Laura Nyro, a great artist

Born 18 October, 1947 in New York City, the woman named Laura Nigro started singing as a young child with harmony groups on street corners and, by her own admission, was a naturally gifted singer. During this time she was listening to Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Nina Simone; later on she moved to Smokey Robinson and Curtis Mayfield.

Fascinated from an early age with chord structures and progressions (her father was a jazz trumpeter), Laura attended the Manhattan High School Of Music And Art and started to play coffeehouses on a regular basis. These performances led to her being signed by Verve, and her debut album More Than A New Discovery was released in 1966.

The Mamas & The Papas invited Nyro to support them at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, but after being booed off stage by impatient hippies, she was pep-talked and poached by future record industry mogul David Geffen who took acid with her, signed her to Columbia, and became her manager (they later fell out). It was then that Nyro created the incom­parable meister-trio in short succession on which her reputation stands. Eli And The Thirteenth Confession, New York Tendaberry and Christmas And The Beads Of Sweat were written, performed, co-produced, and published (Tuna Fish Music) by Nyro herself, a feat almost unheard of at that time.

A whole raft of artists have since claimed to have been influenced by these records — when old flame Todd Rundgren wrote Baby Let’s Swing about her, (“Laura, I saw you open in LA/I knew you’d make it good someday”) he was spot on — but the music con­tained therein is of a singular, totally inimitable quality. Indeed, Nyro’s later work would never quite match the supreme creativity she found in the late 60s and early 70s, though much of it does have a certain something nevertheless. The posthumous releases on the Rounder label were Nyro’s very last recordings: The Loom's Desire is a 2-CD double live set recorded during her regular Christmas Eve slot at the Bottom Line in 1993/94, but here Nyro’s vocal prowess is noticeably absent. Her last studio album, Angel In The Dark, was recorded in 1994/95. The eight originals and eight covers (‘Primal heartbeat songs of my youth’) sound a little strained, which is hardly surprising as she was undergoing chemotherapy at the time. Still, there are five or six greats on each of these discs.

By all accounts her personality was equally unique. She often arrived by horse-drawn carriage via Central Park at Columbia studios on 52nd Street for midnight recording sessions wearing a black velvet ball-gown. She could withdraw inside herself and not be heard from for weeks; friends called this place ‘LauraLand’. And in the early 80s she came over all sapphic and shacked up with another woman.

In June 1995, while on tour in America, Nyro was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and sadly, she died on 8 April, 1997, aged just 49. The records she left behind (10 studio albums plus a handful of live sets) serve as testament to her vastly underrated talent.