The Laura Nyro Experience (Part Two)

The continuation of a three-part essay on the joy and wonder of Laura Nyro

Hello again from the Laura Nyro vortex in which I happily remain. Below is the second part of my three-part essay on her. Throughout this section, I return often to the idea that a substantial part of the lure of her music is individual moments that are, for lack of a better adjective, jaw-dropping. As someone who has spent an inordinate amount of time listening to her in the past six weeks or so (as I have for over 20 years now), these moments do not dull with repetition. They are durable, potent and vital.

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!”

Part three of The Laura Nyro Experience arrives on May 15.