Laura Nyro: a woman in full

If you don’t own much of Laura Nyro’s music and have a couple of hundred quid to spare, a newly released 19-CD set of her complete studio and almost complete live recordings titled Hear My Song would be a good investment. All the 10 studio albums are there, from 1967’s More Than a New Discovery to the posthumously released Angel in the Dark, plus the official live albums — Spread Your Wings and Fly (1971), Season of Lights (1977) and The Loom’s Desire (1993-94) — and two live performances from a San Francisco hotel in 1994.

For me, though, there’s one thing missing: a double album called Laura, subtitled Laura Nyro Live at the Bottom Line. Recorded during a tour in 1988, her first in 10 years, it was released the following year on the independent Cypress label after the A&R department at Columbia Records, her home since 1968, indicated that they didn’t want her next album to be a live recording and gave her permission to make a one-off deal with another company.

For the tour she put together a small band with Jimmy Vivino on guitar, David Wofford on bass guitar, Frank Pagano on drums, Nydia Mata on percussion and Diane Wilson on harmony vocals. It’s not the kind of virtuoso-level team with which she toured in 1976 and whose work with her was preserved on Season of Lights — guitarist John Tropea, double-bassist Richard Davis, Mike Mainieri on vibes, Andy Newmark on drums — but it’s a much better fit with her music and recorded with much greater warmth, richer textures and sense of space. Laura’s own performance is much more mature and confident.

The whole lengthy set is very fine, but the one thing I wouldn’t be without is a song called “Companion”, of which this seems to be the only recording. It begins with the drummer ticking off the time and a heart-melting guitar-and-bass lick that leads into a slow 12/8 blues ballad. It’s the fourth song in, and Laura addresses the crowd in the Greenwich Village club: “Well, now that you’re finally my captive audience, I’m going to force these new songs on you…”

Then she sings. “I don’t want to marry / I don’t want your money / But love’s come our way / Just a warm companion is what I want, honey…” The melody as simple and gorgeous as the lyric: “Life is complicated / Funny, love can be that way / When just a warm companion is what I want, honey / A very special trust / A very special lust…” There’s a short bridge passage (“Walk inside the rain / Laughter in the dark…”) that goes out of tempo, then the guitar-and-bass lick returns and the band riffs quietly as she introduces them, one by one, before three part harmony (Nyro/Wilson/Pagano) gently takes it out.

There nothing here of the wild originality she brought to Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and New York Tendaberry when she was in her very early twenties. She’s a different person, no longer sitting on a fire escape above a New York street. Her life has changed. She’s been through a marriage. She’s living in Amherst, Massachusetts with a female partner, the painter Maria Desiderio. She’s a radical feminist campaigning for women’s rights, Native American rights, animal rights. She’s a mother, bringing up a son, Gil. But as different as the songs may be, the voice is still hers, with all the poetry it contains.

Some people criticised her later studio albums — Smile, Nested, Mother’s Spiritual, Walk the Dog & Light the Light — for lacking the fire of her early music. That’s like accusing her of growing up. We’re lucky to have all of it. And for me, alongside “Wedding Bell Blues” and “Emmie” and “Been on a Train” and “When I was a Freeport and You Were the Main Drag”, there’s “Companion”, the expression of a woman no less powerfully connected with her deepest feelings but now finding peace.

Maria Desiderio was with Laura when she died in April 1997 of ovarian cancer, the disease that had killed her mother, her maternal grandmother, and her maternal great-aunt. She was 49 years old. It’s a great thing to know that, around the world, people are still listening to her voice and her songs with admiration and love.

* The Hear My Song box is released on the Madfish label. Live at the Bottom Line is out of print in both vinyl and single-CD formats. The photograph is by David Bianchini, to whom Laura Nyro was married in the early ’70s, and is taken from the booklet accompanying The Loom’s Desire.