Archives for January 17, 2005

I don’t mind admitting that it shook me to receive an e-mail the other day whose return address was NancyLaMott@aol.com. Even though it didn’t really come from beyond the grave, it had something of the same disorienting impact, if only for a moment.

Here’s what it said:

Midder Music Records is thrilled to announce the release of a brand-new Nancy LaMott CD, “Nancy LaMott: Live at Tavern on the Green,” the first new Nancy LaMott release in eight years.

Recorded live at Nancy’s last engagement at Tavern on the Green, just seven weeks before her untimely death, this CD is filled with radiant, joyful, gorgeously sung performances, as well as charming, funny, often touching patter.

Featuring some of your favorite Nancy LaMott standards plus many songs you’ve never heard her sing on CD before, this CD captures, for all time, the magic that was Nancy live.

SPECIAL OFFER!

CD’s don’t hit the stores until February 1, but you can order them online
right now at a special price, by going to nancylamott.com.

Order “Nancy LaMott: Live at Tavern on the Green,” or any of Nancy’s other six CD’s (they’re all being re-released) before February 1, and pay only $13.98 plus shipping and handling (a $3.00 discount).

Offer good until February 1 only.

Nancy’s back at last! SPREAD THE WORD!

Midder Music sent me an advance copy of Live at Tavern on the Green last week. At first I was reluctant to listen to it–afraid, really. I was in the audience when it was taped, in October of 1995, shortly after Nancy told me that the cancer for which she was being treated had spread to her liver. I knew as I watched her perform that she might not live much longer, though I was doing my best not to think about it any more than I could help. She knew, too, and the songs she chose to sing that night would have given her secret away to anyone who was paying attention: “The People That You Never Get to Love.” “Sailin’ On.” “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was.” “The Promise (I’ll Never Say Goodbye).” Not that you would have guessed it from the open-hearted, uninhibited way she sang them, the same way she sang everything, as if there wouldn’t be any more tomorrows. Only this time there really weren’t: I had Thanksgiving dinner with Nancy and her fianc

Note that the Top Fives are all new this morning! Look, ponder, click through, investigate….

“Hence the despotic and all-absorbing power of art, as also its astonishing power of soothing: it frees from every human care, it establishes the artifex, artist or artisan, in a world apart, cloistered, defined and absolute, in which to devote all the strength and intelligence of his manhood to the service of the thing which he is making. This is true of every art; the ennui of living and willing ceases on the threshold of every studio or workshop.”

Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism