Billy Childs presented a magnificent, heart warming concert of Laura Nyro’s music at Sanders Theater in Cambridge on January 22. The performance drew on Childs’s 2014 album, Map to the Treasure: Reimagining Laura Nyro. The Sony Masterworks release expands on a pair of “Jazz-Chamber Music” albums that Childs has recorded over the past decade, including Lyric, released in 2005 on Lunacy Music, and a 2010 Artist Share project, Autumn: In Moving Pictures. The latter includes a stunning arrangement of Bill Evans’s “Waltz for Debby.”
Childs hears in Nyro’s musical oeuvre “an opera about a girl in New York City.” The Bronx-born pianist and composer was an early inspiration for Childs’s chamber jazz conception, in particular her 1970 album, Christmas and the Beads of Sweat. Side two of that album, suite-like and seemless, featured Duane Allman as well as Alice Coltrane playing harp, saxophonist Joe Farrell, and bassist Richard Davis. Three of the album’s songs are heard on Map to the Treasure, and were performed at Sanders: “Been on a Train,” “Upstairs By a Chinese Lamp,” and “Map to the Treasure.” The latter, Childs says, “was the beginning, for me, of various concepts in my musical life. Its repetitive pattern in A Minor is one of the first things I learned to play on the piano…It also, through Alice Coltrane’s extraordinarily beautiful and intelligent harp accompaniment, showed me how the harp could be used as a dramatic orchestral device, a lesson I took to heart with my current jazz/chamber ensemble.”
Map was produced by Larry Klein and features a cast of major name artists including Wayne Shorter, Esperanza Spalding, Renee Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, Dianne Reeves, Chris Botti (with whom Childs has toured), Shawn Colvin, Rickie Lee Jones, Susan Tedeschi, and others. At Sanders, Childs’s twelve-piece ensemble featured the Parker [String] Quartet, guitarist Peter Krause, bassist Ben Williams, drummer Billy Kilson, and two long-time collaborators, the harpist Carol Robbins and the saxophonist Bob Sheppard; Childs and Sheppard spent several years working with Freddie Hubbard’s Quintet. The singers were Alicia Olatuja and Becca Stevens, and they sang Nyro’s songs with arresting skill and passion.
Friday’s concert concluded with a rousing performance of “Stoned Soul Picnic.” At Sanders, Olatuja took the lead on the Nyro classic that Stephen Sondheim hailed as a song that “summed up what music is all about.” Childs premiered Map to the Treasure in concert at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 2014 with many of the guests who appeared on the album. Here’s 20 Feet From Stardom star Lisa Fischer singing the tune that Childs hears as a “reflection on the idea of friendship and free love.”
Brooklyn-based Stevens sings Nyro’s proto-feminist anthem “The Confession” on Map to the Treasure, and here at Monterey.
Olatuja, who sang at the Obama inaugural in 2013, was a delightful revelation. She’s been working with Childs for about a year, and is seen here in concert with bassist Christian McBride.
I’ve loved Laura from the first notes I heard of her music. Like the footage below of a 1969 performance of her gospel classic, “Save the Country,” Nyro played solo when I saw saw her in concerts that were separated by about 25 years. Seeing Laura alone enhanced the poetic intimacy of her music, but Childs’s lavish arrangements remind us not only of the music’s richness and complexity, but of how her vision continues to resonate with both musicians and audiences today.