Laura Nyro lives

Photo credit: Dan Nigro

She’s been gone over 12 years but the late Laura Nyro and her music have proved truly immortal.

None other than Elton John cited her as a major influence when he appeared late last year on the premiere episode of Spectacle: Elvis Costello With…and told the host that she pointed the way for songwriting beyond the traditional pop song structure. He even revealed that his Tumbleweed Connection track “Burn Down The Mission” was an attempt to apply Nyro’s style to his own.

Then last week at the Laurie Beechman Theater in New York came the premiere of One Child Born—The Music Of Laura Nyro. Written by Louis Greenstein and performer Kate Ferber, the one-woman show involves Ferber’s remarkably accurate vocal and piano renditions of 11 Nyro favorites (including “Sweet Blindness,” “Wedding Bell Blues” and “Stoned Soul Picnic,” which were hits for the 5th Dimension; “Eli’s Comin’," a hit for Three Dog Night, and “And When I Die,” a hit for Blood, Sweat & Tears) and one Nyro-inspired original.

The songs are interspersed with little monologues spoken in character by Ferber.

“Some are made up and some are loosely based on people's ‘Nyro stories’ of how they were affected by her,” says Greenstein. “We wanted to put Laura’s music out there, but what we're trying to say is that art can change your life.”

Certainly it changed Ferber’s from very early on.

“Like I said in the show, I definitely grew up on her music,” says singer-songwriter Ferber, who is almost 24 and plays regularly in New York. “My mom introduced her music to me and my piano teacher gave me The Music Of Laura Nyro songbook.”

She actually brought out the now frayed text and used it once again at the show.

“It has every song from the first four albums,” Ferber continues, noting that Eli And The Thirteenth Confession, Nyro’s second album from 1968, was her favorite album back in eighth grade.

“She was so cool, deep and mysterious,” Ferber continued. “Like I said in the first monolog, I was the only one who knew who she was. A huge reason for doing this show is to make people my age now aware of her.”

To this end, Ferber throws a Nyro cover into every one of her own shows, prompting listeners to approach her afterwards with more “Laura stories.”

“They come up and say how much they loved her and how they remember her concert back in 1974 or whenever,” says Ferber. “The connections she had with her fans are so deep that all they want to do is talk about her.”

Judy Kuhn has one of the deepest Nyro connections.

The Tony-nominated actress picked up an Obie Award for her starring role in Eli’s Comin’, the novel 2001 trip through Nyro’s songs that was staged in New York at the Vineyard Theater. Never a huge Nyro fan before, Kuhn was so impacted by the experience that she performed Nyro songs solo as part of Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series, then recorded Serious Playground: The Songs of Laura Nyro in 2007.

“I felt like her music needed to be heard,” says Kuhn, echoing Ferber. “If you’re young you don’t recognize her, but anyone my age and even younger people know her songs.”

Much of Nyro’s music intuitively combined jazz and gospel elements with pop and r&b, and could be “so complicated and sophisticated that I don’t think I was mature enough [to fully appreciate it] when I was 11 or 12,” Kuhn notes. “But when I sat down and listened to those recordings as an adult, I got it.”

Being a “lyric driven” artist, Kuhn arranged the Serious Playground material around what Nyro’s words meant to her.

“Especially with a lyricist like that, whatever you do you want to be supporting the lyrics and making people listen in a new way than they might have done before,” says Kuhn, who continues to perform her album around the country. “But so much of her music is so original that you don’t know where it came from: It’s something very improvisatory that sprung from someplace in her soul that is very hard to define.”

For Ferber and many Nyro fans, though, it all comes down to an almost supernatural singing voice.

“No one sings like that,” says Ferber, pointing to Nyro’s “ridiculous” two-octave drop in “Timer” (which Ferber approximates in One Child Born). “Her voice is one of the most powerful sounds I ever heard, and as a singer just that alone is very influential. And now as I sit at the piano and play songs I’ve written and try to make my way in the music world, I see how much she has actually done to shape the roll of female singers and songwriters in pop culture—how she influenced us to the core.”

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