Customer Reviews

New York Tendaberry (Exp)

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With 6,400 volumes in my music collection, there are many artists I love. Laura Nyro is my VERY favorite. And of her work, "New York Tendaberry" is my all-time favorite, #1 out of 6400. I think back to 1969, 17 years old, living in Japan, depressed beyond depression, I picked this LP up because I'd heard about Nyro as a writer ... and hated it, what a waste. A week later I figured, "You're already depressed; you spent the money on this LP, might as well put on the headphones and give it one more listen." REVELATION! I think you have to be in a certain head space to click with NYT; and once you do, it never leaves you.

So how does one review the music that kept them on the planet? "I don't want to say goodbye, baby goodbye." Holding on and letting go at the same time. "You Don't Love Me When I Cry" is one of the most incredible songs ever recorded. It's softness and fierceness mixed, blended seemlessly. "I am soft and silly & my name is Lillianaloo" "Captain for Dark Mornings" sings lightheartedly juxtaposed with "My daddy's a ravin crazy gambler." Nyro uses her piano like a weapon, emotionally disarming and light one minute then pounding and raw the next as on "Tom Cat Goodbye," "Tom Cat, you ole rat, where you been to?" "Mercy on Broadway" starts with a piano line Gershwin would've been proud of and then shifts time signitures abruptly that would've put a smile on John Coltrane's face, "In the doom swept the band away." "Come on down to the glory river...gonna lay that devil down," Nyro rages on the stirring "Save the Country." The dissonant piano on "Gibson Street" made this the least accessible track on NYT for me; but the arrangement with its chimes and horn flourishes make it one I marvel at for its shear instrumental diversity, "Oh my sorrow, oh my mourning." "Time & Love" is pure pop heaven. Phoebe Snow did a terrific version on the Time & Love Tribute CD. "The Man Who Sends Me Home" is the essence of sadness, reflection and hope. "I belong to the man" Nyro sings on "Sweet Lovin' Baby" only to change the lyric years later to "I belong to myself" on her Season of Lights live CD, Japanese version. When she sings, "Grace & the preacher, blown fleets of sweet eyed dreams tonight," it is with such a wild abandon that it is totally touching. "Captain Saint Lucifer" is Nyro's "Devil or Angel," the sometimes conflicting combination of physical and emotional love. "The Urantia Book" talks about how beauty relies on the variety of contrasts which Nyro does exquisitely on that track. "New York Tendaberry" is the sweet coda that concluded the original release, "Firecrackers break and they cross and they dust and they skate and the night comes..." For me, this is the most exquiste set ever recorded, my desert island CD.

The 2002 rerelease cleans up the sound a bit, although there's still more hiss on the softer parts than I expected. The single version of "Save the Country" reads well, although the longer album version is my favorite. "In the Country Way" seems out of place on this most urban of CD's, but is a welcome as a previously unreleased track, "My old man is Peter Pan." "New York Tendaberry" is quintessential artistry, emotionally powerful, unable to be forgotten as is this incredible singer, Laura Nyro.

Laura Nyro orginally made her reputation by writing songs that mixed urban doo-wop with folk flavors--songs like "Stoney End," "And When I Die," "Wedding Bell Blues," and "Stone Soul Picnic," songs that hit big when recorded by other artists. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Nyro recorded three ground-breaking albums (ELI & THE 13TH CONFESSION, NEW YORK TENDABERRY, and CHRISTMAS & THE BEADS OF SWEAT), and although many consider that her creativity peaked with those releases she continued to record and remained powerfully influential until her death in 1997. But for all of this, and unlike such Brill Building contemporaries as Carole King, Laura Nyro herself never made the leap from star writer to star performer. There are several reasons for this. Nyro had a passionate voice of considerable range, but it was not a "star" voice--that is to say, her voice lacked that idiosycratic sparkle that one expects to find in a great singer. But more to the point, after her first wave of song-writing hits, Nyro unexpectedly evolved into an incredibly uncompromising artist who seldom bothered to consider audience response to her material. Only one recording in her long career would achieve anything like a commercial success, and that recording is the 1969 NEW YORK TENDABERRY, which peaked at number 32.

It is odd that NEW YORK TENDABERRY ever made it into the pop charts to begin with--even by today's standards it is alternative with a capitol "A," a strange mix of jazz, blues, rock, pop, urban edges, and folk flourishes created largely by Laura and her piano with little in the way of musical back-up and still less in the way of vocal back-up. But the most disconcerting thing about NEW YORK TENDABERRY is its dynamics: the individual selections shift quiet to loud with startling effect, and no sooner does one become used to a tempo than it changes in an unexpected direction. The result is often as frustrating as it is fascinating. The opening "You Don't Love Me When I Cry" begins so softly that you'll reach for the volume control--but no sooner do you make the adjustment than Nyro bursts out full force and you'll have adjust the volume down. The first three selections are perhaps the weakest on the album, more interesting for the way in which Nyro performs them than for their actual content, but once the album reaches "Mercy on Broadway" it strikes and maintains a powerful but delicate balance. The best known selection from NEW YORK TENDABERRY is "Save the Country," a selection that mixes politics, protest, and spirituality to exceptional effect; "Time and Love" is equally fine.

Nyro's work, particularly at this extreme, inevitably provokes a love it or hate it reaction--but say what you like, her influence is undeniable. It is impossible to imagine such diverse artists as Patti Smith, Kate Bush, and Suzanne Vega (who actually acknowledges the debt in an album note) without reference to Nyro in general and NEW YORK TENDABERRY in particular. Recommended, but don't say you weren't warned: Nyro is an acquired taste, and unless you're prepared to give this work repeated listenings you'd best go somewhere else.

New York Tendaberry represents everything about Laura Nyro that makes devotees religiously loyal while inspiring dismissive derision in detractors.

With Laura, everything is subjective so I will simply offer my own view: Be patient with this album and many fruits will emerge over time.

New York Tendaberry was my first Laura Nyro album and was not an easy listen the first time through. It is dramatic, intense, at times painfully quiet and more often than not bewilderingly freeform, almost expressionistic. Minimalistic arrangements and the naked solitude of Nyro's voice made me reluctant to come back to the album. But come back I did, and everytime something delicious emerges that makes me wonder how carefully I'd been listening the first time through.

"Captain St. Lucifer", a rhythmically intriguing composition with a soaring chorus that's probably the best in Nyro's songbook, expresses the joy and spontaneity that few acknowledge in Laura's songwriting. "You Don't Love Me When I Cry" is a searing torch song that cuts like a knife, as soon as you get past its overtly aggressive emotion. And on this album another cluster of Nyro standards emerges: "Save the Country", "Gibsom Street", "Time and Love" -- New York Tendaberry is one album that, once you accept its complex but fascinating inner logic, works both on the level of individual songs and as an organic concept album. Each mode puts you in a separate state of consciousness, and the listener is the better for it.

Laura Nyro's importance in pop music is undeniably precarious. Long considered one of the genre's brilliant songwriters, her music has been covered by myriad artists from Streisand to Blood, Sweat and Tears. The sheer diversity of musicians drawn to her compositions speaks volumes of her greatness.

Nyro's own recordings, in terms of selling power, fared less well than the various cover versions. Criticized for their unbridled abandon, melodrama, self-indulgence and spontaneous mood, meter, dynamic and tonal changes, proponents of her music laud these same characteristics. New York Tendaberry is not an album for the faint of heart or the casual listener.

It makes demands, from the understated opening of You Don't Love Me When I Cry to the furious, taunting Tom Cat Goodbye. Its stresses and swells exhilirate. With a musicologists ear and a sociologists eye, she catalogues her beloved New York City, from the balcony of a Manhattan roof top to gritty Gibsom Street, seamlessly merging Broadway, Tin Pan Alley, Gospel, Folk, Jazz into an avant-garde opus of terrifying magnitued. The scope of her compositions, the bare instrumentation, the fury of her vocals and inspired piano playing reek havoc on pop music, trembling its core, shattering its mirrors and clamboring from the debris to recast the mold of music.

This album should be required listening for the human race.

I got this album in 1969 or so as an unhappy teenager and recently purchased and downloaded these beloved tracks to my computer. It's as if I'd never left them and they are more than just those dreadful oldies that contain nothing but memories. Nyro's experiments in solo sound with just a piano in most spots WORK. Lyrics are sung, cried, breathed, gasped, and gain in momentum like the poetry they are. The title song is a love ballad to the place where the artist has lived out the vicissitudes of her life, rich in imagery. "Where Quakers and Revolutionaries join for life the precious years, join for life through silver.. tears.." The written word does not do justice here. "Save the Country" is just as much a call to action as it was back in 1969. It's full of optimism and has a motivating melody line. Nyro lets herself GO in this album. Her past work was so much more structured and conventional in format.(though quite innovative too I can assure you) This is rich in taste, texture, imagery, and varying styles.
I saw her in concert once but it wasn't much. I think her music is so private it's meant to be listened to privately to absorb the nuance. She wasn't at the top of her game in concert but then why would such a sensitive artist also be a showman/entertainer? So much was lost in feeling.
How sad she is no longer among us but what a perpetual treasure she left.

Laura Nyro wrote, with great skill, highly personal and complex poetic works interwoven with soul, doo-wop, Brill Building girl group and gospel overtones. Although her songs at first listen seem unstructured and meandering, after awhile one realises they have an underlying solidity and form, giving some of her songs an unexpected commercial potential.
Her songs were successfully interpreted by Fifth Dimension (Stoned Soul Picnic; Wedding Bell Blues; Sweet Blindness), Blood, Sweat And Tears (And When I Die), Barbra Streisand (Stoney End) and Three Dog Night (Eli's Coming).
None of her own singles charted in America but her albums and sell-out concerts belie this. New York Tendaberry from 1969 was her best selling album although it was her least compromising to date and included the single Save The Country only in a sparse arrangement (the re-recorded single is included as a mono bonus track).
New York is the inspiration and the grounding of the album. The liner notes describe how she commuted from her home in Manhattan to the midtown recording studios by horse-drawn carriage through Central Park, arriving in an evening gown and later breaking for a brought-in meal sitting by the studio console, eating by candlelight. Somehow this romanticism is conveyed in the beautiful understated arrangements and her wonderfully recorded voice and piano. The album is a work of art to treasure.

Dirt and grit, sweetness and sorrow, this is "New York Tendaberry", Laura Nyro's masterpiece. This tapestry of great beauty and painful images is not for the pop-oriented crowd who only are familiar with the aurally digestible versions of "Save the Country" and "Time and Love" sung by other people. Laura herself had a voice both comforting and full of despair, and both those songs are woven into this complex journey. I always imagine it as twenty-four hours in the life of this street-wise, New Yorker, where she is both observer and subject. She wakens as her man leaves (You Don't Love Me When I Cry), yanks us by the hand to follow her down to the subway to sing joyful harmonies which echo and blend to the sound of trains(Mercy on Broadway), and then to Gibsom Street. If you are soft, then you will shiver, they hang the alley cats on Gibsom Street. Finally, in the languid, deep night, a brief celebration from her terrace as firecrackers break, dust, and skate. But the reality of her world takes over as she gazes below on humanity which joins for life through silver tears (New York Tendaberry).

Listen to the final song, "New York Tendaberry". Laura Nyro's incredible vocals and imagery are of this time, now. It was of that time, and will be forever treasured by those who love and be willing to listen to this exceptional artist.

Among fans, there is an ongoing argument to this day as to whether ELI & THE 13th CONFESSION or NEW YORK TENDABERRY is Laura Nyro's true masterpiece. I hate that sort of debate. Last I heard artists can create more than one, can't they? They are both masterworks in my book of life. But if pressed, well, for many, many years, I would have said ELI. More recently, I've been drawn more and more to TENDABERRY. It has what she herself termed "madcap energy" in abundance (listen to "Captain Saint Lucifer," or "Tom Cat Goodby") but it was also full of powerful, meditative silences. Its portraits of her native New York were alternately joyous and grim ( compare "Mercy on Broadway" and "Gibsom Street"). Only one song had enough bounce and verve to end up being covered by the Fifth Dimension, and even though I didn't realize it at the time, that was a sign of progress. She was honing her vision and her craft. Hangers on were left behind. It all made for a difficult, but ultimately rewarding album. If THE FIRST SONGS and ELI had enough hooks to make casual listeners forget the musical and lyrical idiosyncracies, TENDABERRY laid them out full square. Take it or leave it. And a lot of people did pass. Their loss, I think. But for those who took the time to listen, to plumb the depths, it yields incalculable riches.

As a young artist, Laura Nyro produced her first masterpiece in the late 1960's and called it "New York Tendaberry." Laura's Art does not appeal to everyone but to those who can relate it is the ultimate musical expression of our own personal angst; secret feelings that we cannot, will not share with anyone else. This is how personal and profound Nyro's music is to those of us who call ourselves her fans. "New York Tendaberry" is the ultimate expression of these thoughts and feelings performed by the artist that was Nyro at a very early time in her life and career.
"NYT"is Laura's tone poem to the city of New York. "Eli and the 13th Confession" was the first inking that Nyro had the genius necessary to produce such a work as varied and as emotionally provocative as "NYT." "Tendaberry" takes the emotional and sensual openness of "Eli" and targets it specifically on the New York-ness of New York: on the people as well as the places.
Laura Nyro's work was always personal, sometimes painfully so: listen to "The Man who sends me Home" or "You don't love me when I cry" for evidence of this.
Remember that this is music and lyric composed over 30 years ago yet now in 2002 it still retains the gut wrenching wallop that it did when it was first committed to vinyl.
I've always been of the opinion that these songs should be played at all the New York area team games for they express a love and a fondness for New York that has yet to be matched or expressed since, even taking into account the music of Billy Joel or Bruce Springsteen.
Laura Nyro is gone now, but these songs will live on in our hearts and in our minds as a testament to and the confirmation of the fact that she was and will always remain the supreme purveyor of dreams and of love. And we in turn, admire and love her for it.

Back in the day, when the New York airwaves were full of all kinds of music and FM radio had on-air personalities like Rosco and Alison Steele (the Nightbird); before the homogenization of taste and risk adverse programming; before the secularization and compartmentalization of music; there were songs that lifted me up and carried me away from the drudgery of high school. Instead of tracing geometric figures in mechanical drawing class, a friend and I would swap tales about the music and the great labels that had the courage to put all kinds of music in the publics' ear. Atlantic/Atco, Blue Note, Columbia, Elektra/Nonesuch, Motown, Prestige, Riverside, Stax, and Warner Bros. all come to mind. During this period, after the Beatles demise and before Disco, the airwaves were filled with music that reflected not only the tumult of the times but provided a forum for the passion and creativity that was brewing. If you gave a listen you could hear it all: Blues, Classical, Country, Folk, Gospel, Jazz, Pop, and World, political and a-political, top 40 and something the DJ just happened to share. It was all out there, just a twist of the radio dial away!

(Closer to home) A few singer/songwriter's efforts stand out: Van Morrison's Astral Weeks and Laura Nyro's New York Tendaberry are notable in their honesty. Tendaberry is such a New York album. Granted, Bob Dylan, Duke Ellington, Joni Mitchell, Billy Strayhorn, the Velvet Underground, and others have invoked Gotham, but Tendaberry truly takes you on a journey to Laura's neighborhood. A neighborhood fraught with peril and vulnerability but infused with hope and love. Imagine, if you will, a soundtrack to accompany Edward Hopper's cityscapes not unlike Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition".

When Tendaberry came out, I rushed home and put it on my record player and waited....and waited....and was shocked by this quiet gem. Where were the sons and daughters of Eli? I had to stop, quiet myself, re-read the liner notes and then, when I had the time to listen, truly hear this wonderful, twilight introspective composition. Then it made perfect sense - on her terms, not mine. This is music for reflection and regret, for anticipation and celebration - music to mourn the passing of the day while anticipating the promise and fulfillment of the night.

My only criticism of the work is that he order of songs should be reversed. Let me explain. Side one of the LP starts with "You Don't Love Me When I Cry" and ends with "Save the Country" - bold, brash and brassy. Side two starts with "Gibsom Street and ended with "Sweet Lovin' Baby". Much too quiet after the ending of Side One. So, before the advent of CD's and programmable CD players, I reversed the order and taped Side Two first and then Side One. On playback, the emotional journey and mood are much more sustainable and rewarding. Give it a chance. Enjoy the journey.

You can listen to the extra cuts later.