Headline, July13, 2013

'''MUSIC : SOLDIER OF THE HEART'''

Nanacy LaMott doesn't remember what she sang at that Fourth of July party thirty years ago. The guess is a lot of early Streisand. ''She taught me to sing,'' Nancy says to anyone who asks. And much like Streisand. Nancy brings a surprising point of view to many of the songs she does.

In her youth, when the school staged a Broadway musical, everyone but Nancy attempted to emulate the cast album. Nancy came in with the original interpretation that were thrilling to hear. Somehow, the material was Nancy-fied. Examples of later Nancy-fication : ''It Might as Well Be Spring'' emerges from an impatient, and  angry girl.

''I've got the Sun in the morning and the Moon at Night'' allows her to tease the song's Pollyanna heart by expressing a progressive dissatisfaction with those two meager possessions. And her Sondheim piece, in almost all performances has never failed to provoke an almost visceral reaction from the always sold-out house.

The two ballads she does, ''Good thing Going'' and ''Not a Day Goes By.'' from Merrily We Roll Along, are among the most dangerously evocative reminders in popular music of how tenuous romantic love can be. They convey the merciless insanity of obsession and the horror felt when a lover is revealed as a ''cunning terrorist''.

Nancy is not all embarrassed to lay bare the dept of her experience with these messy matters. That she does so through a performance as rigorous as and real as any given by Streep or De Niro, while remaining musically centered in the shocking beauty of her singing, creates five minutes of theater so shattering that it is invariably met with audible sobs from the members of the audience for whom she speaks.

Her singing honors the composer's notes, as well. She lands in the middle of the B flat or the F sharp, never flirting with the struggles to get there. There is, too, a tremor a throbbing, at the surface and well below it, that suggests a passion distributed unexploitatively. A listener is jubilant and teary all at once. These not necessarily contradictory emotions are a sweet invasion. Their fusion is Nancy's inevitable result.

Nancy LaMott is one of the most gifted musicians of our times and a woman so entirely unself-aggrandizing; so empathic, maternal and steadfast that she de-emphasizes her elevated musical self by lack of reference to it. Nancy LaMott, a white light in the middle of any action, is meticulous essentially unimprovisational, painfully honest.

Way down deep in her singing lies the very reason for her popular music- the transmission of passion: the articulation of its absence, the voracious longings of the heart. If there are singers to be heard while chewing Gum, Nancy LaMott is to be received without any distracting provisions at all.

Not even a simple glass of water.

President Bill Clinton often invited her to the White House, to entertain  -the sole act of that evening. Very very few singers get invited. Those who do, do so,  - (but) they are the ones who tend towards the sort of material to which they affix a highly personal imprint

Music after all is the Soldier of The Heart.

With respectful dedication to the on oh- so - lampoonable fashion world and the fashion victims.

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless