and percussionist Jeff Busch also take part.

I stumbled upon the album on Spotify, started to play it and was immediately drawn to it in how the music slowly insinuates itself. It’s different, neither out there nor derivative. One of a kind.

The cover of pianist Anthony D’Alessandro’s sophomore release, City Lights (self-released), out for about four months now, is pure Francis Wolff, Blue Note vintage. The album title and leader name encircle the rest of the recording’s personnel: trumpeter Summer Camargo, tenor saxophonist Jacob Chung, bassist Jonathan Chapman, drummer Ernesto Cervino and, on one track, vocalist Jennarie.

The retro feel extends to how the album was recorded. It was put to tape straight off the floor and without the musicians using headphones. It also extends to D’Alessandro’s writing. Six of City Lights’ tracks were written by him. A seventh, the smoky ballad ‘Oversight,’ was co-written with Jennarie. The remaining two are interpretations of stride standards by James P. Johnson.

It’s the originals that stand out here. D’Allesandro can write an appealing line. He has a mastery of the lingua franca of Horace Silver and his ilk. The band he has assembled has an easy yet tight camaraderie. The end result is another jazz album that harkens to the past yet isn’t stuck in it. It captures the spirit of a by-gone era in the here and now.

That’s the new jazz that’s really fired up my interest. What’s been doing elsewhere? A lot, as usual. But again, if the aim here is to focus on the really good stuff, what’s really been doing is three singer-songwriters who have put out truly excellent albums in the past few months.

Ny Oh (the stage name of Naomi Ludlow) is UK-born, New Zealand-raised and now domiciled in Topanga Canyon. She’s worked with Harry Styles, Madison Cunningham and Margo Price. Her debut album, Wildwood (self-released), was released in mid-November and is often as radiant as California can be. I guess I would call her music dream pop that remains earthy and focused on the beat. ‘Shine’ and ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ are potent examples of how these opposing impulses can co-exist in a pop music that latches onto both the listener’s heart and head. Oh’s music can also move such as through the driving beat and the intriguing harmonic motion of ‘Don’t Forget.’ There are a lot of treasures here that are only revealed through many listens.

The latest from Courtney Marie Andrews calls out for similar care. She and her music call to mind an adjective like Americana but I’ve always felt that Andrews is someone who writes and delivers songs that are based on what no longer has primacy but are by no means passé: music and lyrics.

Valentine (Thirty Tigers), released in mid-January, continues her gift for songs that yearn and illuminate that just getting through the day is triumph enough sometimes. Here, I think of ‘Outsider’ and ‘Best Friends,’ both songs that have Andrews’ faint cry.

The album also includes two songs that command attention for their structure. The opening number, ‘Pendulum Swing,’ has two moments where there’s a rhythmic break that brings an edge, a sign that Andrews is a true craftswoman. ‘Little Picture of a Butterfly’ dissolves into an ambient fog after its strong harkening to Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night,’ both melodically as well as in the sound of his recording of it on his first LP.

Emily Scott Robinson has been making recordings for a decade now and, as what seems to be always the case, someone whom I’ve only recently discovered. Her new album, Appalachia (Oh Boy Records), which came out at the end of January, is the most gentle and genuine album I have heard this year. Calls for piety and grace, as on the astonishingly beautiful ‘Bless It All,’ can seem like cheap posing these days but in the hands of a gifted singer and songwriter, as Robinson surely is, against a background of all-acoustic, almost-all-stringed instruments, the sentiments it calls up remind that turning away from them is often a reflex of reflection and defence. They cut just a bit too close for comfort.

Other highlights include the heartfelt, empathetic ‘Time Traveller,’ a lovely interpretation of ‘The Water is Wide’ (also known as ‘Waly, Waly’) on which Robinson is joined by Duncan Wickel and the opening ‘Hymn for the Unholy.’ So far, for 2026, Appalachia is the album that has most moved me.

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Recently, I picked up a copy of Patti Smith’s Horses, an album firmly canonized as a classic and one I had barely heard prior to buying it. Since then, I have listened to it five times and wrote an essay about the experience.

I hope you like it and will let me know what you think too.

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Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

“Horses, Horses, Horses, Horses”
By: Robert C. Gilbert

What are your music blind spots? Those places where you dare not or chose not to go. We all have them, even those whose tastes run wide or whose collections run deep or even in the areas of music with which one has been long well-acquainted. Here are a few of mine: Louis Armstrong beyond his album-length collaborations with Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker outside of his recordings with strings or the famous Massey Hall concert in 1953 with Dizzy Gillespie or anything by Joni Mitchell after 1980’s Shadows and Light. Here are a few more: I own no recordings by Chuck Berry or the Kinks or Nina Simone or B.B. King or Nick Drake.

The reasons for these holes in my musical soul, so to speak, are varied. Partly, it’s a practical matter like waiting for Mitchell’s Archives series to tackle the eighties and beyond or that a box set of Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings is not easily available. Sometimes, it’s a matter of my taste. I’ve never felt too compelled to dig beyond the hits of the Kinks or have warmed to the sound of Simone’s voice. Another reason is that there’s only so much time to listen to music and only so much room someone has to store it and there’s only so much money to lay out on this wonderful obsession called music.

There’s also that the whim simply hasn’t been there to pick up a classic Berry session, for one example, even as there is no denying that there is a certain shame to have spent almost 40 years building a record library that still doesn’t have even one cut by Chuck Berry in it.

I suppose that glaring omission is at least partly understandable if one considers that it’s not as if I don’t know his music or that it wasn’t a foundational part of my musical education. Anyone raised on fifties and sixties rock and roll as I was knows about the deeply American travails of ‘Johnny B. Goode,’ the futile longing for ‘Nadine (Is That You?)’ or that the time had come to ‘Roll Over Beethoven.’ So some blind spots in my collection are not filled as they wouldn’t necessarily satisfy the continued longing to stretch further, go deeper and gain the widest knowledge and appreciation of music. That’s not an excuse, it’s just a rationalization of where the collecting path has taken me.

And so then there are albums that I am long acquainted with that many others have never heard just as there are albums that others know front to back, back to front and every other way about which I know little. In both instances there lies the possibility of that first listen. To hear a recording with fresh ears. To measure if one’s notions about the music are equal to the reality, way different or ideally, far better than could have possibly been imagined.

That was the position I was in when a few weeks ago I decided to order the 50th anniversary of Patti Smith’s Horses. It seemed like the perfect way to finally hear the album, long known as a major statement, if not the major statement, of gritty, seventies New York. I had once heard the opening cover of ‘Gloria’ on the radio, recalling that I was impressed by its in-your-face quality but that was it. It was time to hear Horses for myself.

As I loaded the compact disc of the original album, newly remastered, into my player and got ready to press play, I posted a note here.

Among the responses I received were: “Welcome to the cult…,” “You’re in for a real treat!!!,” “Well, this should come as a shock to the system, in a good way,” “Oh to hear this with fresh ears again” and “Won’t be your last.”

The opening line of the album is “Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine.” It’s provocative and confrontational. It’s also like the revving of an engine, which then roars for the next minute and 40 seconds while still stationary. Smith then shifts into drive as she proclaims, “here she comes” and ‘Gloria’ begins in earnest.

What’s interesting here is the antic energy, an anticipation of the song’s rush of a refrain, colliding against the polish in which Jay Dee Daugherty’s drums, especially the bass drum, in synch with Ivan Král’s bass sounds not far removed from the lockstep of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie that was one of the many defining elements of the Buckingham-Nicks era of Fleetwood Mac.

That crispness is unexpected. Nineteen seventy-five bohemian New York—the crucible in which Horses was created—does not, on the surface, seem to lend itself to such well-manner sonics but I think they’re central to the album’s potent power. That comes mostly from Smith, creating an art rock that’s not too dissimilar from Yoko Ono’s double LP Approximately Infinite Universe from 1972, but is something earthier, something one can dance to. In other words, unlike Ono’s albums, I can play Horses on my stereo without having to put on headphones.

As an outsider to this type of music—one label given to it is art-punk—but genuinely fascinated by the do-it-yourself, flipping-off-convention ethos of the movement that Horses was heralding, the glean of accessibility or maybe more accurately, an easy entry point to gradually understand and appreciate the album, was not something I had counted on. If John Cale, Horses’ producer and one of the antecedents of the way the album was pointing, had his way, there would have also been strings on it.

The album’s clean sound isn’t my only way in here. These are others more substantial, including a fascination with rock music that balances a view quite askew with a deep foundation in the mechanics and craft of pop songwriting. Here, I think of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s Safe as Milk, the Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out! and parts of The Velvet Underground and Nico. I am also predisposed to strong female singer-songwriters like Laura Nyro, Judee Sill and Joni Mitchell. Of the three, Nyro is the best comparison to Smith and her go-for-broke dynamism. Another is that Wilson Pickett’s recording of ‘Land of 1000 Dances’ is one of my favourite recordings.

That song, written and originally recorded by Chris Kenner, is part of Horses’ centrepiece, an almost 10-minute thrill ride that sandwiches it between two pieces by Smith, the title composition and ‘La Mer(de).’ Like ‘Gloria,’ there is anticipation. How will ‘Land of 1000 Dances’ fit into all this? What is it even doing here? Its presence is not so unexpected considering Smith’s interest in getting back to the beating heart of rock and roll not to mention bandmate Lenny Kaye’s bona fides as a music preservationist through his creating the Nuggets compilation in 1972.

The shift to ‘Land of 1000 Dances,’ after Smith repeats the word horses four times, is perfect. It becomes a familiar sight, a chance to get one’s bearings recalibrated. Again, it’s contrast at play. The callbacks to the days when dances like the twist or the watusi were all the rage act as an leavening to Smith’s poetic flights of fancy. All of it is delivered by her coolly, announcing a difference from Bruce Springsteen—his Born to Run vying with Horses as the album of the moment in 1975—who was just as exuberant but in a far hotter manner. ‘Free Money’ is the one time Smith and Horses reaches the ecstatic heights of the Boss’ breakthrough even while it keeps its hipster framework intact.

He’s an artist I appreciate but I’m sure I would consider myself a fan of his. I have his first four albums. The music is often overwhelming, so plugged in it is to the day-to-day struggle and the longing to transcend it that I need to be in a special mood in order to be able to be planted in my seat to receive it for about 45 minutes straight. No surprise then that my favourite Springsteen recording is ‘It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City’ from Greetings for Asbury Park, N.J. where he’s more detached.

That would not exactly be the word I would use to describe Smith on the reggae-like ‘Rendono Beach’ or on the street-wise beat of ‘Kimberly.’ Disaffected may work better here. Her voice is deep and full. It’s neither coarse nor pretty. But it is the sound of someone who knows all the angles and while she’s not going to spill them, one can possibly guess at some of them simply by listening hard to her.

‘Break It Up,’ on which Allen Lanier of Blue Öyster Cult and Tom Verlaine of Television guest with Smith, Kaye, Král, Daugherty and Richard Sohl on piano, is the most expressive moment on Horses. A song about Jim Morrison, ‘Break It Up’’s refrain is unforgettable, the moment in which the precision of the album’s sound seems most unsettling, even dangerous.

I see albums like Horses as ultimately being provocations, weeding out those unwilling or unable to give it the attention it needs. The path from attention to rapt interest is fairly swift for the six tracks I’ve already written about. The remaining two: ‘Birdland’ and ‘Elegie’ don’t permit such instant gratification. Horses’ isn’t just an album of balls-to-the-wall rock. It’s also one of poetry. The former, with Kaye’s screeching guitar and Smith’s almost spoken-word vocal underlines the lineage, if Cale’s participation wasn’t enough to do so, back to the Velvet Underground, especially to something like ‘Heroin.’

The closing ‘Elegie’ had a floating quality. It is mournful yet also suggests a steely determination—particularly the lines “trumpets, violins, I heard them in the distance / and my skin emits a ray.”

I feel that may be Horses’ primary emotive quality. A cry of the rebel announcing something new and different. It’s about time I got hip to Horses’ call.

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I hope you enjoy what I have written and will share your thoughts as well!

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Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

McCoy Tyner and the Thrill of Discovery
By: Robert C. Gilbert

Using the word holy to describe the music of the John Coltrane Quartet is hardly an original thing to do. And yet, when it is played at the right time and in the right place, it can slowly, almost without knowing it, induce a state of bliss so transcendent that it’s hard not to call it anything else but that. Perhaps some additional leeway is afforded here as when I think of Coltrane’s music as being holy, I’m not necessarily thinking of A Love Supreme or ‘Dear Lord’ or ‘Alabama’—deeply spiritual works though they all are. Instead, I’m primarily thinking of the early months of the Quartet just after McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones joined, and Steve Davis and then Reggie Workman held down the bass chair.

The group’s first two concentrated periods of recording—three sessions in October 1960 and three sessions in May 1961—yielded five albums and also marked Coltrane’s transition from Atlantic to his final recording home, Impulse!. It was during this time that he put on tape his most well-known recording, his transformation of ‘My Favourite Things,’ Olé Coltrane, his final straight-ahead recording with an expanded front line and Africa/Brass, his exhilarating expansion of the Quartet’s sound to a small big band.

These records operate on two different, seemingly contradictory, planes. One is exploratory, focused on trying to reach a sonic nirvana. The other is accessibility, employing motifs, harmonic suspensions and tightly coiled energy to make the music quickly understandable to the novice jazz listener as well as satisfying to the long-time jazz buff. In effect, this collection of music is both governed by a musical language that seems to transcend the theme-solo-theme structure while also making it highly logical. Take, for example, how Tyner’s solo on ‘Olé’ seemingly dissolves into the lengthy dialogue between Workman and Art Davis.

That not only suggests a way to implicitly hand the soloist baton from musician to musician but also implies that an ensemble becomes a collective instrument, everyone’s energies profoundly aligned. Now, that’s a romantic way to describe what happens. Another would be to suggest that it’s tentativeness instead at work here with everyone staying within a clearly defined boundary, particularly in how Jones keeps the breadth of his sound fairly constrained or how Coltrane never breaks into full cry. But, whatever constrictions there are only furthers the exhilaration here as well as on, foe example, the very cool ‘Equinox,’ recorded in October 1960 and only released in 1966. In a sense, to hear it is to discover the fundamentals of jazz. At least, that’s what it feels to me.

That thought is no doubt one I have because these early recordings of the Coltrane Quartet formed my first substantial exposure to him and his group’s music. It was all so gloriously new to me as undoubtedly what the Quartet was playing was new to the members of the group. Regardless of what personal connection I have to this music, it’s often the earliest documents of a new way of making music that most strongly endure. In other words, when the new rules are being created rather than being adhered to, if you like.

But what turned me on the most with this music was hearing McCoy Tyner. The steadiness of his comping behind Coltrane. The way his solos progressed from crystalline single lines to those hypnotic chordal patterns to the reassurance of a motif that signaled the shift from one mode to a new one or the conclusion of his statement. It was an approach markedly different from other sideman appearances he made at the time—he was all of 21 when he joined Coltrane’s band—such as on Freddie Hubbard’s dynamic debut as a leader, Open Sesame, where he plays like a spritelier and slightly more adventurous Wynton Kelly.

Of course, how Tyner played on something like ‘Song for the Underground Railroad,’ an outtake from the Africa/Brass sessions and my favourite Coltrane recording, would evolve as would the sound of the Quartet, from the legendary recordings from the Village Vanguard in early November 1961—by that time, Jimmy Garrison was in the process of supplanting Workman—to the dissolution of the group as 1965 wound down.

During those years, Tyner was also recording as a leader on Impulse!. What is most interesting about the six albums he made for the label is their varied nature—each has its own character. Nights of Ballad and Blues is a trio recording with old bandmate Steve Davis and Lex Humphries on drums and is pitched towards mass appeal. A live set from the 1963 Newport Jazz Festival is informal. Today and Tomorrow switches from a trio with Garrison and Albert “Tootie” Heath on drums—dig an almost-modal take on ‘A Night in Tunisia’—and a sextet with a jaw-dropping frontline of Thad Jones on trumpet, Frank Strozier on alto saxophone and John Gilmore on tenor saxophone that only hints at the possibilities of such a combination. The opening ‘Contemporary Focus,’ for example, points toward the expanded sound palette of Tyner’s 1967 album Tender Moments, his second album after moving from Impulse! to Blue Note.

The three remaining three LPs are essentially trio sessions. Reaching Fourth, recorded in the fall of 1962, has Tyner playing with bassist Henry Grimes and drummer Roy Haynes, who was on call for the Coltrane Quartet whenever Jones was unavailable. No surprise then with Haynes at the kit that the brisk tracks are wound deliriously tight. Haynes’ clipped hi-hat-and-snare work on the title track in particular makes it a high point of Tyner’s sixties stint on Impulse!. Inception and McCoy Tyner Plays Ellington bookend it.

They are also notable as they document the pianist with his mates in the Coltrane rhythm section. The latter, recorded the same week as A Love Supreme, is with Garrison and Jones (Willie Rodriguez and Johnny Pacheco provide not-exactly-necessary percussion on four of the album’s seven tracks). It’s one of the strictly-trio cuts, ‘Mr. Gentle and Mr. Cool,’ an Ellington feature for Ray Nance and Shorty Baker, that stands out. The theme is very hummable. The harmonic shift in the B section is full of possibilities for the solo.

After playing the theme, Tyner, Garrison and Jones cast a Coltrane shade on Ellingtonia. The beat gets heavier. Jones thickens it on the toms on the middle eight. Tyner’s three solo choruses have him lightly climbing up and down the keyboard and also playing dense clusters of chords. Garrison favours strumming the strings for his one solo chorus.

A brisk run-through on ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)’—not released until 1978—has Jones playing those instantly recognizable polyrhythms as well as a relentless swing on the ride cymbal. These recordings not only call back to the first days of the Coltrane Quartet but also reveal the effect of subsequent years. The music is a little less polite. Everyone has emerged as a mater of their instrument.

Inception was recorded at the start of 1962. It’s not only my favourite of his Impulse! albums but also, in my opinion, the best artistically with Reaching Fourth a close second. With the pianist are Jones and Art Davis, while never officially a member of the Coltrane Quartet, he was called on often enough as a second bassist to be considered part of the fold.

There’s a symmetry to the program. Three up-tempo pieces, each based on a different form, all written by Tyner. Three ballad- to mid-tempo pieces, two being well-known standards and the other the fourth original written by the pianist for the album.

The title track, which starts the album, is full of quirks even as it is mostly a tune that provides an engaging structure for the soloist. A lickety-split run up the keyboard and a brief response by Jones is played before the theme. A four-bar riff is added so that the exchanges between Tyner and Jones become a cycle between one instance of four bars and then two instances of eight bards after Tyner’s improvisation. During it, he is bursting with ideas, filling in all the spaces but never in a gratuitous manner. When he switches to chords, he also switches from laying into the beat to laying away from it.

On ‘Blues for Gwen,’ named after Tyner’s sister, he is even more precocious, improvising straight through. What is even more notable is that as Tyner is playing aggressively, there is still room for space and more than once, he ruminates on a shimmering trill.

‘Effendi,’ probably the best-known of the numbers Tyner wrote for Inception, is a modal piece with a twist. There’s only one A section before the switch to a new mode on the B and then a return to the A. Here is Art Davis’ finest moment on the album, a two-chorus solo in which he goes outside of the harmony, plays the bass like a guitar on the B and throughout, sounds like he is playing free even as he adheres to ‘Effendi’’s 24-bar form.

The other Tyner original is ‘Sunset,’ dedicated to his then-wife Aisha, and the lyrical highlight of Inception. It starts off rubato and then resolves into a romantic chordal climb echoed by Davis and given extra momentum by Jones’ brushwork.

Inception’s two standards are another study in contrasts. The melody of ‘There Is No Greater Love’ unfolds in a light, decorative way in which each member of the trio weaves around each other similar to the approach of the classic Oscar Peterson Trio with Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen. ‘Speak Love’ has Jones back in Coltrane mode, playing a rhythmic dialogue between the ride and using cross-sticks with Tyner employing a pedal point to unspool the famous Kurt Weill melody. It’s a propulsive way to end the album, one that is pretty special to me.

It was natural for me to start collecting Tyner’s albums after immersing myself in the music of Coltrane. Inception was the first one I bought. It’s the kind of discovery path that jazz best inculcates, especially back in the late nineties when I first got seriously into jazz and one still had to actively seek out the music one wanted to hear.

It’s a process I am also remined of as I dig into Haunted Heart, the recent release of everything—both masters and alternate takes—that Bill Evans, Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian recorded in the studio between 1959 and 1961 for Riverside Records. In this case, Miles Davis brought me to Evans. My first purchase of his music was Portrait in Jazz. That’s real music discovery. Here, I’d also use the word holy to describe it.

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Just prior to 2025 saying goodbye, I had a review published in The Metropolitan Review, a fast-growing literary publication here, on the debut book by Chris Dalla Riva (who runs his own fast-growing publication here too!), Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us About the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. The review is mixed but I hope I was as upfront as possible on what I liked about Chris’ book and to highlight his success both on Substack and in getting a book published (that’s no mean feat!). Here is the review in case you haven’t checked it out.

The Metropolitan Review

This Is Top Forty

There’s a channel on Stingray Music, an online streaming service based in Canada, called All-Time Greatest Hits. A typical five-song set goes like this: Billie Eilish followed by Foreigner followed by Gladys Knight & the Pips followed by Rihanna and ending with the Lovin’ Spoonful. Contrary to the…

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5 months ago · 35 likes · 10 comments · Robert C. Gilbert and The Metropolitan Review

For my first essay for 2026, I thought I would take a look at two interesting yet confounding albums by Del Shannon, both recorded and released in 1966: This Is My Bag and Total Commitment. Neither could be called a classic but both document the artistic struggle to remain relevant and to try to find one’s place in an environment that was quickly changing. They are worth checking out and I hope you will share your thoughts on them as well.

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Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

Del Shannon in 1966
By: Robert C Gilbert

There are many reasons to curse streaming. The lousy metadata, the lousier fake artists and the lousiest thing of all, the miniscule royalties paid for streams. These are just for starters.

Yet, there are upsides to streaming in the midst of all the downsides. For example, there is no way I could have listened to so much new music last year if not for Spotify. But to get a whole lot out of it, you need to put a whole lot into it. In other words, the exact opposite to how platforms should work.

A far more esoteric compliant about streaming is that when catalogue albums are finally made available, the only way to usually find out about them is to stumble upon them or on, let’s say, the 50th time or so searching for an elusive album, there it finally is. Obsessive music fan I am, such a discovery when it does happen is always accompanied by a gasp and true to form, I do so last summer when I found This Is My Bag on Spotify and then again just a few weeks ago, when I found Total Commitment there too. They are the two albums that Del Shannon recorded and released in 1966.

Shannon remains one of the most intriguing of the artists that came to prominence in the time between Elvis Presley—then Private Presley—embarking for 16 months of military service in Germany and the Beatles touching down at JFK Airport. He was one of the singers who brought a new range, both emotively and octavely, to the rock singer as well as a frenzied vulnerability beneath the bravado.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about Shannon’s music in the early sixties can be found on ‘Little Town Flirt,’ which he co-wrote with Maron McKenzie and which came out in late 1962. It was his third big hit, a year after the one-two procession of ‘Runaway’ and ‘Hats Off to Larry,’ and more sedate than either of them as groove supplanted pure emotionalism. And what a groove it is, powered by a snare backbeat and the steady comping of a guitar, very similar to the Orlons’ ‘The Wah-Watusi’ but, even more importantly, expressing a telepathic synergy with a certain rhythm that would distinguish many of the early Beatles’ sides (think here of ‘All My Loving,’ ‘Ask Me Why’ and ‘There’s a Place’).

Shortly after ‘Little Town Flirt’ made its climb up the charts, Shannon would tour with the Fab Four in England and soon after that, he would be the first artist to put a Lennon and McCartney song—‘From Me to You’—onto the Billboard Hot 100. That he not only recognized the genuine invention of what was coming out of Britain (fueled, to an extent, by Shannon’s own genuine invention) but was also able to express his own brand of artistry within it through something like the devastating ‘I Got to Pieces’ which Peter and Gordon memorably recorded speaks to a dynacism in Shannon’s music that easily gets lost by fixating a little too much on ‘Runaway.’

He was not milquetoast as it could be said of some of his peers whose fortunes seemed to change almost overnight in the winter of 1964. Not even Roy Orbison, who had a tremendous influence on Shannon, could hold off the inevitable. It would happen to him as well.

In the fall of that year, Shannon had a big hit with the urgent ‘Keep Searchin’ (We’ll Follow the Sun).’ The break-heavy recording underlined with handclaps plus lyrics like “I’ve gotta find a place to hide with my baby by my side / she’s been hurt so much, they treat her mean and cruel” illustrates a danger that is never fully explained yet is fully understood. His follow-up single, ‘Stranger in Town,’ from which Shannon and his girlfriend “run / yeah we run / yeah we run” was even more existential in its portrayal of danger with its stops and starts that culminate in the refrain proclaiming the need to get away right away.

The two singles that came after, ‘Break Up’ and ‘Move It on Over,’ are just as interesting in how they showed Shannon's openness to garage rock, the snarl of the Rolling Stones and in the case of the latter, the Cajun soul of the Sir Douglas Quintet. Neither went anywhere but after them came a new record contract, Shannon’s first with a major label; in this case, Liberty, then home to the Ventures, Gary Lewis & the Playboys, Cher and Jan & Dean. And it was on the label that quickly came two albums by Shannon: This Is My Bag and Total Commitment. They stand as two of the fascinating curiosities of sixties rock which is why I gasped when both finally became available for streaming. They portray Del Shannon trying (often desperately) to find a new sound.

This kind of search often yielded uneasy results in how they conflicted with an artist’s public image and how the listening public was accustomed to hearing him or her. There was also the nagging feeling that embracing change was done more for expediency than any artistic reason. Some of the results from there efforts succeeded despite whatever dubious motivations may have been behind them. I think here of ‘Twinkle Toes,’ Roy Orbison’s fuzz-drenched final top 40 before his 1988 renaissance, ‘Devil’s Child,’ a driving album cut from 1967’s The Hit Sounds of the Everly Brothers and Another Side of Rick Nelson on which the attempt to branch out Nelson’s sound to folk, contemporary rock and even psychedelia worked far better than it had any right to.

Shannon’s initial efforts to do so on Liberty were far more tentative, favouring covers over originals written or co-written by him. This Is My Bag came out in the summer of 1966 and was produced by Snuff Garrett and had arrangements by Nick De Caro and Leon Russell. Leading it off was the only Shannon recording that dented the Billboard Hot 100 in 1966 (and just barely at that). ‘The Big Hurt,’ best-known through Toni Fisher’s phase-heavy recording from 1959, is the kind of song that was tailor-fit for Shannon. It's broadly emotional and features a sweeping melody that builds to a majestic release as well as the feeling that its ending does not auger anything even remotely like a happy resolution.

Shannon sings the song well, if not entirely convincingly. The layering of phasing effects, particularly as the recording reaches the conclusion, build a sound that is futuristic and would soon become commonplace once the brewing musical counterculture began to boil over.

This Is My Bag is a strange album. The three originals are easily dwarfed by the covers. There are two reasons why. The first is that their obscurity rests anxiously against the songs Shannon is given to interpret and the second is that none of the interpretations deviate markedly from the versions that remain well-known. Sometimes the approach works.

It’s no surprise that Shannon digs into ‘Oh, Pretty Woman’—his “yeah” at the end of the first verse is a nice touch—or that songs like ‘When You Walk In the Room,’ written by Jackie DeShannon, another American artist who immediately got the British beat and ‘Everybody Loves a Clown,’ one of seven straight top 10 hits by Lewis & the Playboys, which are both rooted in the ache of young love, have Shannon fitting into them nicely.

He also makes personal contact with Bobby Goldsboro’s hooky ‘It’s Too Late.’ One wishes he could have done the same with the Northern-soul like ‘The Cheater,’ the only hit by Bob Kuban and the In-Men. More glaringly, having Shannon tackle ‘Lightnin’ Strikes,’ a Lou Christie number-one hit that is indebted, in part, to his ‘Runaway,’ can only be attributed to the crassness of the record business.

Of the originals, only ‘Never Thought I Could’ stands out. ‘Hey! Little Star’ sounds five years too late and ‘For a Little While’ is marred by Shannon trying to sound overly tough.

It’s that same mannerism: yelling instead of singing, that he uses on his cover of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Under My Thumb,’ a song graced by a fiendishly catchy melody and chord structure that is marred by lyrics that are just plain ugly. Shannon sounds entirely out of place as a guy who throws away his customary gallantry to offer put-downs that are too cruel to quote here. This most unfortunate of covers leads off Total Commitment, which was released just three months after This Is My Bag. It is another confounding recording.

Primarily produced by Dallas Smith, who would soon work with Canned Heat and Hour Glass, Gregg and Duane Allman’s group before the Allman Brothers, Total Commitment is an unflinching portrait of an artist wondering where to go. Nothing more clearly illustrates this then on several of the album’s cover songs which replicate their hit-recording counterparts so closely that it seems to me that the backing tracks for them are used for Shannon to sing a vocal over them. There is a pronounced separation between Shannon and the musicians that doesn’t appear elsewhere on the album, and no discernable deviation between, for example, how Crispin St. Peters’ ‘The Pied Piper’ sounds and Shannon’s take on it. The gambit doesn’t work here, to say the least, and comes off only slightly better for Bobby Hebb’s ‘Sunny’ or ‘Time Won’t Let Me’ by the Outsiders (horn rock before there was such a thing).

The four originals on the album—three by Shannon and the other by Roy Nievelt—point to a greater ease with rock heavy on the backbeat and Shannon fits well into it even if none of the songs have a lasting impact after hearing them.

There is a kind of grace, however, reached on a fourth of Total Commitment. He finds a toughness in the bubble-gum sound of Paul Simon and Bruce Woodley’s ‘Red Rubber Ball,’ the Crykle’s biggest hit, singing the resolution to the refrain how Simon and Garfunkel would on a recording of them performing it live at the Philharmonic Hall in the winter of 1967 that would be released thirty-years later. He also sounds at ease covering ‘The Joker Went Wild,’ written by Bobby Russell and recorded by Bryan Hyland, someone whom Shannon would work with later in the sixties and into the seventies.

But, to me, that most revelatory track on Total Commitment is his take on P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri’s ‘Where Were You When I Needed You,’ drenched in folk-rock jangle and Dylan-esque lyrics. Here, Shannon sounds powerful and strikes the balance between delivering a brutal kiss off and the admission that doing so comes out of a personal hurt. It’s true that to laud a recording like this that is, in a sense, karaoke—the backing track is original but again, replicates the sound of the hit record Shannon was covering—is trying to redeem music by an artist who is trying to find a place in a rapidly changing environment where there may well not be a place for him or her. But, striving, even if done in a misguided way, has virtue and, in Shannon’s case, poignancy.

Even as he realized an original vision of his music through a psychedelic lens on 1968’s The Further Adventures of Charles Westover and steered Hyland to a mini-resurgence in 1970, Del Shannon would sadly remain on the periphery for the rest of his career. This Is My Bag and Total Commitment are documents of the artistic struggle, both of Del Shannon’s as well as of all who strive to create. They are worth hearing.

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I may be late to the game but I wanted to close out the year with my thoughts on the albums that most moved me in 2025 as well as some reflections on my writing here and the state of my newsletter.

My deepest thanks to everyone here for your support of my work and I hope to have some new surprises and delights for you in 2026 starting on January 13 when I will next be in touch.

Happy New Year everyone!

2025 in Music and Words
By: Robert C. Gilbert

Twenty twenty-five was the first year in my life I really tried to pay attention to new music. I’m 47. Growing up, and long after that, what I was listening to and discovering, and what was being released, were out of synch. I never felt that I was missing out of anything. There is enough old music to find—if one hasn’t heard it, it’s technically new music no matter when it was recorded—to last several lifetimes. And that was fine when I was a somewhat crazed music fan and record collector but tougher to justify when I am also trying to make it as a music writer and critic.

In 2024, I began to wrestle with contemporary music and started writing an ongoing series of round-ups of new and upcoming albums that caught my ear, starting with jazz and branching out from there. This year, I got more serious, keeping a log of everything I heard and writing six essays chronicling the good new stuff (read them here, here, here, here, here and here). Overall, I heard 507 new albums in 2025; the pace steady from the beginning of the year until around mid-November when thoughts increasingly turned to the sounds of the season.

It’s said that Downbeat received about that number of records in 1959. These days, that amount of LPs is but a sliver of the new music being made and released so my thoughts about what stuck most with me over the year is but a small impression of the sounds of the past 365 days.

Looking back at the albums I wrote about this year, here are the ones that stood out the most.

Tenor saxophonist Jon Irabagon’s Server Farm (Irabbagast Records) was one of the most sprawling and ambitious albums that came across my desk in 2025. It confronted the spectre of artificial intelligence and in five compositions, built a narrative that shifted from authenticity to artificiality. The band was first-rate: in addition to Irabagon’s regular band-mates: keyboardist Matt Mitchell, bassist Chris Lightcap and drummer Dan Weiss, there were the dueling guitars of Miles Okazaki and Wendy Eisenberg. The result was enthralling with the performances constantly shifting in texture and tempo.

One of the big surprises of 2025 was that it brought two excellent, yet very different, salutes to Thelonious Monk. Tenor saxophonist Xhosa Cole’s On a Modern Genius (Vol. 1) (Stoney Lane Recordings) interpreted the master’s music with restlessness. Recorded live in 2023 in Birmingham, England, the presence of tap dancer Liberty Styles on four of the album’s seven tracks added to its boldness.

Danya Stephens’s Monk’d (Contagious Music) had two twists: the first was that instead of tenor, Stephens played bass and the second was that the program focused, though not exclusively, on the nooks and crannies of the Monk songbook—think ‘Humph,’ ‘Coming on the Hudson’ and ‘Stuffy Turkey.’ But what was even more interesting was how Stephens and crew: tenor saxophonist Stephen Riley, pianist Ethan Iverson and drummer Eric McPherson echoed the bumptious bounce of Monk’s early-sixties quartet of Charlie Rouse, John Ore and Frankie Dunlop without ever being captive to it.

Throughout the year, I got the occasional email from a musician pitching his or her music to me. I appreciated this gesture and always gave a fair hearing to what was sent me. None of the albums that came my way through this method knocked me out as much as New York singer-songwriter Lili Añel’s You Have a Visitor (self-released), a call back to the days of Janis Ian, Norma Tanega and (especially) Phoebe Snow. But what really made me take notice was ‘Saw the Light,’ propelled by a looping bass line by Samuel Nobles and an evocation of the gritty side of New York with Añel dispensing truths like Gil Scott-Heron.

Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and keyboardist Vijay Iyer teamed up for Defiant Life (ECM), a stark and often alluring work on being angry about the state of the world. That might suggest Defiant Life was aggressive. It wasn’t. Instead, it was ambient, atmospheric and full of space, the kind of album to play over and over again.

Distinctive singers were a consistent source of pleasure. Tyreek McDole’s velvety sound brought to mind Kevin Mahogany and McDole’s debut recording, Open Up Your Senses (Artwork), was wide-ranging, offering deep interpretations of not-overdone standards like ‘Under a Blanket of Blue,’ bringing new energy to the totemic ‘The Creator Has a Master Plan’ and, speaking of Monk, caressing Mike Ferro’s lyrics to ‘Ugly Beauty.’

I loved Allan Harris’ The Poetry of Jazz: Live at the Blue LLama (Blue LLama Recordings) which mixed poetry with song, both well-suited to Harris’ voice: full of warmth, gentle yet rich. I was also touched by Raquel Marina’s Kind Words (self-released). Her sound on the album was unconventional, often hovering around a note rather than landing on it, but I found her album one of the most uplifting and pure things I heard all year.

Taylor Rae’s The Void (Missing Piece Records) was an addictive synthesis of pop, rock, soul and country. Jack Splithoff’s Far From Here (Virgin) evoked the Yacht rock sound of old without feeling dated in any way. Reed Turchi’s World on Fire (Xenon) went all the way back to the low-fi days of blues and folk. Cory Hanson’s I Love People (Drag City) persuasively argued that the age of tuneful singer-songwriter whose view is askew remains alive and well.

The New Eves, a female quartet out of the United Kingdom, personified an edge that was foremost in 2025. Their debut, The New Eves Is Rising (Transgressive Records), had a palpable menace that always seemed around the corner.

I also deeply admired producer Michael Simard’s project, Motivation, which paid tribute to the music of the seventies that existed in the liminal space between jazz, soul and funk. The 21-person aggregation’s debut recording, Take It to the Sky (self-released), was a bold statement, resisting the easy tribute—there are only deep cuts here—and was the kind of recording that barely made a dent but one I loved sharing and spreading the word about.

Two jazz releases from 2025 illustrated the music’s wide range of expression. Drummer Joe Farnsworth offered The Big Room (Smoke Sessions Records) which seemed as if it escaped from the Blue Note vault circa 1964, so strong did the spirit of the label pleasantly haunt the recording. It also didn’t hurt that the band Farnsworth assembled resembled the kind of heavy-hitter units that Blue Note was beloved for. Joining the drummer were trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, alto saxophonist Sarah Hanahan, vibraphonist Joel Ross (the X-factor here), pianist Emmet Cohen, bassist Yasushi Nakamara. It all added up to a modern classic.

Vibraphonist Patricia Brennan circled the outer edges of the music. Her presence on a recording is always a sign to take notice (and, to that end, how I wish I had been able to get deeper into guitarist Mary Halvorson’s latest, About Ghosts, on which Brennan appeared). Brennan’s Of the Near and Far (Pyroclastic Records) was one of the most fantastical listens 2025 offered. Fueled by her interest in astrology, the compositions she wrote for the recording had a spaciousness and etherealness that often inspired awe, especially the closer, ‘When You Stare Into the Abyss.’

The decision to write about an album comes down to first, whether I like it and second, whether I can write about it in a way that has something interesting to offer about its contents. Glancing back at my list of all the albums I heard this year, there are some that I didn’t write about for whatever reason but still liked a whole lot.

• The Weather Station, Humanhood (Fat Possum)

• Anna B Savage, You & i are Earth (City Slang)

• Gary Louris, Dark Country (Thirty Tigers)

• ARTEMIS, ARBORESQUE (Blue Note)

• Rumer, In Session (self-released)

• Foxwarren, 2 (Arts & Crafts)

• Beatie Wolfe & Brian Eno, Luminal (Verve)

• Pasquale Grasso, Fervency (Sony Masterworks)

• Colin Hancock’s Jazz Hounds with Catherine Russell, Cat & the Hounds (Turtle Bay Records)

• Wet Leg, moisturizer (Domino Recording)

• Alexa Tarantino, The Roar and the Whisper (Blue Engine Records)

• The Beaches, No Hard Feelings (AWAL Recordings)

• Trio of Bloom, Trio of Bloom (Pyroclastic Records)

Two albums I heard late in the year that I would have written about if I had done a seventh round-up of new music would have been bassist Rich Brown’s NYAEBA (Whirlwind Records), out since the end of September and a rhythmic, ambient and complex album that took me to far-off places. Vocalist Whitney Ross-Barris’ Curtains of Light (self-released), released at the end of October, was the kind of cross-genre music that never fails to surprise and delight. The opening cut, ‘Bourgeois Reverie,’ was full of brass and had a shuffle too, and powers what follows on the album.

The one composition I dug most this year was ‘The Files’ by the current iteration of the SFJazz Collective. It was a composition by the vibraphonist Warren Wolf and appeared on the Collective’s latest album, Collective Imagery (SF Jazz), a collaboration with San Francisco’s deYoung Museum and was inspired by artist Sadie Barnette’s FBI Drawing: Legal Ritual. The artwork consists of five collages which include excerpts from her father’s FBI files—he was both a Vietnam War veteran and a member of the Black Panthers—situated around by graphite-pencil drawings. Wolf used a spoken-word narrative to weave around a multi-part composition that included a deeply evocative homage to the sounds of Shaft and Superfly that spotlighted Wolf on marimba as well as David Sánchez on flute and Chris Potter on tenor saxophone.

No lyric seem to capture the increased surrealness of reality in 2025 than what singer-songwriter Emily Hines wrote for ‘UFO,’ part of her excellent debut album, These Days (Keeled Scales), in which she envisioned, “Jesus will come ridin’ in on a UFO / Jesus will come crashin’ with his alien buddies / Jesus will come in the nick of time and take us up.”

This year, I published 36 editions of Listening Sessions. My most popular essay was The Rambunctious CTI of 1970: Freddie Hubbard, Joe Farrell & Stanley Turrentine which looked at three adventurous albums released on Creed Taylor’s label.

Other essays this year I am particularly proud of included my attempt to memorialize Gene Hackman by focusing on The French Connection—his breakout role—and Don Ellis, who composed the picture’s haunting soundtrack. A few continued my interest in going deep on artists that usually don’t receive such treatment. I wrote at length this year on both Johnny Rivers and Porter Wagoner in the late sixties, the sole album by jazz-rock powerhouse Air—I loved having wordsworthesq aboard for it—as well as Mac Davis’ debut, Song Painter.

I also tried to say something new about music that’s already been written about ad nauseum. I think my essays honouring Brian Wilson and connecting Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with The Notorious Byrd Brothers came off well. The essay I had most fun writing this year was, no surprise, my travelogue of a week-and-a-half spent in New York.

While my attempt to go paid has seen me not paywall anything since May, I’ll try to focus next year on creating and acting on a paid-subscriber strategy that offers real, added value to the work I do here. Still, I began this year with 15 paid subscribers and will end the year with 18. I am forever appreciative of the support! Overall, my subscriber base continues to grow and in 2025, it went from 2,012 to 2,635 (as of December 28)—a 31% increase.

That I am able to do what I am doing is thanks to all of you who find what I do worth supporting and, most importantly, worth reading. That’s not something I will ever take for granted. I feel immense gratitude to be able to keep on going here. Thank you to you all! Here’s to 2026: may the New Year be good to us all!

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The year here is almost done. There will be one more essay—it’s coming December 30 and will be a look back at 2025 in terms of the music I’ve enjoyed most as well as my work here.

Until then, I wish you all a wonderful holiday season where peace, love and joy will be found all around you.

Another Trip Around the World of the Music of Christmas
By: Robert C. Gilbert

From 1963 to 1969, members of the Beatles’ Fan Club would receive a seven-inch flexi disc—that’s really thin vinyl—containing a holiday message from the group. The first three messages were increasingly anarchic recordings taped at Abbey Road Studios. The following two were extended comedy skits and the final two were stitched together from separate contributions by the Fab Four.

They have only been available commercially as a collection once when, in 2017, they were released in a boxed set of seven-inches—fairly thick vinyl, this time—with replicas of the covers for each message. The cost wasn’t too hefty at just over $125 Canadian but still, shelling out that amount for about 45 minutes of talk, mostly zany, with some music, often even zanier, can only be chalked up to dedicated fandom.

Amidst the mayhem, a song occasionally emerges. Parodies of ‘Good King Wenceslas’ and ‘Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.’ Paul McCartney offers ideas that could have turned into songs for both the ’68 and ’69 messages. What could plausibly be conceived as a fleshed-out ditty starts the ’66 message and for the following year’s missive, a song is weaved through the Goon-like and Monty-Python-to-be sketches. It’s called ‘Christmas Time (Is Here Again).’ The lyrics—if you can even call them that—are rudimentary. A full-length version was released as the flip side of the single for ‘Free As a Bird’ in 1995.

Of the seven Beatles’ Fan Club records, the ’67 edition is my favourite. It’s not only because it is the funniest of them or because there are cameos by George Martin as well as Victor Spinetti, so memorable as the aggrieved TV director in A Hard Day’s Night. It’s mostly because there is an actual Beatles Christmas song on it.

That brings a lot of comfort and joy to me. It may seem a little silly to admit such a thing, to take happiness from the fact that one has the option to listen to a favourite artist at this time of the year and hear a selection or an album or albums of music of the season, but it’s a feeling I have often felt, especially because of how I approach listening to and enjoying the music of Christmas each year.

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There’s a point—usually around mid-November—where my indulgence become exclusive to any other type of music. The reason is not simply because I love the many ways that musicians seek to express the feelings, experiences and other assorted thoughts of Yuletide in melody and (mostly) lyrics. It’s that the opportunity to hear it all is brief. Everything else can wait.

In the harangue that always attends what can feel like an onslaught of recordings that can be aggressively cheerful, painfully banal or sugary enough to give one cavities, there is much pleasure the music lover can take in how the sounds of the season are presented and heard.

Peoples’ ears grow wider. The strictness of narrowcasting gives way to something more elastic. Each season, the durability and adaptability of the canon of the seasonal repertoire is demonstrated once more. And, perhaps most interestingly, Christmas music—not a genre of course but a collection of music marked by a depth and breadth of expression on one subject only unmatched by romantic love—shines anew as a folk music of awesome strength.

All this then suggests to me evidence of music as one of this world’s most ennobling and enriching forces. Taking this perspective then makes the inevitability of Brenda Lee’s recording of ‘Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree’ wracking up millions upon millions of plays proof that a piece of music can be an always flowing current of riches. The record also gives a chance to hear the cream of the Nashville A-Team, including Hank Garland, Buddy Harman, Boots Randolph and Millie Kirkham. It’s a great bonus.

There’s a way to attack this music to mine greater meaning from it. Take ‘It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,’ one of two immortal seasonal recordings by Andy Williams. It is a prime example of holiday music with pep: a big band, a choir, a celeste, all an affirmation of the pedestal upon which Christmas is perched. The song was written by Kay Thompson and the arrangement here is by Johnny Mandel. The cheer is overwhelming but not, I would argue, in the force in which it is expressed but how, in hearing it and buying wholeheartedly into its sentiment, it can cause the spirit to soar. And yet, there’s something else working here. It is felt when Williams, a singer whose ability to communicate directly is underappreciated, sings, “there’ll be scary ghost stories / and tales of the glory / of Christmases long ago.” Those lines deepen the meaning, layering in both nostalgia as well as the fact that those happy moments of bygone days include loved ones who are no longer here.

That bittersweet feeling anchors Paul Anka’s recording of the number in 2011. It’s also sentimental but from another angle. He turns it into a ballad, taking his time over each word, each syllable, touching on another feeling that can be felt—at least by me—at this time of the year: how wonderful it is to experience another Christmastime. A gooey feeling perhaps but one that feels honest and when that thought takes over, a song is never far behind. One like ‘Step Into Christmas.’

Written by Elton John and Bernie Taupin, and recorded by John in 1973, the year of ‘Candle in the Wind,’ ‘Bennie and the Jets’ and ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,’ its primary virtue is its relentless pulse that digs deeper and pushes harder over its four-and-a-half minutes, plateauing during the ecstatic coda. I must have heard it hundreds and hundreds of times, even a thousand, by now—it’s another seasonal record that’s everywhere. I don’t get tired of it though, especially as it illustrates the rarefied orbit that John and Taupin were circling at the time.

Something else stands out about ‘Step Into Christmas’ and I have to thank a cover of the song that was part of the soundtrack for the picture, Oh. What. Fun. It’s by Uwade, a singer I hadn’t heard of before. She strips down the arrangement but leaves in all the hooks and breaks and by doing so, reveals what ‘Step Into Christmas’ is—a homage to Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. Give a listen to their ‘Child of Winter’ from a year later and the connection is clear.

Discovering something new in a piece of music is always exciting. Here’s another Yuletide example and it’s Beach Boys related too.

Carnie and Wendy Wilson’s ‘Hey Santa!’ is admittedly an example of the excesses that music about Christmas can sometimes have but there is a delight to savour here. It happens during the coda. As the Wilson sisters repeat “with my baby tonight / sleigh ride / sleigh ride / sleigh ride,” a male voice answers with “it’s Christmas time.” It’s a familiar one though it took a long time for me to realize who it was. But then it came to me and the memories of ‘Darlin’,’ ‘Wild Honey’ and ‘It’s About Time’ flooded back. It’s Carl Wilson and that it’s he who is answering his nieces gives ‘Hey Santa!’ a far different meaning than the one at its surface level. It’s really about family.

Music and family at Christmas can mean many things. The albums a brood traditionally play while trimming the tree. The songs that comment on the family dynamic during the holidays, whether rosy (Jamie Cullen’s ‘Beautiful, Altogether’), hardscrabble (Merle Haggard’s ‘If We Make It Through December’) or of deep longing for it (‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’) or anticipation of soon being enveloped in it (Chris Rea’s ‘Driving Home for Christmas’).

There’s also musical families with the Mills Brothers’ smooth, easy harmonies gliding through ‘Jingle Bells,’ the Everly Brothers’ earnestly, if a little uneasily, taking on ‘Bring a Torch, Jeannette, Isabella’ and everyone in the Jackson 5 joining in on ‘Up on the Housetop.’

“Grandmas, grandpas, fathers, mothers / friends I’ve loved dear,” Neil Diamond once sang, “sisters, brothers, sons and daughters / I once played with / aunts and uncles I once stayed with.” These words are the centrepiece of ‘Christmas Prayers,’ which he wrote for his fourth Yuletide-themed album, Acoustic Christmas, released in 2016 and most certainly his last LP. The album is pure—no amplification. The sound of friends gathered around a family room to play the well-worn hymns as well as a few other of the sacred songs of December. Acoustic Christmas employs a lot of space. Hear the pause after Diamond asks, “do you hear what I hear?” on the namesake song or how a guitar drops in, strummed with the drive as only Diamond can, before the second verse of ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.’

If we’re lucky, life gets narrower as December 25 nears. If we’re even luckier, it gets slower. Each day becomes one to savour. Anticipation is in the air. A time to, as the Irving Berlin standards goes, to “count your blessings instead of sheep” in the build-up to, as a different kind of standard goes, “almost day.”

Bruce Cockburn’s Christmas, which came out in 1993, captures these feelings well. A thorough excavation of the many ways the story of the Nativity has been captured in song, Christmas is uncompromising. Cockburn takes his time. ‘It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,’ maybe the most lovely of the well-known hymns of the season, clocks in just shy of seven minutes. He offers ‘The Huron Carol’ and ‘Riu, Riu, Chiu’ and interprets ‘Oh Little Town of Bethlehem’ as Bob Dylan might have if he had recorded it in 1963 (when Dylan tackled it himself, 46 years later, he did it like Frank Sinatra did in the forties).

To me, the album’s most stirring highlight is ‘I Saw Three Ships.’ It opens with what sounds like a pipe organ. An acoustic guitar then plays a rolling figure that sounds like the rushing in and out of the tide. An electric guitar offers an occasional accent, heightening the recording’s winter feel while also sounding like the pell of a bell proclaiming the Good News that has occasioned the arrival of the ships. It may well be the finest recording of the carol which dates back to the 17th century. I first heard Cockburn’s version on the radio the year it was released.

Indeed, each year brings new such favourites whether just out or lingering around for years waiting to be discovered. For the former, there’s the indie feel of the Oh. What. Fun. soundtrack which I mentioned earlier. In addition to Uwade’s cover of ‘Step Into Christmas,’ Andy Shauf and Madi Diaz resurrect Dennis Linde’s ‘Christmas Eve Will Kill You,’ best-known in the version recorded by the Everlys in 1971 and Sharon Von Etten has a gauzy take on the Pretenders’ ‘2000 Miles.’ This season also offers two stripped-down versions of Kenny Loggins’ beautiful ‘Celebrate Me Home’ by Lizzy McAlpine and Valerie Broussard.

Vocal group Pentatonix can always be depended upon to release something that is uplifting and fully in synch with the idea that the music of Christmas should be fun. To that end, ‘Christmas in the City, a celebration of how the holidays feel particularly vibrant in the urban jungle and ‘Bah Humbug,’ a retelling in song of Charles Dickins’ A Christmas Carol, have both been sources of delight.

Beyond what has come out this year, I’ve been enjoying the uplift of violinist Lindsey Stirling’s seasonal efforts. Livingston Taylor’s ‘My Perfect Christmas Day,’ from 2003, has a soulful message about how the best gifts are the ones that aren’t tangible and Joe Tex’s choral ‘I’ll Make Everyday Christmas (For My Woman),’ from 1967, has never been too far from my ears.

For the one recording new to me that has reached me most this year, I need to reach back to when I was young. That was, among other things, when I discovered the Beatles and first heard, through a radio documentary, their fan-club Christmas discs. It was also when, though I didn’t realize it at the time, that it would be inevitable I would become a jazz fan. That seed was planted through my grandparent’s small collection of Glenn Miller albums; the rigid swing of ‘American Patrol,’ ‘In the Mood’ and ‘Tuxedo Junction’ similar enough to the rhythm of early rock ‘n’ roll to spark a curiosity I would begin to fully investigate in my teens.

There was also ‘(I Got a Gal in) Kalamazoo’ with tenor saxophonist Tex Beneke taking the lead vocal and joined by Marion Hutton and the Modernaires. The Miller big band continued for a long time after the bandleader’s death in 1944. Beneke was one of the Miller alumni who kept the sound alive partnering with band singers Ray Eberle, Paula Kelly and the Modernaires, and releasing a series of albums. In 1965, they brought out Christmas Serenade in the Glenn Miller Style for Columbia.

Included on it was ‘We Wish You the Merriest,’ written and first recorded by Les Brown in 1961. In 1964, Sinatra and Bing Crosby recorded it in grand style with Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians, and Nelson Riddle wrangling all the forces into a rendition that is mammoth in scope. Things are narrower in the version Beneke and crew got on tape a year later but the bonhomie is ever greater.

About 80 seconds in, there’s an interlude with Kelly and the Modernaires doing a tongue-twister variation on the refrain that, this year at the very least, encapsulates the season at its best. Excitement tinged with knowing that it will be fleeting. But during that moment in the recording, nothing but joy matters. As the song goes, “may your tree be full of happiness / happiness and friendliness for all.” That is my hope for us all this holiday season and in the New Year to come.

My very best of the season to you all.

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Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

I Dream of a Carpenters’ Christmas
By: Robert C. Gilbert

I enjoy looking at photographs of Karen and Richard Carpenter listening to music. There is one with Karen seated looking at the gatefold cover of Todd Rundgren’s second solo album, Runt. The Ballad of Todd Rundgren., with Richard standing over her. In the background is Paul and Linda McCartney’s Ram.

There’s another photograph that is even more interesting. Karen and Richard are sitting cross-legged on a carpeted floor. In front and behind them are stacks of albums. At the moment caught on camera, it’s a reel-to-reel they appear to be listening to. Of the albums on the floor, only two are visible. One is Neil Sedaka’s Emergence. The other is Steely Dan’s Katy Lied. They make for an interesting juxtaposition. Middle of the road meets disaffected hipsterism. Both dedicated to the craft of making sophisticated music. Knowing that Karen and Richard were hip to Rundgren as well as Donald Fagen and Walter Becker is perhaps surprising but probably shouldn’t be.

For what is the music of Karen and Richard Carpenter but another result of making records in the seventies that were centred on songs that were deeply acquainted with the fundamentals of pop songwriting and also sounded pristine. That also applied to Sedaka but without the street cred even if perhaps some should stick to him. After all, few have written and recorded something as gorgeous as ‘Laughter in the Rain.’

Squeaky-clean is, I suppose, a moniker that can stick easily to the Carpenters. When they covered Leon Russell and Bonnie Bramlett’s ‘Superstar,’ the lyric “…and I can hardly wait to sleep with you again” was changed to “…and I can hardly wait to see you again.” A gloss was applied to covers of urgent rockers like ‘Help!’ and ‘Ticket to Ride.’ The recordings that made them very popular very quickly: ‘(They Long To Be) Close to You’ and ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ had a meticulousness to them that made them seem as if they were exactly designed to hit every pleasure centre except for the one that counted most: the heart. That is, of course, not even remotely the case.

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Consider the latter, initially a jingle for Crocker-Citizens National Bank that Paul Williams and Roger Nichols quickly fleshed out once it hit the ear of the Carpenters. There’s that opening clarinet line by Doug Strawn. There are tom fills, like heartbeats, that could only be played by Hal Blaine. Layers of harmony powered by Karen and Richard and, what gelled it all together, Karen’s lead vocal. She was barely 20 when she recorded it, singing with a maturity and knowingness not dissimilar to Johnny Mathis’ early sides when he too was just barely out of his teens. Richard was 23. In addition to playing a whole host of keyboards on ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ he orchestrated it. The verses luxuriate in the romanticism of lines like, “and when the evening comes, we smile / so much of life ahead.” The bridge pushes ahead with the promise of the road ahead, punctuated by punchy brass. There’s depth even as the recording could plausibly be labeled soft rock. The emotion it can bring up is anything but mushy. And a descriptor like that only captures part of what the Carpenters were all about.

‘All I Can Do,’ from their debut album, initially titled Offering and then changed to Ticket to Ride, is jazz at a frenetic clip. ‘Another Song,’ which closes their second album, Close to You, verges into progressive rock by the end. It was one of many songs that Richard wrote with John Bettis, who had been part of the second band Richard and Karen formed, Spectrum, and who also, with Richard, got fired from Disneyland in 1967 when they slipped one too many Beatles songs serenading visitors on Coke Corner. They all also went to California State University, Long Beach. Frank Pooler ran the choir at the school—Karen sang in it, Richard provided the piano. It’s Pooler’s words that Richard set to music on ‘Merry Christmas Darling,’ the Carpenters’ follow-up to ‘We’ve Only Just Begun.’

It’s one of those special seasonal recordings that can be heard just about everywhere at this time of the year and, at least for me, is always good to catch even if it’s just a brief snippet in the rush of holiday preparations or when festivities are underway. The version most commonly heard has a vocal that Karen recorded in 1978 to replace what was put on tape eight years earlier. While the re-recording is just about perfect, it loses some of the vulnerability of Karen’s original vocal take—for example, the way she stretches the “too” in “Happy New Year, too”—that makes the song’s yearning more real, better in allowing the listener to layer in his or her own pining for someone special at this time of the year whomever that person or persons may be.

It would be four years before the Carpenters released another Christmas song, a transformation of ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’ into their musical language. The slow tempo. The brilliant brass fanfare that opens it. The exact enunciation that Karen gives the words, placing the seasonal standard at some mid-point between being a lullaby and being a love song, turning into a celebration of the wonder of Christmas through the eyes of a child. The amazement that attends going to bed on Christmas Eve with the family tree barren of presents only to wake up the next morning with it laden with gifts. Again, softness does not connote syrupiness.

But, it was that lightness—a feeling that I would characterize as comfort or a genuineness free of cynicism or agenda—that made it inevitable that the Carpenters would have much more to say about the music of the season. So much so, in fact, that it resulted in two albums: 1978’s Christmas Portrait and 1984’s An Old-Fashioned Christmas which Richard built around a half-album’s worth of material recorded with Karen, but not released on the former album, as a tribute to her after her passing. She had a particular affection for Christmas music and indeed, both albums have a go-for-broke mentality, an attempt to create a compendium of the seasonal repertoire, reaching all the way back to ‘Il Ducli Jublio’ and covering just about every nook and cranny save for Handel’s Messiah.

It’s the classic approach. Reverent with largess: brass, strings, a choir. Each album opens with a brief prologue, like the Introit to begin a Christmas mass, which leads to a lavish overture constructed by Richard. They are not traditional opening suites in that, save for ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ on Christmas Portrait, none of the compositions, carols, hymns or songs are referred to subsequently in full. As theme after theme goes by—sometimes sprightly, other times lushly and occasionally a beloved melody just unfurls—it is like two streams converging, one made of memories, almost all good ones of Yuletides past, and the other of anticipation of all the rituals to partake of once again. If there is good to be found in Christmas, it may ultimately be that as it reminds of how one has been worn down by the year, it presents a chance to repair the frayed threads and to recommit once again to the ideals of the season.

That consolation seems very near when Karen is first heard on Christmas Portrait, telling of “frosted windowpanes” and “candles gleaming outside” on ‘The Christmas Waltz.’ The same feeling, magnified even more, comes as she begins ‘Sleigh Ride unaccompanied. Has anyone caressed the words, “just hear those sleigh bells ringing, jing-ting-tingling too…” like she did, stretching out syllables and words to express a joy beyond words? It meets Richard’s arrangement head on: clip-clopping drum brushes, bells of all kinds, a choir. The chance to hear him sing on the bridge. It’s a recording that moves not because it is easily recognized—it’s another of their Christmas recordings that is heard everywhere—but because it is all about atmosphere. It’s a milieu that is radiant, full of the glow of a living room bright and cozy with reds and greens. It’s sentimentality done right and a reminder that sentimentality does not always result in treacle.

What makes Christmas Portrait fairly remarkable is how it sustains this snow-globe aura for 50 minutes. Even in its cutesiest moments—a glockenspiel-heavy ‘Winter Wonderland’ for starters—wonder is never far away. Its height, at least to these ears, is thirty seconds from the medley pairing ‘The First Snowfall,’ just one of the many seasonal songs introduced by Bing Crosby, with ‘Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow!’

After a stately introduction, ‘The First Snowfall’ shifts into tempo. At first, it’s the choir—shades of the Ray Conniff Singers here—that sets the scene. There’s then a deepening of the harmony with Richard heard at its tip. The excitement builds as “folks puts runners on their surreys / and forget about their worries.” It’s then Karen to deliver the kicker, the harmony shifting again, as she sings, “when a man becomes a boy once again.”

That’s the whole thing right there: why the Carpenters had a natural affinity for Christmas music. Everything fits just so. The collective sound asks, of the listener, to remember, if just for a moment, what it was like to be a child in December.

It’s a bit jarring then to consider what was happening to the Carpenters while Christmas Portrait was recorded. Richard was addicted to painkillers, a habit he would kick in 1979. Karen’s struggles with anorexia would lead to her untimely passing four years later.

It’s inevitable then that her loss hangs over An Old-Fashioned Christmas. After starting off, as Christmas Portrait does, with a kind of Introit (here, it’s ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear’) and an overture, there is the melancholia of the title track, sung by Richard and a choir, and written by him and Bettis. The ache of the line, “it used to be that all the family would gather together for this one night,” is acutely poignant. Following it is an instrumental and ornate version of ‘O Holy Night’ leading directly into a rich interlude for strings that clear for Karen to sing, “oh, there is no place like home for the holidays”—the dream of that old-fashioned Christmas being realized. This entire opening sequence, spanning about 17 minutes, is the linchpin of the album. It’s the one segment that re-captures Christmas Portrait’s primacy of feel.

There is much good to be heard on the episodic remainder of the album, including an effecting version of the spiritual ‘Little Altar Boy,’ Richard’s creative suite of the most memorable moments of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker and the pleasure of the Carpenters’ ‘Santa Claus is Back in Town’ from 1974.

The initial CD release of their music for Christmas strung together most of both albums while using the artwork of Christmas Portrait, creating a super-sized aural fantasia of the season while leaving off, inexplicably, ‘The First Snowfall’ medley. In 1996, both albums were issued on a two-CD collection. That’s the version to own. Karen and Richard’s Christmas music is one part of the puzzle explaining why they reached and continue to reach so many. They weren’t soft. They were real.

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Regular programming here resumes on December 6 with an essay on the Christmas music of the Carpenters and then there will be more two pieces before the end of the year: one more look at the sounds of season on December 20 and then a round-up of 2025 on December 30.

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

Letting the Sunshine In
By: Robert C. Gilbert

I’ve written quite a few times before that the best music writing is here on Substack. No matter what kind of music you dig, someone is writing about it here and writing about it with passion, knowledge and love. What makes being here so rewarding is not necessarily the convergence of talent on Substack, but that the MusicStack community is a collegial one full of the best kind of people. We cheer each other on and we celebrate each and every success. I guess that’s why it’s been gratifying reading over the past week many pieces related to the Sunshine Blogger Award, in which writers nominate others to recognize their work.

It was with deep pleasure then that of the Vinyl Room, a publication about the passion of recording collecting and listening, , a writer of deeply perceptive and eclectic essays that you can check out here and of Analog Encounters, a writer and publication I’ve just discovered, all nominated me for the Award and posed a series of 11 questions.

As I’m a naturally shy person who sometimes is uneasy with getting too personal here, the prospect of answering these questions is daunting but I thought, in order to honour kindness, that I would get out of my comfort zone. So here goes…

Andres’ Questions

What’s your earliest musical memory?
It must have been when I was very, very young—I guess no more than three. I am eating ice cream in a Scarborough apartment and out of the corner of my eye is the cover of Elvis Presley’s soundtrack to G.I. Blues which my father was either in the middle of playing or had just played.

Was there a specific artist, band, record or event that inspired you to start writing about music?
Reading liner notes, especially those by Nat Hentoff, Ira Gitler and Ralph J. Gleason, as I began to collect jazz recordinsg in my late teens as well as listening to Gary Giddins throughout Ken Burns’ PBS documentary on jazz were both inspiring. I did a little bit of music writing back in 2002 and 2003 but didn’t really do it with any seriousness until 2021 when I launched my newsletter here.

What’s an album you could write treatises on?
Part of the fun of writing here is to go deep on albums that haven’t received that level of attention. One album I hope to write a long-form essay about is the Blues Project’s Projections, released in 1966, a deeply eclectic album that symbolizes, to me, why that year was the beginning of a golden age in music- and record-making. It’s not a perfect album but its range is daunting.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
The best advice I’ve ever received was indirectly through watching an interview of writer and critic Nelson George. He discussed his writing process and that he writes by hand, the reason being that writing by hand forces him to take his time and really think through what he wishes to write, and then doing an edit when tranferring it to the computer. My writing process comes directly from that.

What’s the most unusual place you have ever written from?
As I was walking from a bus stop to my parent’s place earlier this year, I grabbed a seat in the shelter to jot down the beginning of a paragraph that I needed to get down before I did anything else.

If you could go on tour with one artist or band, current or past, dead or alive, who would you choose and why?
The Beatles, either the shows they gave in New York and Washington, D.C. in February 1964 or their first full tour of the United States and Canada later that year. It would be been exhausting but unforgettable. A chance to see history up close and the glory of Beatlemania before it got tiresome and wearying.

Name a concert you were lucky to witness and one you regret having missed.
I was lucky to be able to be at one of the performances by the New York Philharmonic of Leonard Bernstein’s 3rd symphony, Kaddish, with Leonard Slatkin conducting and with Jeremy Irons as the speaker in 2017 as part of the Philharmonic’s tribute to the centenary of Bernstein's birth. It was a deeply moving experience, especially as it took place in the hall where Bernstein conducted the orchestra during most of his time as the Philharmonic’s music director.

In terms of a concert I regret missing, I wished I had gone to see Simon and Garfunkel when they played Toronto in 2003. The concert would have been on the last Sunday in November of that year and I decided not to get a ticket because it was the night before the start of another work week. What made the decision sting was just five days before the show, I was canned from my job.

How would you define success?
I would paraphrase Joel McCrea from Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country here. Success means being able to walk into one’s own house justified.

What’s your main guilty pleasure?
I don’t necessarily believe in guilty pleasures but I suppose some would feel my affinity for singers like Jerry Vale, Dick Haymes, Robert Goulet, Vic Damone and others of that ilk is something to be feel bashful about.

A hill you’ll die on?
That Elvis made his best recordings in Nashville from 1960 and 1968. They are the ones that most clearly and persuasively express his ambition to be an artist for everyone. He was at peak voice and accompanying him were the most accomplished musicians he worked with during his whole career. I wish Sony would reissue them so they could be re-discovered.

When all is said and done, how would you like to be remembered?
A flippant answer here would be to say that I hope to be remembered as a Renaissance man. An honest answer would be how I think most would answer: a good husband, brother, uncle, son and friend that tried his best and succeeded more often than he failed.

wordsworthesq’s Questions

What one thing do you think largely influenced who you are?
My father, who inspired me to be curious and to love music, movies, books and sports, and continues to do so.

What is the one thing you are passionate about that you feel loneliest in loving (like a song or movie no one else seems to love)?
Cannonball Adderley’s recording of ‘74 Miles Away’ from 1967. It was written by Joe Zawinul, who held the piano chair in Adderley’s band for most of the sixties, and is one of the most important and prescient jazz performances I have ever heard. The first, big bold step forward in jazz fusion, jazz-rock or however else you wish to term it.

What one question do you always want to answer but are rarely asked?
I’m a fairly reticent guy so I often appreciate when I’m not asked a lot of questions. I suppose I wish I was asked more about what I have been listening to that’s good.

You find a $5/10/20 bill on the ground and can do whatever without feeling guilt about whose money it is. What do you do with it?
I’m heading to the local thrift store with the bill in my pocket to see if there are any used records I can buy with it.

You are your own nation. What is your national anthem?
Ray Charles’ 1960 recording of ‘New York is My Home.’

You can build any house you like. What piece of art (album, painting, poem, movie) do you give to the architect and say ‘“draw on this for inspiration?”
I would suppose Carole King’s Tapestry not only because of it appears to be a loft where King and cat are photographed on the cover but there’s also a comfort to the music on the album that I think should be present in a home. It should be a place to relax, unwind, and to pursue one’s hobbies and passions.

If you ate Oreo cookies as a kid, did you eat them as is, licking the middle or, like me, starting with the wafters and combining the centers up into one ginormous ball and eating them that way?
My method was twisting the top and bottom wafer free and then gnawing off the center before eating the wafers.

What one childhood show, song, movie, PSA, etc. can still give you goosebumps if you think of it, either good or bad?
The Sesame Street of my youth in the eighties: a beautiful, wonderous place with people and monsters who all felt very real to me. If I’m being honest, they still do.

When you are listening to music, how do you typically do that?
I am either in my record room listening to my vinyl and CD collection or streaming Spotify on my phone while working, walking, commuting, reading, etc. My day is a constant soundtrack.

What’s your favorite word, or words, and why?
As the son of a teacher, appreciating language was instilled in me daily. I like words that are expressive, unique and direct.

Why did you accept this nomination and these questions anyway?
Because it’s important to recognize kindness and to try to return it in kind.

Howard Salmon’s Questions

What album changed how you understood yourself?
A big turning point for me was hearing Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue after being obsessed with it for months wondering what it sounded like (this was way before streaming) and discovering it was every bit as good as I imagined. It made me realize I was bound to go my own way and follow the beat of my own drum, in my musical taste as well as life in general.

What is one piece of art you return to when you feel lost?
Listening to Elvis’ sixties recordings in Nashville never fail to cheer me up and made me feel better when I feel lost or blue. They are that foundational to me.

What is a musical opinion you hold that almost nobody agrees with?
Perhaps that Frank Sinatra was at his peak in about 1965.

Which childhood memory still shapes your creative life today?
Listening to my father’s records. That set me off well for a life-long cultural education.

What artist do you wish more people would give a fair chance?
Johnny Mathis, whom I consider one of the finest interpreters of popular song since the beginning of the LP era. He has yet to be honoured at the Kennedy Center which strikes me as a glaring omission. He only retired from performing earlier this year and is one of our last living links to a golden age in music. We should celebrate him while he is still here among us.

If you could preserve one cultural space forever, what would it be?
Smalls in New York. It’s an intimate, kind of dive-y jazz club in the Village. It’s one of the places I must visit every time I go to New York.

What song feels closest to “home”?
Any song that reminds me of my father’s records such as the Mills Brothers’ recording of ‘Basin Street Blues’ from 1958 or Tennessee Ernie Ford singing a spiritual with the Jordanaires backing him.

What’s one belief you outgrew — and what replaced it?
That appreciating jazz imparted a sense of superiority over the rabble. Replacing it was that jazz is a music for everyone.

When do you feel most like yourself?
When I’m out and about, whether that be on a date with my wife, at a coffee shop reading or on one of my solo trips to New York. I am a city guy who enjoys being on the move.

Which book or album would you place in a time capsule for the future?
Leonard Bernstein’s sixties cycle of the symphonies of Gustav Mahler. If I had to pick only one of them, I’m picking his 1966 recording of Symphony No. 7.

What made you decide to participate in this community in the first place?
I started my Substack in May 2021 after Ted Gioia shared that he was starting a publication here. It seemed like a good platform to use to see if I could fulfil my dream of writing about music.

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I hope you enjoy it and will let me know your thoughts.

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With December around the corner, it’s tradition here to turn to the sounds of the season (for those less inclined to Christmas music, not too worry, regular programming will resume here by the end of the year). First up will be some thoughts on the Carpenters’ two seasonal albums and then one other essay (subject matter still up in the air). Prior to that will be a response to the very kind writers here who have nominated me for the Sunshine Blogger Award—expect that by the end of this month.

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

The Mamas and the Papas’ Peak on Record
By: Robert C. Gilbert

Crashon Screamon All Fall Down. For a time, that was to be the title of the Mamas and the Papas’ second album, just as memorable as If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears, the introduction to California’s second-most important—the Beach Boys’ being first—musical deliver of the promise of the Golden State in the late sixties.

Their debut had a cover for the ages. John Phillips, Cass Elliot and Denny Doherty squeezed width-wide in a bathtub with Michelle Phillips lounging length-wise, feet stretched across the laps of her bandmates. To their left was a toilet, a site so controversial in 1966 that a sell sticker was slapped in front of it on later pressings.

If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears is three-fourths a great album. Beyond its two hit singles, ‘California Dreamin’’ and ‘Monday, Monday,’ there were ace covers that featured the group’s two supreme voices, Doherty on ‘Do You Wanna Dance’ and ‘Spanish Harlem’ and Elliot on ‘I Call Your Name’ and the closing ‘The In Crowd.’ ‘Straight Shooter,’ with its full-throated declaration of “no more” following “or I won’t come around your door” hit the listener with the defiance underlining their collective harmony and ‘Got a Feelin’’ suggested that John Phillips, the group’s primary songwriter and arranger, had an early pulse on the milieu of the sixties counterculture along with a darkness underneath the meticulousness of the Mamas and the Papas’ merging of backing tracks powered by the cream of California’s crew of session musicians: Larry Knechtel, Joe Osborn and Hal Blaine, with Phillips’ intricate vocal charts.

The photo that was to grace the cover of Crashon Screamon All Fall Down oozed cool. In the foreground were John Phillips on the left chewing a piece of tumbleweed and Doherty on his right nattily attired in a suit and tie with a pocket square. Behind a fence in the centre was Elliot with a feather fan framing her face. To her left wasn’t Michelle Phillips but Jill Gibson.

As the Mamas and the Papas were quickly recording their sophomore album, Michelle Phillips was in the middle of an affair with Gene Clark, by then having left the Byrds. When John Phillips found out, it wasn’t long before his wife was fired. In her place was Gibson, a singer, songwriter, photographer and artist, best-known for her work with long-time boyfriend Jan Berry of Jan & Dean which connected her to Lou Adler and ultimately to the Mamas and the Papas whom Adler produced for his record label, Dunhill.

The recording sessions resumed and Gibson also appeared with the group live. It soon became clear that, for whatever reason, the fit just wasn’t right and Michelle Phillips was back in the group although interestingly enough, Gibson would serve as one of the primary photographers at the Monterey International Pop Festival of June 1967 in which Adler as well as John and Michelle Phillips were driving forces.

With Michelle Phillips back in the group, she recorded over some of Gibson’s contributions for the Mamas and the Papas’ upcoming album but not all of them. When it was released at the end of August, the evocative Crashon Screamon All Fall Down was titled just the Mamas & the Papas. In place of the flapper and dandy-esque outdoor shot was one of the group behind a window, everyone except for Michelle Phillips looking tired, even haggard.

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That vivid weariness is not exactly reflected in the album’s music. If John Phillips was initially reluctant to embrace the pop sounds of the sixties, holding tight to the purity of folk, he was all in by the time of the Mamas & the Papas, the peak of the group on record. Consider ‘I Saw Her Again.’

It’s one of six album tracks that Michelle Phillips is likely on. The others are ‘No Salt on Her Tail,’ ‘Words of Love,’ ‘My Heart Stood Still,’ ‘Dancing in the Street’ and ‘Once Was a Time I Thought’ leaving Gibson likely on ‘Trip, Stumble and Fall,’ ‘Dancing Bear,’ ‘Strange Young Girls,’ ‘I Can’t Wait,’ ‘Even If I Could’ and ‘That Kind of Girl.’

The brief introduction is breathtaking with the Mamas and the Papas layering a bright chord over a bed of strings and Blaine’s shimmering cymbals. What follows builds on that flash of ecstasy. John Phillips’ vocal arrangement is full of counterpoint and double-time runs. Elliot’s voice punches through at the start of the third verse. Doherty has the line, “she’ll never leave me,” all to himself and is answered by a flourish of the strings on the low end. There’s also a beautiful, bright interlude.

‘I Saw Her Again’ sounds like the sunniest day of the year, almost certainly a Saturday. California like in the movies. The lyrics tell of something different. Amidst the sunshine, it’s about Doherty’s affair with Michelle Phillips. He co-wrote it with John Phillips. It’s full of anguish. Guilt too. But also, and most critically, it suggests that some unmeet need is being fulfilled, against the protagonist’s better judgement, in the admission that, “I saw her again last night and you know that I shouldn’t.”

It’s a song like that which gives dimension to the music of the Mamas and the Papas. What they created may be called sunshine pop but it’s more complex than that. Listen to it and hear the slow realization of the dark underbelly of the sixties. That also underlines the group’s history. Beyond the numerous affairs, there was Elliot’s unrequited love for Doherty and John Phillips’ initial refusal to make her a permanent member of the group.

No album in the group’s discography captures these tensions like the Mamas & the Papas. ‘Trip, Stumble & Fall’ reads as a warning of Manson and Altamont. A more literal interpretation, particularly the lyrics in the middle section of the first verse, suggest, as what was often the case in the songs that John Phillips wrote, that the trouble could just be getting tangled up with the wrong type of woman. ‘Strange Young Girls’ is far more specific about the sixties ending up being a bummer.

When thinking about John Phillips, I often think of Brian Wilson too. No one came as close as Wilson to treating the studio like a laboratory where wondrous sounds would emerge from the hours upon hours of toil as Phillips did. Both had demons. Wilson conquered this. Phillips’ were far darker.

As a result, it’s hard to encounter a song like ‘No Salt on Her Tail,’ which opens the Mamas & the Papas and has an uncredited Ray Manzarek on organ, and not cringe a bit. Best to just approach it in the moment and marvel at its lament for a partner destined to fly away as well as the counterpoint between John Phillips and Doherty, and Michelle Philipps and Elliot. ‘That Kind of Girl,’ on the other hand, doesn’t warrant such generosity. It’s a tuneful song that gender-wise is simply off-key.

‘Even If I Could’ is magnificent with an especially memorable coda that includes the opening line of ‘Deck the Hall’ and a structure in which the bar length of the verses vary. It’s a poignant song on the inevitability of karma in a relationship when one partner has hurt the other, and is experiencing the same emotion in turn. ‘I Can’t Wait’ has John Phillips and Elliot gleefully trading barbs anticipating the moment when they both will lower the boom on their unsuspecting partner.

It’s part of the sass and the brass that Elliot brought to the group. It’s there as well on her hip lead on an in-your-face cover of ‘Dancing in the Street.’ Her finest moment on the Mamas & the Papas is ‘Words of Love,’ one of two hits off the album (the other being ‘I Saw Her Again’) with her exaggerated phrasing apropos of the song’s kitschy, Roaring-Twenties feel that also features Knechtel’s roadhouse piano and Michelle Phillips’ unforgettable “no!!!!” in the middle of the first verse.

That’s part of the range that the Mamas and the Papas had. On their second album, it’s also found in the attempt to treat Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s ‘My Heart Stood Still’ like ‘Go Where You Wanna Go.’ It doesn’t exactly work, it’s just a little too glib (for comparison, give a listen to Frank Sinatra’s magisterial recording of it from 1963 with Nelson Riddle). Far better is the baroque poetry of ‘Dancing Bear,’ with a woodwind trio of flute, oboe and bassoon and some of John Phillips’ most ambitious lyrics, full of imagery of chimney sweeps and cabin boys, kings and queens, magic ships and a spread of “fruits and candy” and “nuts and cheese.” It’s also a rich solo for Doherty’s warm Maritime voice, pure and knowing. It ends with a spine-tinging round—first Elliot and (likely) Gibson, then Doherty and finally a chorus of John Phillipses that fades out to return to the opening figure by the woodwind trio. I’m not sure the Mamas and the Papas had a finer moment than this.

The closing of the Mamas & the Papas is equally ambitious. ‘Once Was a Time I Thought’ takes all that has been sung in the preceding thirty minutes and offers a benediction. It’s all of a minute and is a jazzy tongue-twister in the style of (Dave) Lambert, (Jon) Hendricks & (Annie) Ross. It begins in cynicism, mentioning that love has been elusive because “the potion of passion / had never been passed to me.” It ends with the cynicism, at least for the moment, dissipated: “but now with you by my side / I find I feel so satisfied / somebody must have lied to me.”

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