Stoned Soul Picnic: The Best of Laura Nyro

Though she was an innovator in '60s pop-rock on a par with Paul Simon, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro's place in the history books is not as secure as those of her peers. Whether this is due to her markedly reduced output after her late-'60s/early-'70s heyday, the inconsistency of her later releases or some indefinable sociological phenomenon is hard to say. What this two-CD career retrospective does prove beyond a shadow of a doubt is that Nyro was a true original. She merged jazz, gospel, R&B and girl-group pop to create an unprecedented form that was both sonically rich and instantly accessible.
STONED SOUL PICNIC features Nyro's broad, poetic vision on great early songs like "Gibsom Street" and "New York Tendaberry" as well as on cuts best known through other singers' versions ("And When I Die", "Stoney End", etc.). What emerges over the course of these two discs is the highly-developed aesthetic sensibility of an artist who not only understood the sources of her inspiration, but had enough of a vision to assimilate those sources and take them someplace new.|