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An image grips me. June 1995. Laura is alone at the black grand piano, dressed in a black dress. She had been working on a couple of new albums for a few months. She had scheduled some dates in California. But the day before, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, the illness that had taken her mother Gilda 22 years earlier. On that piano, Laura places a frame with the photo of Gilda and her maternal grandmother; she looks at them, moves them slightly back, then forward, and begins the chords of Angel in the Dark. Then she sighs and starts singing. The scene with the photos on the piano would repeat itself in the following weeks, as she fought against the disease, exhausted from paclitaxel treatments. That song and those notes run between earth and sky until the fateful, goddamn, April 8, 1997. She was 49, just like her mother. She had recently planted a Japanese maple in her garden at home in Danbury, in the Connecticut countryside (that home with the cardboard lamps and the duck pond, where she had lived since she left New York behind).
New York was her city. Steinway & Sons, her piano. Her sensitivity, her art.
At 17, she sold her first song, And When I Die. At 19, she recorded her first album, “More Than a New Discovery”.
And yet Laura, in the beginning, refused to learn semiography, rhythmic organization, various harmonic-melodic elements; for her, making music was painting: music, a sum of colors; sounds, shades. And just as a painter would never let another brush their paintings, she wrote, composed, and arranged everything herself. Yes. When they objected to complex, sophisticated, inextricable structures, she cried. She cried warm tears. Her songs are made of those tears.
A dramatic and blues soprano, she fused the ecstatic emotions of soul music with New York pop, jazz, folk, gospel, urban blues, and rhythm and blues, in a tortuous lyricism. A personal and intimate style, drenched in tragedy, as stubborn as it is solemn, yet capable of the fragility of the smallest, most delicate shudders. Laura traversed Broadway musicals, Harlem Baptist church gospel, Brill Building sound, jazz from Greenwich Village clubs and bars, the strong voices typical of Motown, doo-wop groups performing in subway stations and street corners, ghetto blues, but also the nonconformist poetry of the Beat generation and the prophetic poetry of Dylan she loved as much as the music of Van Morrison, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Curtis Mayfield, Mary Wells, Dusty Springfield, and Dionne Warwick interpreting Bacharach and David. That universe is sucked into her being, into her restlessness, into her shyness, into her sense of inferiority compared to others beyond any reasonable reason, into her sensitivity that, from the beginning, seemed a jarring condemnation.
People rarely bow before Laura's greatness; more often, they ignore it.
As is often the case, others benefited from her compositions: Peter, Paul and Mary and Blood, Sweat & Tears (And When I Die), Fifth Dimension (Wedding Bell Blues, Stoned Soul Picnic, Sweet Blindness, Blowing Away), Three Dog Night (Eli's Coming), Barbra Streisand (Stoney End) and still others like Carmen McRae, Linda Ronstadt, Thelma Houston, and many more.
Many, like Mitchell, Jones, Vega, Siberry, Snow, Amos, Germano, Apple, owe her a debt.
Laura Nyro, her real surname Nigro, was born on October 18, 1947, in New York. Her father, Louis Nigro, an Italian-Jew, was a jazz trumpeter and piano tuner; her mother, Gilda Mirsky, a Russian Jew, was an accountant with the American Psychoanalytic Association, with a remarkable record collection (from Billie Holiday and Nina Simone to Ravel and Debussy) and progressive ideas. Laura grew up in the Bronx and soon began playing the family Steinway self-taught. By age 8, she was already able to write songs.
After the already mature debut, the second LP, "Eli and the Thirteenth Confession", is a powerful and lyrical concept album where, with superb arrangements and an exciting freedom of styles and dynamics, she sings about her femininity transitioning from adolescence to adulthood.
The subsequent "New York Tendaberry", an ode to her hometown, represents an additional step forward for Nyro, away from rock's taxonomies: she accompanies herself on the piano with sparse yet dramatic block chords, drawing rubato times that are completely free of constraints and tempestuous, falling into unpredictable melodic forms and abstract frames. The introspective and visionary lyrics are no less:
New York Tendaberry
-true berry-
I have already lost my eyes
In the east wind skies
Here where I have cried
Where I too have tried
Where God and the Tendaberry rise
Where Quakers and revolutionaries
Have united for life
For precious years
United for life
Through silver tears
After these two masterpieces, however, unknown to the public, Nyro was led to return to the more solid structures of rhythm & blues and soul music with "Christmas and the Beads of Sweat" (another underestimated and commercial flop, as it goes).
But then, the following year, she released this "Gonna Take a Miracle,” recorded in Philadelphia with producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, masters of the Philly Sound, and with Labelle on backing vocals (Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash), serving the performances with heartfelt participation aimed at tempering, if not exorcising, her tendency towards melancholy, as well as setting aside her well-known reluctance towards collaborations. The album is an intense and sincere homage to black music, with a highlight being the tribute to Motown, featuring the jaw-dropping and unparalleled version of The Bells (among others, written by Marvin Gaye for The Originals), alongside the loose-limbed You've Really Got a Hold on Me by Smokey Robinson, the tribute to Brill Building, with the smooth and definitive version of Spanish Harlem (by Leiber and Spector) and the girl group era epic, with the phantasmagorical and spirited rendition of It's Gonna Take a Miracle (by the not-so-well-known Royalettes of Baltimore). Nyro makes all these songs her own, beloved in her earliest youth, and even though they might somehow present as antitheses to her songbook, they undoubtedly return to us as the active counterpart of her intertwined art, once again with her life. Noting that the 2002 edition is enriched by 4 live tracks from 1971, where, alone at the piano, she gives a poignant rendition of Carole King's A Natural Woman and Up On The Roof (ironically, the latter was her/”not hers” most acclaimed success), it shouldn't be overlooked that, for the first time back then, Laura was forced to embark on a long tour to support the album's sales, which would earn her the 46th place on Billboard (and 41st on the “black chart”), but also drive her, exasperated, to announce her retirement from the scene at just 24 years of age. She said her only truly happy moments as a performer were when she played in Manhattan, on the steps of a subway station, with a Latin American doo-wop group of friends, during her times at the High School of Music & Art.
Now, why is there such a disturbed femininity within "Gonna Take a Miracle," why is such a sumptuous album also so raw?
Precisely, here Laura bares herself, illuminating the darkness of her soul.
Nigro never left her soul, much like Emily Dickinson never left her room. Always the same cell to look out from: the inflexible and austere New York; Monterey experienced as a great personal failure, much more than it actually was; a tentative relationship with Jackson Browne; retreats to avoid compromising with the music business; stage fright; LSD; her marriage to carpenter and veteran David Bianchini and the departure from New York for the rural village of Gloucester, Massachusetts; the non-renewal with Columbia; the divorce; the birth of her son Gil from a brief relationship with Hindu Harindra Singh; growing interest in supporting Native American causes, feminism, and ecological issues; her cohabitation with the beautiful painter Maria Desiderio, which continued throughout her life, at the small country estate in Danbury, Connecticut, where they raised Gil (now a rapper, "Gil-T"); camper vacations.
I don't think I can find Laura in the elegant horse-drawn carriage that, from the hotel where she lived, took her to the recording studio, when she was still in New York, as reported in a Life article titled "The Funky Madonna of New York Soul" (dated January 10, 1970). But only in her soul, which is her art, where she poured all of herself, along with her human flesh, withholding nothing of her genius and weaknesses, her passions, her sad and conflicted gaze on life.
So, then, "Gonna Take a Miracle" also clearly says what soul is. That soul filled with a damned beauty, exceedingly pure and exceedingly tainted with life. Laura, after all, never transcends the tragic, nor is she ever so insincere as to fall into affectation or aestheticism. For Laura, feeling equals vanishing. A reality too fragmented to be enclosed within the soul. Too incomplete and imprecise. Impossible to be circumscribed by the angel that sinks into the darkness. A thousand abandonments. A thousand ruinous falls of excessive sensitivity, translated into luxuriant, free and desolate art, offered to the world with disarmed candor and defeated by the world. A broken heart, with a void that could only be filled by infinity.
Subsequently, Nyro would sporadically release more marginal albums: "Nested," oriented towards folk-rock, then "Mother's Spiritual," highlighting her new social commitment (environmental, feminist, and animalist themes, she even became a vegetarian) and "Walk the Dog and Light the Light." Then there’s the posthumous material, collected in "Angel in the Dark" (Rounder Records), which was recorded between 1994 and 1995 and was supposed to be part of two albums, one of original material and the other of covers. She worked on it as long as the illness allowed her (and perhaps beyond); the recordings are of great depth, attesting it as her best album since 1971. Here, once again, she dissects her self but as before a greater reality. A work that should be seriously reconsidered. Finally, she managed, damn it, just in time to choose the tracklist for the double anthology "Soul Stoned Picnic: The Best of Laura Nyro."
Laura and her mother were both 49 when they died, and, tragedy upon tragedy, Maria Desiderio also died of ovarian carcinoma in 1999.
There is another image that grips me, alongside the splendor of Maria’s face. It’s what happened during the recordings of "New York Tendaberry." Laura invited Miles Davis to play and enrich some tracks of the album. After careful listening, in complete silence, Miles, with a sort of slight smile on his lips, explained before leaving: "I can't play on these tracks. You've already done it!" The darkness was torn apart; there was nothing else to add, no color or shade to make vibrate beyond those tremors rendering the silence divine.
I love colors, times of an anxious, irreconcilable, vital yearning, the humblest and sovereign explanation of the cosmic “whys” of my breath.
(Alda Merini)
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