INTERVIEW: Audiences still ‘Swoon’ for Nora York’s music
Photo: Nora York will be remembered at a special Joe’s Pub concert. Photo courtesy of Stephanie Berger / Provided by Fortune Creative with permission.
The late great singer Nora York left quite the indelible influence on the indie and cabaret music scene in New York City. The acclaimed vocalist and songwriter tragically died from pancreatic cancer in 2016, but her music continues to live on, thanks to her husband, Jerry Kearns, and her frequent collaborator, pianist Jamie Lawrence — not to mention her many, many students from NYU.
To commemorate the singer, who had an almost indescribable soulful voice, Good Mood Records recently released Swoon, a compilation; this recording actually features York’s voice, along with the instrumentation of her band.
To celebrate the album’s release, Lawrence will stage a special concert Monday, Oct. 7 at Joe’s Pub in the Village (tickets are sold out). The Public Theater cabaret room was actually a favorite concert venue for York.
On Monday night, Lawrence will be joined by York’s other band members: Dave Hofstra on bass, Peter Grant on drums and Jack Broza on guitar. Special guests will also play throughout the night.
Lawrence first met York in 2002 when the singer approached him about producing a new record.
“She was a friend of a friend, and I went to see her at Joe’s Pub perform,” Lawrence said in a recent phone interview. “And she was amazing, and I also had some thoughts about how we could make her more amazing. And so when she came to talk with me, we agreed that I would produce her next record, so I produced her record called What I Want. And then after that we just continued. I started performing with her band. I started producing, directing for her. We started writing a lot of songs together, and we worked on a musical theater project. We worked on some TV theme songs.”
Lawrence remembers York as a dedicated professor at NYU. In fact, he was brought in to her classroom on a regular basis to teach cabaret skills to the aspiring performers.
“We recorded a lot of songs for a lot of different projects,” he said. “Some were just new songs for an unknown album in the future. We did a theater project called Jump at the Under the Radar Festival at Joe’s Pub, which was about the life of Sarah Bernhardt mixed with the opera Tosca. … We had other songs from a show called Water Water [Everywhere] that really remained in workshop form that we did at the BRIC arts center in Brooklyn on climate change. Then suddenly she passed away tragically, and when I looked back, I was shocked to learn that we had only put out one record of hers in all that time.”
Lawrence had tons of her songs simply sitting on the computer in his studio, so he started to work with Kearns, who was committed to put out his wife’s recorded work.
Here’s what Kearns had to say about York’s influence: ““Her unforgettable voice and presence flew her poetry to us,” he wrote in an email to Hollywood Soapbox. “Her deep commitment was to a soulful conscious voice in her music. Nora York sang about love and empathy in the garden of desire, confusion and disorder. Listening to her illuminated our lives. Her music embraces a poetry for understanding. Nora had an intriguing way of rolling the lyrics back on themselves to reveal her mind and soul. She gave herself fully to us to take into our hearts and hold close.”
He added: “She always performed with her shoes off. When I asked, she told me she liked to feel the ground when she sang. Nora’s performances were mesmerizing. She reminded me of a swan. In a blink, her stunning gracefulness could flow between vamp, priestess and truthsayer. It was always a thrill when she slowly raised her slender mile-long arms, reaching ever upward with the span of a Red Ibis in flight. Her hands resembled two beautiful birds fluttering at the top. In her art and her life, Nora stood firmly behind her beliefs. She beat the odds stacked against a gifted innovator and brought wonderful music to us.”
It took Lawrence and Kearns two-and-a-half years to go back through the recordings and compile an album. Their project ended with the recently released Swoon.
The songs on the new recording are a motley variety of tunes. “Amelia” is from a musical project about Amelia Earhart, while “Earliest Memory” and “Rain Come Down” are from Water Water Everywhere. There’s one addition that was actually recorded for What I Want, but didn’t get on that album. So Lawrence included it on this one.
“A bunch of songs we sort of did the general tracking for, and Nora sang,” he said. “But I never quite finished mixing them or adding piano to them, so there was quite a lot of work to be done to get them in shape. Throughout, her singing is extraordinary, so what the important thing was, was that those were her vocals.”
At the Joe’s Pub tribute concert, the set list will mostly be focused on selections from Swoon, but Lawrence said there may be a few surprises.
“All the singers are going to be alumni from Nora’s different NYU classes, all of whom I worked with,” Lawrence said. “They’re all coming in to perform Nora because we all loved her so much. She was an incredible influence on these young singers.”
That influence, in Lawrence’s estimation, had something to do with York’s incredibly unique interpretations of other singer’s songs. York had an uncanny ability to combine genres (like a Miles Davis tune with a Jimi Hendrix tune) for a wholly unforgettable interpretive experience.
“She’d find interesting ways of combining songs,” he said. “She was great at really showing how to take a song that you heard a thousand times and try to find a way to make it your own song and make it unique to your own performance of it. She had all sorts of fun exercises she used to do with the students to make that happen. I learned from her.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Swoon by Nora York and Jamie Lawrence is now available. The tribute concert will take place Monday, Oct. 7 at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater. Click here for more information. Tickets are currently sold out.
