New York Tendaberry [Original recording remastered]

New York Tendaberry [Original recording remastered]

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Though Laura Nyro was one of the most successful American songwriters of the late '60s, penning hits like Streisand's "Stoney End," Blood, Sweat & Tears' "And When I Die," Three Dog Night's "Eli's Coming," and the Fifth Dimension's "Wedding Bell Blues," her buoyant, genre-blending major-label debut clicked with only a small, if influential, cult audience. But even Nyro's faithful must have been taken by surprise by its 1969 follow-up. A mature, deeply impressionistic ode to her hometown, New York City, Nyro's creation captures the city's multicultural soul and emotionally jagged edges so well it's hard to believe this 22-year-old daughter of a jazz musician who couldn't read a note of music concocted it. Stripping her music down to the bare essentials of her expressive, occasionally explosive soprano and fervent piano work somehow expanded its dramatic potential exponentially. Indeed, there are few pop albums whose protominimalist use of studio flourishes and production sheen have been as brief or effective; Nyro called them "colors," and that's exactly the function they serve here, adding crucial glimmer to the stark, jazzy drama of the singer's evocative songs. The bonus, "Save the Country," cut as a full studio production prior to Nyro rethinking the approach, fairly blares by comparison. Rooted in the singer's beloved '50s R&B and pop, yet infused with her brave, singular vision and the chutzpah to stick to it, this album remains Nyro's masterpiece. --Jerry McCulley

New York Tendaberry,Laura Nyro,Sony,Folk,Folk & Traditional,Pop,Popular Music,Singer/Songwriter,Soft Rock

New York Tendaberry (Exp)
Average customer rating:

An Artist Stripped Naked

Juiced

Songs from the Heart

Simply Superb

Can't Quite Get My Arms Around It

New York Tendaberry (Exp)
Laura Nyro
Manufacturer: Sony
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

General | Folk | Styles | Music
Traditional Folk | Folk | Styles | Music
4-for-3 Pop | 4-for-3 Music | Stores | Music
4-for-3 All Music | 4-for-3 Music | Stores | Music
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Eli & The 13th Confession (Exp)

Christmas and the Beads of Sweat

Gonna Take a Miracle (Exp)

The First Songs

Spread Your Wings & Fly: Fillmore East May 30 1971

ASIN: B000068QZP
Release Date: 2002-06-25

Tracks:

You Don't Love Me When I Cry
Captain For Dark Mornings
Tom Cat Goodby
Mercy On Broadway
Save The Country
Gibsom Street
Time And Love
The Man Who Sends Me Home
Sweet Lovin' Baby
Captain Saint Lucifer
New York Tendaberry
Save The Country (Single Version) (Bonus Track)
In The Country Way (Bonus Track)

Amazon.com

Though Laura Nyro was one of the most successful American songwriters of the late '60s, penning hits like Streisand's "Stoney End," Blood, Sweat & Tears' "And When I Die," Three Dog Night's "Eli's Coming," and the Fifth Dimension's "Wedding Bell Blues," her buoyant, genre-blending major-label debut clicked with only a small, if influential, cult audience. But even Nyro's faithful must have been taken by surprise by its 1969 follow-up. A mature, deeply impressionistic ode to her hometown, New York City, Nyro's creation captures the city's multicultural soul and emotionally jagged edges so well it's hard to believe this 22-year-old daughter of a jazz musician who couldn't read a note of music concocted it. Stripping her music down to the bare essentials of her expressive, occasionally explosive soprano and fervent piano work somehow expanded its dramatic potential exponentially. Indeed, there are few pop albums whose protominimalist use of studio flourishes and production sheen have been as brief or effective; Nyro called them "colors," and that's exactly the function they serve here, adding crucial glimmer to the stark, jazzy drama of the singer's evocative songs. The bonus, "Save the Country," cut as a full studio production prior to Nyro rethinking the approach, fairly blares by comparison. Rooted in the singer's beloved '50s R&B and pop, yet infused with her brave, singular vision and the chutzpah to stick to it, this album remains Nyro's masterpiece. --Jerry McCulley

Customer Reviews:

An Artist Stripped Naked.......2007-05-08

When an artist is said to bare all, standing naked and vulnerable, we know it wasn't an easy task getting there. Take Joni Mitchel's Blue or Frank Sinatra's Only For The Lonely or Billie Hiliday's Songs for Disanque Lovers. There's no denying these artist have stripped away layers of emotion to get to their inner beings, even bare their souls in their quest to express their hurt. Such is clearly the case with Laura Nyro's New York Tenderberry.

Juiced.......2007-04-18

Just flatout, jawdropping, cokedup, telescopic percipience. And the sound - jazzed, organic, desperate and dynamic. I believe this one is Nyro's best moment (song for song plus arranging and vocal performances).

The place for this underestimated masterpiece, in criticspeak: Pet Sounds with a dash of Rehearsals For Retirement (Ochs) and Whales & Nightingales moving towards For The Roses (before Joni got that far).

"Gibsom Street," "Captain Saint Lucifer," "Time and Love," "You Don't Love Me When I Cry" and (absolutely) the title track are among Nyro's most compelling compositions. No comp will provide 'em all.

I'm pretty biased towards this one as THE one.

13th Confession has more "hits" (obviously "Stone Soul Picnic") but it's less maniac artistic. Sweat has "Chinese Lamp" (the final peak) but there's a tiredness on the "rockin'" tunes.

THIS session, I believe, has the recondite vibe and the tunes are the loveliest crop.

Chillraising, shocking, dark, joyous - elemental and vast.

Songs from the Heart.......2007-02-19

New York Tendaberry is a major personal statement by an artist who tends to invoke extreme personal reactions from listeners. This highly experimental work with its rapid changes in rhythm, mood and volume can be a challenge to listeners. What may not be immediately apparent, however, is that Laura Nyro had a capacity for composing melody that was second to none in her generation. Like Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney, and Stevie Wonder she created a stream of alluring melodies that stick in the mind and move our emotions. Unlike these other artists, however, there was nothing in the least mainstream about Laura Nyro's sensibility, and that fact is nowhere more apparent than on this album.

Some of the best songs on New York Tendaberry, such as Sweet Lovin' Baby, seem on first listening to have little structure and no clearly defined chorus. It's only after several listening that it becomes apparent that there is a chorus, and that it contains the kind of strong melodic hook that one associates with the Beatles or the Beach Boys rather than with a quirky young dark haired girl from working class New York. On this song, however, Nyro all but throws this melody away. The hook, which appears at about 1:25 into the song, appears in its pure form only once, and then disappears as if Nyro were running from it, saying: "No, I don't want to write a pretty song, I have something more important to say."

Later in her career Laura would in fact have something more important to say. But at this early stage in her development, she wants to get back to her emotional life, which this album captures with frightening specificity. If you are like me, and you can relate to Laura's mercurial mood changes, to her aching sense of loss and longing, to her amorphous religious impulses, then this album becomes an extraordinary record of emotional territory that is usually left completely unexplored in popular music.

Laura was not happy during this phase of her life, and she never returned to this territory later in her very creative and interesting career. If you listen carefully to one of her great later albums, "Angel in the Dark," you can see that she never entirely abandoned the experimental impulse that drove the music on New York Tendaberry. But the production values, and the themes of her music, became more mature, and more palatable. Here we get Laura Nyro's rawest impulses, her voice loud and harsh, perhaps from drinking too much, and the treble turned up so high that her solo piano accompaniment crashes and bangs, startling us out of any sense of complacency, even if we have heard the album so many times that her bursts of emotion no longer surprise us.

As I said earlier, this album evokes very personal reactions from listeners. I tend to slight the two songs on this album with relatively traditional pop song structures: "Save the Country" and "Time and Love." I prefer the quirkier songs such as the afore-mentioned "Sweet Lovin' Baby," the title track, "You Don't Love Me When I Cry," "Captain for Dark Mornings," and "The Man Who Sends Me Home." Laura apparently labored for months over the production for this album, adding tiny bits of color to her mostly solo piano accompaniment. It is the album's shimmering flashes of melody, these small flourishes in the production, that give the album its heart.

In making this album, Laura broke every rule in the book, and in the end she gave us something entirely unique, but for me at least, quite unforgettable. Thank you Laura for giving us this amazing emotional testament that charts territory that usually stays locked up in our breasts because most people lack the skill or means to express it.

Simply Superb.......2006-11-21

Laura Nyro's New York Tendaberry is undeniably the greatest album production of the pop musical era, and it ought to be recognized as a classic achievement in all of American music. "Mercy on Broadway" is a legitimate art song in any genre. No one has ever captured the soul of New York City like Laura Nyro on this concept album. From hearing her in concert, I can avow that her voice rang true. No other vocalist was ever so sensually alive with stunning shades of emotion. You can even sense her lipstick on "Tom Cat Blues."

Can't Quite Get My Arms Around It.......2006-11-08

Here you have it ........The quintessential teenage, suicidal, confessional love poem, complete with primal scream, aghast smokey New York City midnight unrequited adolescent......Hurt deep down to my soul.....Can't forget that low-down man, that tore my soul asunder....

All right. So this is not for the faint of heart, nor the main-stream top-forty listner. Yes Laura Nyro wrote some of the most distingtive hits of the sixties. With songs like Sweet Blindness, Stoned Soul Picnic, Stoney End and Eli's Comming, Nyro established herself amoung the upper echelon of the 1960's "singer-songwriter" community.

But really, what can be said about New York Tendaberry other than it is an extraordinary late-night mood piece. Yes I've admired Laura Nyro's talents as both a singer and songwriter for many years. I've been a huge fan of Eli And The Thirteenth Confession forever and I love her collaboration with Labelle on Gonna Take A Mircle. But, truth be told, I've never been able to quite get my arms around New York Tendeberry. Perhaps it's a bit too teenage, sucidal, love poem..........You know the rest.

Average customer rating:

They Hang The Alley Cats On Gibsom Street
Where Is the Night Lustre? Past My Trials.
SOUL & NOCTURNES
An overlooked and highly influential classic
A Moment of Sixties Revelation Preserved Forever

New York Tendaberry
Laura Nyro
Manufacturer: Sony
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

General | Contemporary Folk | Folk | Styles | Music

Singer-Songwriters | Contemporary Folk | Folk | Styles | Music

General | Folk | Styles | Music

Traditional Folk | Folk | Styles | Music

General | Pop | Styles | Music

Singer-Songwriters | Pop | Styles | Music

Soft Rock | Pop | Styles | Music

General | Rock | Styles | Music

Eli and the Thirteenth Confession
Gonna Take a Miracle (Exp)
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ASIN: B0000024UE
Release Date: 1989-10-05

Tracks:

You Don't Love Me When I Cry
Captain For Dark Mornings
Tom Cat Goodbye
Mercy On Broadway
Save The Country
Gibsom Street
Time And Love
The Man Who Sends Me Home
Sweet Lovin' Baby
Captain Saint Lucifer
New York Tendaberry

Customer Reviews:

They Hang The Alley Cats On Gibsom Street.......2007-05-28

No one, no one, hung it all out to dry like Laura Nyro. A triple threat genius, composer, lyricist, and performer (piano and chilling vocals), Laura Nyro was a one-woman carnival that came into town and left its audience breathless. Nyro's most perfect album, Eli and the 13th Confession, demonstrated incredible range and provided hits that allowed several groups to take early retirement. In Gonna Take A Miracle she revived some classic Motown fare, with the help of Patti LaBelle and LaBelle, taking those standards out for a high-speed car chase late at night. New York Tendaberry falls in-between these albums, and for many it's a problem child. The tunes are often catchy, like Eli, but every time you think you're safe, the bottom drops out. It gets very beautifully dark and scary.

It's hilarious now, but when this album was released CBS had two girl stars, Nyro and Janis Ian. They were considered peers! Ian complained bitterly about Tendaberry, the money spent on production, the "self-indulgent" silences. This catty, petty jealousy seems preposterous in retrospect. Ian, at her best, was just another folkie. Nyro was a giant, and this is quite possibly her bravest, riskiest album - remarkable considering there must have been a lot of pressure for "Eli II."

Nyro had an unerring instinct for finding the nerve, and staying on it. She had an internal compass that pointed to the place where perfect beauty, intense pain, joy, bitterness, loss, surrender, rapture, anger, and love all collide and, in a moment of overwhelming madness, become indistinguishable from one another.

She will take you to the darkest alley in New York City and pick a rose for you. Every piece of chocolate she feeds you is bittersweet. Some entertainers give you the "Big Hits" of love, the candles, the flowers, the Italian restaurants. Laura Nyro gives you all 360 degrees of love, you can feel it in the way she caresses the keys and you can feel it on the back of your neck when she sings - her vocals are stunningly expressive.

If you're new to Laura Nyro, get Eli and the 13th Confession. If you're ready to go the distance, if you understand that loving and being loved means walking down Gibsom Street, get New York Tendaberry, you will never, never forget it.

Where Is the Night Lustre? Past My Trials........2006-06-22

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.

SOUL & NOCTURNES.......2005-05-28

I had an English Teacher in Miami from Venezuela, who always reinforced that their was no such word as "real" just "really" She was as adamant as my English borne English teacher in NY, Ms. Mastracola, who always insisted that young ladies say "I must utilize the vanitorium" instead of I gotta hit the head.

While I appreciate their good intentions and make use of their teachings, I'm sure that both these teachers have in their privacy, or need to, at some point, console themselves in the darkness while listening to Laura Nyro as sister-girl "keeps it real" singing You Don't Love Me When I Cry.... and other songs on this disc.

Laura is pure unabashed vulnerability; truth exposed. She is what I felt when I first heard Jose Carreras, and what I felt when I first heard Chopin's Nocturnes, and Lil Green, and a small child sitting in my lap happily singing their favorite nursery rhyme... "exposed." Soul music, takes on any and every form. All you need to understand is that.... if the music reaches your soul; it's soul music.

Laura expresses the beauty in the contrast between this woman and her man (men). How they were made to compliment and fortify one another's weaknesses with their strengths. Woman Laura's vulnerability, her softness, her maternal instincts, her intuition, are strengths. No one is to blame; just pure expressionism.

Laura's songs are those of self-torment. What was the name of those religious people who used to hit themselves on the backs with tethered leather strips... flaggerists? a soul turned out can never be turned back in. I've been into hipping every new generation to Laura that I can.

"The devil is hungry; the devil is sweet....." (Gibsom Street)

An overlooked and highly influential classic.......2002-08-08

As a was not born until a decade after "New York Tendaberry" came out, and coming from Australia, where nothing by Laura Nyro remains in print locally, it is not easy to appreciate the influence and power of this masterful work, especially given the way record guides overlook it.
Following on from the rather thin "The First Songs" and the improved, soulful "Eli And The Thirteenth Confession", Laura Nyro moved away from the band-dominated soul/funk sound of those two albums on "New York Tendaberry", opting for a radically altered sound of fervent, though still intensely soulful, piano-based rock, with a level of sophistication that was out of place in its day.
This radical change in approach barely paid off with critics, but gave Nyro her (still) best-selling album, reaching number 32 on the Billboard chart but making no impact in Australia. However, "New York Tendaberry" will be primarily be remembered for its influence on a generation of singer/songwriters, none of whom have managed to match Nyro's angelic voice and musical passion. This combination is seen at its best on the classic "Save The Country" and the lesser-known "Mercy On Broadway", where Nyro laments the lack of compassion amongst authorities of her time in a language that was too eloquently poetic to be in place during the 1960s. "Tom Cat Goodbye" is even more passionate, and has piano playing that makes Tori Amos' ability look ordinary by comparison.
"Time And Love" shows Nyro developing the spiritual vision many of her emulators would focus on ("So Jesus was an angel/And mankind broke his wing/But Jesus gave his lifeline/So sacred bells could sing/Now a woman is a fighter/Gather white or African/A woman is a woman inside/Has miracles for her man"). "Gibsom Street" and the more sedate "Captain Saint Lucifer" show that Nyro's emphasis on her piano work has not been at the expense of her ability to produce funky workouts.
The title tune, which closes the album, gives a description of New York that would inspire many (check out Kate Bush's overlooked "Top Of The City") and at the same time gives the characteristic social and spiritual vision that made Nyro stand out from the hippie generation of her time.
"You Don't Love Me When I Cry" and "The Man who Sends Me Home" are the most ballad-like tracks on the album, but both showcase Nyro's piano virtuosity wonderfully well, as does "Captain For Dark Mornings", which has one of the finest vocals in music history - stunning and powerful, but not missing a line of melody.
Given the reaction against her sophistication by critics in the wake of punk (even many of the protopunk bands) and latterly grunge, it is not hard to see why Laura Nyro has gained precious little recognition from critics over the last thirty years.
However, what Laura Nyro did do above her influence on such artists as Tori Amos and Jane Siberry (whose vocal style is remiscent of Nyro if not quite as angelic), was to show before anyone else that there is a role for the independent, thinking woman in the popular music world. Before Nyro, women rarely wrote and played their own songs, nor took the type of independent stance that "New York Tendaberry" and its less accessible follow-up "Christmas and The Beads Of Sweat" did.

A Moment of Sixties Revelation Preserved Forever.......2002-05-30

Laura Nyro was one of the great Sixties singer/songwriters. This album recorded in early 1969 was the pinnacle of her creative performing. Minimalist whispering to crescendo wailing. A moment captured, as in her photo on the cover: New York Sixties Avant-Garde at its most compelling. Artistic freedom and actualization of the New York '60s countercultural ego. A Bronx night on Gibsom Street. Your never gonna make a movie maker, you'll always be a city faker. You look like a city, but you feel like religion to me...
Enter the dark depths of New York Tendaberry and you'll never listen to Brittany again.