A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH NANCY HARROW


Wild Women Don't Have the Blues was the title of an album that Nancy Harrow made in 1960, a full decade plus before I was even born. But discovering Nat Hentoff's genius at a young enough age, I have been able to appreciate and more importantly collect the Candid sessions Hentoff produced, one of which was the before mentioned Harrow recording. Admittedly, as much as I enjoyed the recording, I failed to follow Harrow's discography, until I was turned onto the Artists House label, one that is revolutionizing the way music, hopefully, will be sold in my time. Harrow's latest, Winter Dreams is one of the first in the Artists House catalog, and one I clearly enjoyed because it turns out both Harrow and I have something in common, a love for The Great Gatsby. I named my bar after him (The Gatsby) and Harrow, well without spoiling the ending, dedicated the album to him. I was honored to have an opportunity to speak with Ms. Harrow, and what lies beneath is, as always, unedited and in her own words.


FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.

NANCY HARROW: I started out as a dancer, actually. I used to listen to jazz because I had two older brothers and they had a big jazz collection. What actually started me wanting to be a singer was listening to Billie Holiday and that didn't happen until college. It wasn't something from childhood. I always sang, but I didn't think I was a singer. I just sang in the shower.


FJ: What was it about Lady Day?

NANCY HARROW: It was her emotional intensity and what she did with the lyrics that was different from everybody else. That really touched me and that made me decide to become a singer.


FJ: You spoke of how you always sang, even if initially it was limited to the shower, but singing a jazz standard is certainly different than singing a pop tune.

NANCY HARROW: Yes, it definitely is, but I disagree with all my musician friends about it because I always think the difference is in the lyric and that you can't sing, no matter how good a musician you are, you can't make something out of a song that has a meaningless lyric and that doesn't touch you in some way. I think pop tunes in general have dumber lyrics than the jazz standards. I have always picked all my songs by the lyrics and whether it speaks to me or not. That is what has gotten me so now I am writing them because it is the lyric that interests me.


FJ: Whose lyrics were of interest to you?

NANCY HARROW: Oh, many. There are just so many, Fred. All the songs that I have ever sung are the ones that I've liked. I've never sung a song that I don't like the lyric of. I avoided them right from the beginning. I loved Harold Arlen songs and I loved Johnny Mercer's lyrics, Ira Gershwin. And there were many songs where I loved the melody and the lyric isn't good enough so I don't sing it. It has always been this battle of the two elements of singing that have intrigued me and it is when the lyric and when the melody both come together that I find it really meaningful.


FJ: How did the Wild Women Don't Have the Blues session come about?

NANCY HARROW: What happened was, I was at the time, sitting in with musicians that I knew. Nat Hentoff's wife was a friend of mine. She said that she was going to bring him in to hear me. It was one night when I was singing at the Five Spot, sitting in with Kenny Burrell and she brought Nat in to hear me and he wanted to record me and that is how that happened. At that time, he had this Candid, he was the A&R man for Candid and that is how that album came about. You have that album?


FJ: I have most of the Candid sessions.

NANCY HARROW: It is nice that it is still around. It is interesting because my musician friends who are more modern than that one, that was Nat's idea to make it those kinds of musicians for the first album, which was fine with me because it was very familiar. The other musicians that I was friendly with at the time, all thought that that was an old fashioned album. But I see that it has lasted and it was fine. Kenny Burrell was the odd one in that group. I brought him in because I met him sitting in with him. I actually met him by just walking up and asking him, "Can I sing with you?" I felt a debt that when I got my first album, I would ask him to be on it.


FJ: Was that how ad hoc gigs came to pass, by just the asking?

NANCY HARROW: At that time, it was much easier. You could do that. I don't think you could do that now. I had gone up there to hear the music and I was with a friend and he kept saying, "Ask him if you can sit in? What have you got to lose?" He kept pushing me and I finally did it. That was one of the first performances I ever did, by asking him if I could sit in and that is how I met Kenny Burrell.


FJ: You also recorded Secrets for the Italian label, Soul Note.

NANCY HARROW: That was the first time I wrote anything was on that album. There were four original tunes on it and they were the first songs that I had written.


FJ: You sing a favorite of mine, "Pennies from Heaven."

NANCY HARROW: Yes, which albums do you have of mine?


FJ: The before mentioned Candid recording, both Soul Note sessions, and your latest for Artists House. The Bonandrinis were kind enough to send the Soul Note materials.

NANCY HARROW: He was so wonderful to me. He called up and said that he wanted to make an album. That is how Secrets came about. I threw in these original tunes because it was the first time I had a chance to do that. Then the second album, I talked him into. I said I had this idea of writing tunes based on a literary subject and he went for that because he used to be a literature teacher in Italy. That is how Lost Lady came about.


FJ: And you latest, Winter Dreams: The Life and Passions of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

NANCY HARROW: I will give you the history of it. I started to do it just the way I had done the other two. Lost Lady was based on a novel by Willa Cather called Lost Lady and The Marble Faun was based on a Hawthorne novel. This one, I decided to do the Gatsby because I liked the book so much. I started to write the tunes for Gatsby when I found out that there was this opera being done and I didn't want to compete with that and so I switched half way and made it about Fitzgerald rather than about Gatsby. It was easy to do that because everything Fitzgerald wrote was autobiographical and so I could write the songs either about the characters or about him and his own life. That is how that happened and that is why I called it The Life and Passions of F. Scott Fitzgerald because it really is about his own life.


FJ: I have long been fascinated with The Great Gatsby. I named my bar The Gatsby.

NANCY HARROW: Oh, really. You have a bar?


FJ: I have a bar.

NANCY HARROW: In addition to writing?


FJ: The bar pays for the writing. The writing saves me from the abyss of peddling the world's only legal drug.

NANCY HARROW: That is so funny.


FJ: I initially read Fitzgerald's great American novel in high school.

NANCY HARROW: I reread it when I started to work on this and I was floored as to how perfect it is. But I read it in college and I loved it then too, but I liked it even more when I read it again. I just think Fitzgerald is such a beautiful writer and the theme of this longing and unattainable love, well, there are so many themes in The Gatsby, but that one is most poignant. I took quite a few things from it, from the themes of it for this music and lyrics of these songs. "Until It Comes Up Love" comes from the last lines of the book. There is a Daisy song, "Oh God, I'm Sophisticated." There also something about him. His own life is so sad. The end of his life, what happens at the end of it, first, he hits the high part of his life when he is very young. He was only twenty-three when he was such a success with his first novel. Then he gets married to the young girl that he is longing for after he got his novel and they are on the top of the world. Then the marriage begins to fray slightly and also, her mental health starts to disintegrate. He is left writing all these commercial stories that he doesn't want to write in order to support their lifestyle and eventually, she is just hospitalized and he has to support the child and her hospital and still keep going. He begins to drink and his life is just so sad. The thing that really gets to me is at the end, that when is trying to be a screenwriter in Hollywood, he goes into a Hollywood bookstore and none of his books are there. None of his books are in print. He is totally forgotten. It just so horrible that someone so gifted would be totally ignored. What is amazing or ironic is that it all came back after his death. Ten years later, he was being taught in all the colleges. He was just one of the best American writers. Anyway, it was such a very sad life, especially with his alcoholism, it is so awful. He even loses his own daughter. He can no longer support her and he lets agent take care of her when he is in college. His letters are really very sad. He is so eager to make a name for himself.


FJ: Makes for interesting working material.

NANCY HARROW: It really did. I read a lot of books about him. I read all his novels. I read a lot of biographies and books about him. He is a fascinating character. And then he is a romantic. That is the other thing that I liked so much about him. He is gifted and romantic. He is admirable. He is so sweet. I got so I hated Hemingway while reading about Fitzgerald because he was so generous to Hemingway. He had the publisher first and he sort of discovered Hemingway and got him to publish Hemingway and Hemingway was totally ungrateful and even criticized him in writing afterwards and made fun of him. He was a horrible character.


FJ: And thus, the Hemingway curse.

NANCY HARROW: I didn't know that. I was so happy when he had outdistanced Hemingway.

Fred Jung is the Editor-In-Chief and is Wang Chunging tonight. Comments? Email Him