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40 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
All-Time #1, December 22, 2002
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.
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33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Laura and Her Piano: A Ground-Breaking Recording, December 29, 2002
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.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Laura Nyro/ New York Tendaberry, September 2, 2004
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.
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