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Welcome to
60s & 70s Music Store!
Broken
Rainbow
by Laura Nyro
The
old people of the earth
Tell stories
An old woman
Of the old ways
She said -
"I recall my joy
In better days"
The young warriors
Of the open rainbow
Said "Tell me is it true?
Tell me, do some live
out of bags and rags
In the cities too?
Is it true?"
At the edge where I live
Home sweet home
America
Native American Nation
Caught in the devastation
An endless situation
What can I do?
The ghost of prejudice
Cuts thru the moonglow
Poet on a crying page -
Broken Rainbow
Broken Rainbow
Home sweet home
America
Peace
LionHeart
February 2006
Photo
above 'Laura Nyro' © Rob
Altman 2006
Laura
Nyro
(1947-1997)
Laura
Nyro's Website
On Stoned Soul Picnic: The Best Of Laura Nyro, a compilation of her
twenty-five years with Columbia Records, the innovative artistry of
Laura’s singing and songwriting is in full celebration. Contained
in this collection are her original songs of spiritual, social and
sensual vision. Experimenting with form and feeling, her work shares
a connection with modern poetry and art. Her songs have inspired musicians
and music lovers for over three decades.
“I would go out singing, as a teenager, to a party or out on
the street, because there were harmony groups there, and that was
one of the joys of my youth,” Laura says of her musical roots.
“I mean you could just go out and sing. If I look back now, all
these years later, I must have had a spiritual, holistic feeling from
all of that.”
When asked about her approach to songwriting, that perhaps she is
of the generation who addresses certain issues, and what her responsibility
is to express those issues -
Laura replies:
“I’m not interested in conventional limitations when it
comes to my songwriting. For instance, I may bring a certain feminist
perspective to my songwriting, because that’s how I see life.
I’m interested in art, poetry, and music. As that kind of artist,
I can do anything. I can say anything. It’s about self-expression.
It knows no package - there’s no such thing. That’s what
being an artist is.”
By age 17, she had written the classic “And When I Die,”
popularized by Peter, Paul and Mary, and later Blood, Sweat and Tears.
The radio airwaves of the late ‘60’s and ‘70’s
were filled with her songs. “Wedding Bell Blues,” “Stoned
Soul Picnic,” “Blowin’ Away,” “Save The Country,”
and “Sweet Blindness,” a bouquet of compositions, all became
hits for The Fifth Dimension, as did “Eli’s Comin’”
for Three Dog Night, and “Stoney End” for Barbra Streisand.
“She wrote the most unexpected songs,” observer Stereo Review,
“a dazzling display of lyrical and musical innovation that gave
her music a fresh feeling….”
Laura’s work draws from soul, jazz, blues, R&B, and folk-rooted
music, along with a modern classical influence. Her songs have been
recorded by artists as diverse as Carmen McCrae, Suzanne Vega, Phoebe
Snow, Roseane Cash, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Jane Siberry, Mongo Santamaria,
Junior Walker and the All Stars, Chet Atkins, Frank Sinatra, Linda
Ronstadt, George Duke, Maynard Ferguson, Thelma Houston, Patti Larkin,
The Roches, and many, many others. The prestigious Alvin Ailey Dance
Company includes Laura’s music in their performance piece “Cry.”
And the Canadian Ballet has danced to “Emmie.”
Born in New
York on October 18, 1947, Laura was brought up on city life and summers
spent in the lush greenery of the Northeast. She began playing music
very early, and enjoyed a wide range of influences through her high
school years at Manhattan’s Music and Art. Laura listened to
the late ‘50’s and ‘60’s girl groups, Nina Simone,
John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Curtis
Mayfield and The Impressions, Mary Wells, Dusty Springfield, and the
early Burt Bacharach-Hal David songs of Dionne Warwick, among many
others. Laura read poetry and at home her mother played records by
Leontyne Price and impressionist classical composers such as Ravel,
Debussy and Persicetti.
Throughout high school Laura also listened to the protest music of
Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, early Bob Dylan the Beatles and others. Laura
always "adored" the music of Van Morrison. “I was always
interested in the social consciousness of certain songs. My mother
and grandfather were progressive thinkers, so I felt at home in the
peace movement and the women's movement, and that has influenced my
music.”
Laura made her first extended professional appearance at age 18, singing
at the legendary Hungry i coffeehouse in San Francisco Sound.”
The following year (1966) saw the release of her debut album More
Than A New Discovery on the Verve/Folkways label. It’s still
interesting to note that her Verve label-mates then included The Blues
Project, Tim Hardin, Richie Havens, Janis Ian, and Dave Von Ronk;
other seminal New York peers included Tim Buckley and Kenny Rankin.
Laura joined Columbia Records in 1968 and released Eli And The Thirteenth
Confession, “the work of an original and brilliant young talent,”
(as Jon Landau wrote in Rolling Stone). The summer of 1969 brought
New York Tendaberry followed by Christmas And the Beads of Sweat at
the end of 1970. These three albums represent a litany of songwriting
craft to this day. One year later came Gonna Take A Miracle, Laura’s
impressionistic cover album of the soul songs of her youth. In 1973,
her Verve debut album was acquired and reissued by Columbia as The
First Songs.
“When I was working on this anthology, and listening back to
that music,” Laura says of these early recordings, “I thought
‘Oh my God - what a madcap energy. I don’t know if I can
deal with this.’ (laughs) But it’s funny because soon I
started to get into it and it was very energizing. And a lot of fun.
I cried when I heard New York Tendaberry.”
Following Gonna Take A Miracle, Laura recorded Smile in 1976. She
then embarked on a four-month tour with a full band, which resulted
in Season Of Lights, a “live” album (1977). Her next album,
Nested, in 1978, continued Laura’s explorations of sound and
color. Of the shows that followed the release of Nested she recalls,
“That tour was special, because I was pregnant at the time and
I sang up until a few weeks before I had the baby. I’d sing new
originals and just drift into the old Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions
songs.”
“Eight months pregnant, Laura Nyro played The Bottom Line in
four sold-out performances,” wrote Tom Windbrandt in The Soho
News. “The show was almost understated in its simplicity. Ms.
Nyro wore a red strapless dress and performed without any back-up
musicians at all. What the performance lacked in texture, it made
up for in intimacy. It was almost like having Laura in one’s
own living room. The baby figured into the between-song-patter: ‘We’re
both really happy to be here,’ she announced.”
In recording
- Laura-Live At The Bottom Line, (released on Cypress/A & M, 1989).
“I quit smoking and it made my instrument richer and more stable,”
she said at the time. “I have this new band,” she added,
referring to the group led by guitarist Jimmy Vivino. “And we
have a lot of vitality.” The album drew upon a combination of
Laura’s classic compositions and eight original new songs featuring
“Roll of the Ocean,” and the “Japanese Restaurant Song.”
The tour was dedicated to the Animal Rights Movement.
In 1993 Walk The Dog And Light The Light arrived with the studio version
of “Broken Rainbow,” considered one of Laura’s most
important songs of social protest. It was written for the film of
the same name, which won the Academy Award® for Best Documentary
of 1985. “Broken Rainbow” is about the unjust relocation
of the Navajo people.
A working musician, Laura has spent much time during her twenties,
thirties and forties on the road, singing in clubs and concert halls
throughout America and abroad, including her return to Japan in 1994.
“The Japanese tour was the ultimate fun. I brought my harmony
group, and we sang three nights in Tokyo, then took the train to Kyoto.
It was very romantic. The language barrier didn’t matter. The
music was a universal soul connection.”
As of this writing in late 1996, a tribute album covering Laura’s
songs is being produced. The musicians involved in this project include:
Suzanne Vega, Pheobe Snow, Sweet Honey in the Rock and many more.
Laura is currently writing and is working on a new studio recording
and a third “live” recording - a small taste of which is
previewed at the end of this anthology.
Through the years Laura’s albums have reflected various musical
explorations from simple, down-home singing, to wild orchestrations
resembling abstract art. Robert Hilburn of The Los Angeles Times,
wrote about Laura, “Her contributions have paved the way for
the rise of the urban female singer-songwriter.”
And Jon Pareles amplified this in The New York Times: “If not
for Laura Nyro the music of Rickie Lee Jones, Joni Mitchell, and Teena
Marie might have been very different. When she released her first
album in 1966, Nyro was a nineteen-year old who linked high flown
poetry to the ecstatic emotions of soul music, and her singing mixed
the pure tones of a soprano with the throbs and swoops of gospel and
jazz.”
“The music she made,” noted Concerts East magazine, “was
a building block for an important group of contemporary artists, particularly
in the way they cross- bred jazz, R&B, and pop, while poetically
exploring the range of their emotions.”
Her voice has been described as “a blues soprano,” a “rich,
charcoal-smudged alto,” “a soul singer who soars - she can
make you feel it deep down.” Daily Variety wrote, “Nyro
still has an astonishing voice, a kind of melting, pure-toned soprano,
loaded with feeling, that seems drawn in equal measure from some private
inner cathedral, and the doo-wop streets of her youth.”
Stoned Soul Picnic: The Best of Laura Nyro, a thirty-year retrospective,
comes full circle with a gift - the previously unreleased “live”
version of “Save The Country,” recorded on Christmas Eve
1993, at The Bottom Line Club in New York with her newest harmony
group. The harmonies sing in counter-point: “In my mind I can’t
study war…/In my mind I can’t study war…/There’ll
be trains of blossoms../Trains of blossoms…/There’ll be
trains of music…/There’ll be music.”
For listen
samples and reviews, click on CD cover photo. In new window,
click on CD photo again and scroll down.
Stoned
Soul Picnic
Laura Nyro was ahead of her time. She wrote numerous
hits, most of which appeared on her first two albums MORE THAN A NEW
DISCOVERY (1967) and ELI AND THE THIRTEENTH CONFESSION (1968). The female
singer-songwriter wasn't yet in vogue though, and it would be others
that turned Nyro's songs into hits. Those others included Blood Sweat
& Tears with "And When I Die," Barbra Streisand with "Stoney
End," Three Dog Night with "Eli's Coming," and most prolifically,
the 5th Dimension, who had major hits with "Wedding Bell Blues,"
"Stoned Soul Picnic," "Sweet Blindness," "Blowing
Away," and "Save The Country."
Nyro's studio versions of all of the above (except "Sweet Blindness")
appear on disc one of this 34-track, two-disc set. They make a strong
case for Nyro deserving the massive success which eluded her and came
instead to Joni Mitchell, Carole King, and Carly Simon in the early
'70s.
The originality of these songs in both lyric content and arrangement
is stunning. What is even more amazing is that Nyro wrote all of those
hit songs before she turned 21. Yet like her male counterpart, Jimmy
Webb, Nyro clearly peaked at the beginning of her career. By the '70s,
she wasn't even able to write songs that became hits for others. It
is telling that the best recordings on disc two of this set were written
by others.
These two tracks (in collaboration with the group Labelle) come from
the remake-packed GONNA TAKW A MIRACLE album from 1971. The harmonies
Nyro and Labelle weave on the Shirelle's "I Met Him On A Sunday"
and the Originals' "The Bells" are gorgeous and leave the
listener wishing for more from that stellar album.
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The
First Songs, (1966)
Eli and the Thirteenth Confession (1968)
New York Tendaberry (1969)
Christmas and the Beads of Sweat (1970)
Gonna Take a Miracle (with Labelle) (1971)
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Spread
Your Wings and Fly: (Live at the Fillmore East May 1971)
Smile (1976)
Season of Lights (Live-1977)
Mother's Spiritual (1984)
Laura: Live at the Bottom Line (Compilation-1989)
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Time
and Love: The Essential Masters (2000)
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Live
at Mountain Stage (recorded 1990)
Walk the Dog and Light the Light (1993)
Live: The Loom's Desire (recorded 1993-1994)
Live in Japan ( 1994)
Angel in the Dark (posthumous album recorded 1994-1995)
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Mother's
Spiritual
by Laura Nyro
On
a street corner
Where the kids boogie all night
Or where the winds sing
And the stars shine
Like holiday lights
Come a band of angels
Salvation in their might
And as for peace on earth...
Feel this love
My brothers and sisters
Feel the season turn
She is the mother of time
Wonders that take you
Rivers that give
That's where mother's spiritual lives
Talk of a ruby love
Lover's share
Find your love
Lose your love
Here and there
So you go home
Do your own thing
The ocean sings to me
That love is always alive
And part of thee
Feel this love
My brothers and sisters
Feel the season turn
She is the mother of time
Light and darkness
Come to her kiss
'Cause that's where
mother's spiritual lives
Come to the lites my sisters
And take what you need
Doesn't matter my brothers -
Your Sunday creed
Cause each one's a lover
To this winter nite star
A pilgrim, a pioneer
That's who you are
Feel this love
My brothers and sisters
Feel the season turn
She is the mother of time
It's not war
It's life she gives
And that's where mother's
spiritual lives
