Laura Nyro Remembered...Soul Picnic: The Music and Passion of Laura Nyro by Michele Kort

When I mention Laura Nyro (1947-1997), the composer/singer/pianist who was favorably compared to Joni Mitchell, some people react enthusiastically, but some fail to recall her until I mention some of her songs, like "And When I Die", "Eli's Comin'", "Stoned Soul Picnic", or "Wedding Bell Blues", all huge hits in the late 60s/early 70s as covers by artists like Blood Sweat and Tears, Three Dog Night, and The Fifth Dimension. Barbra Streisand, whose highly successful 1971 "Stoney End" album updated her image and appealed to younger generations looking for contemporary music, also included Nyro's "Time and Love". Nyro released multiple albums of her own, including "Eli and the Thirteenth Confession" and "New York Tendabury". In 2014, Billy Childs and Allison Kraus revisited Nyro's work with "Map to the Treasure: Reimagining Laura Nyro", with help from Chris Botti, Renée Fleming, and Yo-Yo Ma, among others.

Nyro was born in The Bronx, New York. Her father was also a musician. She began her idiosyncratic career when she was still a teenager, but in time became something of a legend, as a friend and protégé of then talent agent David Geffen, who was a huge force in popular music before he moved on to film production. She died of uterine cancer at forty-nine, which had also claimed her grandmother and mother.

Michele Kort's book is a well-researched biography of Nyro, and celebrates not just her legacy, but the music scene of the era when her career began, and brings it back to life. It was wonderful to imagine her performances at sadly now-defunct clubs like New York's The Bottom Line, where I went often. Just a little more careful editing would have made it a five-star effort, but it is truly compelling reading for fans of both Nyro and those interested in the singer/songwriter movement, and the music of the 60s and 70s that lives on in many of our memories.

Those Days: Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics by Ronald Brownstein

I thought this book was sensational – a well-written look at a pivotal year in American culture and politics that cleverly used the calendar as an organizational tool, with the focus on what had become the new center of it all, Los Angeles.

In June 1974, I turned nineteen, and in September returned to college for my sophomore year, making me one of the Baby Boomers that the author, Ron Brownstein, a respected journalist, mentioned so often in the text. While I certainly knew the music and TV shows he wrote about, and saw most of the movies, I was not as yet that attuned to politics, and I can't remember if back then I had ever heard of Governor Jerry Brown of California, though at some point I became aware that he was dating Linda Ronstadt, which certainly made him intriguing. I had never been to California, and had no plans at that point to go there. As a native of Philadelphia, I was East Coast-Centric, and California was the distant home of Disneyland, surfing and the Beach Boys, nothing more. New York had much more allure, though in the mid-'70s, it was crime-ridden and decaying, and going there could be a scary adventure at times (little did I know that New York would become my home less than five years later).

Over the years, I have become much more aware of the importance of Los Angeles to the music scene of that time period, but I didn't really know all that much about how the television and film industries interacted with the music world. I was also fairly hazy on the dates of the political rise of Brown, and his predecessor Ronald Reagan. I knew much more about the life and death of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, and other key figures of the '60s, and had followed the news of Watergate and watched the hearings as they happened, but reading Brownstein's book gave me an overview that helped to put so much more of 1974 and the mostly hopeful years just before and after it in perspective. It made it abundantly clear how the country turned towards the conservatism and negative values of Reagan, leading to the nadir of the Trump presidency, and the circumstances of hate and division that were unleashed (with an interlude of overall optimism during the Clinton years, which now feels to me like some lost Nirvana).

I also found the book very entertaining and mostly positive, with so many insights from individuals such as Rob Reiner and Jackson Browne, that reminded me what it was like to be living in a time of youthful discovery, surrounded by the peers of my generation, knowing that we were just getting started, and still optimistic towards our future. 

Ooh, la, la – When Paris Sizzled: The 1920s Paris of Hemingway, Chanel, Cocteau, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, and Their Friends by Mary McAuliffe

I'd like to time travel back to the Paris of 100 years ago after reading this book...imagine being in the milieu of artists like Chagall, Picasso, and Modigliani, composers like Stravinsky or Porter, seeing a performance by Josephine Baker, or simply people-watching in Montparnasse. There was an amazing confluence of art, music, theater, fashion, and literary activity taking place, and living there was very reasonable.

The details and insights of this era were insightfully presented, and the many photos added additional realism to the texts. Truly this was one of Paris's great eras, when the creative energy flowed and it all came together.

Sadly, it was also made clear that fascism and anti-Semitism were on the rise in the background, and soon times would change, and not for the better...but while the art, music, and dance were encouraged and flourishing, it would have been wondrous!