Where Are We Going Now?

Song 278: For an illustration of how music can take you to some unexpected places, this week’s playlist track is Upstairs By a Chinese Lamp by Laura Nyro, who also wrote the song. In the fall of 1970 i saw Laura Nyro perform a concert in Chicago, touring to promote her latest album Christmas and the Beads of Sweat which included this cut, and she probably covered it that night, but it was her performance of another track from the record that left a deeper impression on me (Song 174 — Been on a Train), plus a couple of her older hits that she did to close out the show. Fast forward a few years, and on a typical bone-chilling Chicago winter night, as I entered a woman’s apartment in the process of helping her move some items out to a car, I heard her stereo playing a song that sounded familiar, but I couldn’t identify it, and had to ask her what it was. When she answered, I felt as if I should have known, and when I got back to my place, I soon had Christmas and the Beads of Sweat on the turntable, reacquainting myself with music I had learned to love a few years earlier, but that I had somehow lost track of at some point along the way. One thing that always impressed me about Laura Nyro was the way in which she varied the timing in her songs to fit the emotion and the movement of the track. In most forms of music, from classical to RnR, musicians usually follow time signatures religiously, or try to do so, but Ms. Nyro made some very impressive recordings in her career that did not adhere to strict timing, and those tracks convey a sense of freedom, taking off and flying in any direction, in a way that could change at any moment, and perhaps coming in for a landing in a very unexpected place. This song provides an entertaining example of this type of unexpected flight of fancy, and along with a number of her other cuts, such as Been on a Train, it opened my ears to possibilities for playing with timing, and inspired some of my own personal flights of fancy, such as Shake the Dust. On a side note, for anyone who thinks I might be pushing the season by posting a song from an album with Christmas in the title, just remember that four days from today is a day commonly known as Black Friday, and I think most of us know that it has earned that name because of its connection to a certain December holiday.