LAURA NYRO: “Walk The Dog And Light The Light (Columbia)

WITH LAURA Nyro, the question “who?” now applies. Somehow this maverick singer-songwriter got removed from the Seventies record. The reasons were twofold: a long retirement with only one album each for the Eighties and now the Nineties, and an idiosyncratic style that ensured she was never going to inspire a second generation of imitators who’d become the curators of her reputation.

Besides, with Nyro, there were no neutrals; you either adored or hated her. Her champions set her alongside Van Morrison or Tim Buckley as a white r’n’b innovator; her detractors sneered that this romantic was melodramatic and hysterical with her music often the casualty of unrestrained pretension.

A New York Italian who took taste-defying risks, Nyro certainly had an extravagant operatic streak, more suited to La Scala than the Fillmore. Often she seemed unbothered to graduate from a whisper to scream; she started with a scream and then went nuclear. And alongside this, shall we say, florid vocal style was music propelled by her own driven pianistics whose arrangements, with their sudden and unsignalled changes of tempo, owed much to Gil Evans and Charles Mingus.

But was she too original to figure in the honour-roll of Seventies women, led by Joni Mitchell, Janis Joplin and Bonnie Raitt. Some derided her songs as the confessions of a professional victim but I think this was the distaste of cooler temperaments who couldn’t empathise with the lack of irony in her Latin soul.

After her first three albums, Eli And The Thirteenth Confession, New York Tendaberry and Christmas And The Beads Of Sweat, the white heat didn’t last. She pared back her style to limpid reflections of the uptown r’n’b vocal groups of her New York youth and then effectively resigned from the race.

Walk The Dog And Light The Light is definitely the record of an older, calmer woman. Opening with a Phil Spector song ‘Oh Yeah, Maybe Baby’ and closing with Curtis Mayfield’s ‘I’m So Proud/Dedicated To The One I Love’, Nyro definitely seems concerned to establish the common threads between infatuated youth and stable maturity.

Similarly, her own songs no longer have the earlier dazzling distractions. Produced by Steely Dan aide, Gary Katz, they’re polished restatements of the classic Sixties’ soul ballad era with serenity replacing her earlier impassioned confusion.

The real problem is lyrical. After such a lengthy sabbatical, she has little original to say. Now she’s prescriptive not descriptive and while I’ve nothing against songs of female solidarity, I’m unsettled by the loss of her painter’s way with words. Sometimes saying the right thing can shield the eye from visions and desensitise the most audacious imagination.

If this was a Carole King record, I’d be content. Don’t be mistaken – I know I can’t demand that Laura Nyro recreate the troubled visions of her first trio of albums but I would like to be reminded of her unpredictability. Many will like Walk The Dog And Light The Light but I’d like to hope that there’ll be others who now find her earliest works. They just might venture on a spectacular voyage of rediscovery.

• Bill Graham