New Collection RAIN From Late Vocalist Nora York Out Now

Good Mood Records returns with the new album RAIN from the groundbreaking late vocalist and songwriter Nora York. Featuring songs from two innovative musical theatre works, created in collaboration with Jamie Lawrence, RAIN is available in digital and streaming formats today Friday, November 17. York was renowned for her soulful voice and hypnotic stage presence, in addition to her original songs and thought-provoking musical juxtapositions of contemporary jazz and pop music. RAIN is the second installment in a trilogy of posthumous releases, following Swoon (2019). The new album, which features Steve Tarshis on guitar, Dave Hofstra on bass, Jamie Lawrence on keyboards, Peter Grant on percussion, and a special appearance by Nora’s bother Andrew Schwartz on bassoon, is produced by Jamie Lawrence. To stream or download the album, visit Nora’s website HERE.

 

York and Lawrence’s music theater project about climate change, Water, Water Everywhere (tracks 2-3), was featured in a workshop production at the BRIC Performing Arts Center in Brooklyn. The show blended musings on the climate with a memoir of Nora’s childhood summers in Canada. Nora interviewed many climate scientists to inspire the text and introduced the idea of combining original songs with Handel’s Water Music. The piece’s pensive title song is followed by the chamber music-inspired “Tiny Blue Creature,” which shimmers with the imagery of nature.

 

Jamie says: “There is nothing particularly ‘watery’ about Handel’s music except for the fact that its first performance took place on a barge traveling up the Thames River in London! It was just this kind of inside joke that Nora loved and helped inspire many of the musical moments that happen when we transition from an original ballad, into an excerpt of Handel, and then back to the ballad. Although climate change was on everyone’s mind when we wrote these songs, mostly in 2012, they have only become more prescient with time.” 

 

RAIN also boasts six selections from the show Jump (tracks 4-9), a theatrical adaptation of Tosca with a potent mix of pop, folk and classical music that premiered at The Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival. It features a book by six-time Obie Award winner David Greenspan, and was directed by six-time Obie Award winner, and former artistic director of The Public, JoAnne Akalaitis. Greenspan returned to Victorien Sardou’s original 1887 French play, La Tosca, and integrated it with the biographical story of Sarah Bernhardt. Sardou wrote the play for Bernhardt, who spent a lifetime performing this part (only when the Puccini opera became a hit, did the original material fade from memory.)

 

These tracks feature guest vocalists bass-baritone Kevin Burdette and tenor Andrew Drost. Highlights include the melodic lilt of “Love and Beauty,” the light rhythmic bounce of “Love Only Me,” the ravishing harmonies of “Waiting,” and the plaintive drama of the finale “Vissi Darte.” Lawrence comments: “Nora was a profoundly political person who often brought her politics into her performances and her songwriting. The Tosca story of an artist fighting the politicians of her time deeply resonated with Nora.”

RAIN is bookended by two standalone songs. “Home Is Where the Heart Is” is a beautiful Nora original that never made it onto her 2006 album, What I Want. The closing is a heartfelt, stark-as-nails performance of Purcell’s “When I Am Laid in Earth.” It is a haunting interpretation of this classic reinvented by Nora’s unique burnished voice and her bother Andrew’s 18th century bassoon.

 

Jerry Kearns, Nora’s husband and collaborator, concludes: “In her person and her music, Nora discovered and revealed insights into layers of buried rhythms unifying the dissonance of daily perception She harmonized apparent difference and contradiction into sources of unity and strength. Hierarchies and boundaries stimulated her egalitarian search for connection across musical and social boundaries. For those who hear her captivating voice, Nora’s music reveals our unified soul underpinning surface difference.”

 

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Nora York 

(1956–2016) was an adventurous jazz singer and performance artist whose genre-crossing work defies easy categorization. Her concert work Power/Play was commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and performed at the 2006 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial. York has headlined at the Newport Jazz Festival, Ottawa Jazz Festival, JVC Jazz Festival, New Sounds Live at Merkin Hall, and Lincoln Center Out of Doors, for which she received a “Meet the Composer” grant. In 2013, she received a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation grant to compose and perform a song cycle as part of Marfa Dialogues/NY, an interdisciplinary citywide series on Climate Change. She won the Franklin Furnace “Future of the Present” grant for her collaboration with artist Nancy Spero and her piece “Bad News!” was presented at the 2013 River to River Festival New York.

 

York composed and recorded for television shows on A&E, Showtime, PBS, HBO, and “Klimawechsel,” the award-winning television series from German filmmaker Doris Dörrie. She also contributed to four of Dörrie’s feature films, including The Fisherman’s Wife, whose soundtrack was released by Virgin Records/EMI.

 

In 2005, music historian W. Royal Stokes featured a profile on York in the “Visionaries and Eclectics” section of Growing Up with Jazz, from Oxford University Press In addition, York’s TED Talk was presented in 2009 and she served as vocal coach for Clive Owen for the HBO series “The Knick.” Her previous albums include What I Want (2005); Alchemy, written with Grammy Award-winning composer Maria Schneider (1999); and To Dream the World (1995).

 

Jamie Lawrence is an eclectic musician active in film, television, and theater as a composer, orchestrator, and producer. He has racked up five Emmy awards and another nine Emmy nominations for his compositions and arrangements. He served as Music Director for the 2019 Tony Awards and has been its principal composer/arranger for many years. Jamie has scored many documentaries for HBO, including Dealing Dogs, Death on a Factory Farm, The Alzheimer’s Project - “Momentum in Science,” and produced and orchestrated the scores for many Rebecca Miller’s films, most recently Arthur Miller: Writer, Maggie’s Plan, and The Private Lives of Pippa Lee. He scored and contributed songs to Hulu’s teen musical romp Best Summer Ever.  As an orchestrator and arranger, he has penned arrangements for numerous musical luminaries such as Jessye Norman, Quincy Jones, Smokey Robinson, Audra McDonald, and Herbie Hancock. He is currently orchestrating and just co-produced the cast album to Days of Wine and Roses, the upcoming Broadway musical by Adam Guettel.

 

Jamie loves writing songs and in the past few years has co-written and produced albums for MuMu (Ladies First), Nora York (Swoon), as well as released his personal jazz foray, New York Suite. Jamie grew up in New York City and received a BA in music from Yale University. In his off hours, he has a sideline as a writer/performer of children’s songs under his alias, Jamie Broza. His first CD for children, Bad Mood Mom and other Good Mood Songs, made the Parents’ Choice Foundation’s list of the top 25 children’s CDs in the last 25 years. He is an adjunct professor of Film Scoring at the NYU Film Scoring masters program.

 

Nora York – “RAIN” TRACK LIST

 

1. Home Is Where the Heart Is*

2. Water, Water Everywhere

3. Tiny Blue Creature

4. Jump

5. Love and Beauty

6. Love Only Me

7. Waiting

8. Time Ran Out

9 Vissi Darte

10. When I Am Laid in Earth+

 

Songs written by Nora York and Jamie Lawrence, except * (written by Nora York) and + (written by Henry Purcell)