Warm Snow

Made a visit here on Madison last night to see Judy Collins.
She was a magnificent free spirit looking like Titania and Miss Haversham and giving off a glow that lit the room.

 Her repertoire was as colourful and rich as her life which took us from the dramatic career change in her teens from the concert stage as a potential virtuoso pianist to folk legend at Woodstock and the dingy clubs of  Manhattan like The Bitter End.  She was awake in the early morning hours when Bob Dylan penned "Tambourine Man" and dished the dirt with young Midler and Mama Cass. She has probably had to resort to asking questions about a lot of her life.  "If you can remember the sixties, you weren't there" !
Her programme was deliciously varied to illustrate the turns her musical career has taken. She opened with "Chelsea Morning" which is now so much more meaningful in that we lived right round the corner from it last year.  She rendered songs by Sondheim, Lennon and McCartney, Arlen and Harburg and John Denver and was quite encouraging in having us all sing along.  The highlights were her two of her own songs, "One I Was" and "The Blizzard" which she played and sang beautifully at the piano, Joan Baez's "Diamonds and Rust" and a medley of Brel songs which were throbbing with imagery and sadness.  Her voice is like a young girl's in its purity and simplicity. But underneath is the power of a deep river. Her show is very stream of consciousness and she occasionally changed the order of the programme at whim or sang snatches of tunes out of the blue. George Shearing had died that morning so she spontaneously sang "Laura" which he used to play when he visited her house. She invited Glen Hansard (Oscar winning star and composer of the film "Once") to join her onstage. He stood in casual attire holding a guitar that looked like it had had a foot through it  and rocked the room with his gutsy songs.
We were very honoured to have been there and to have been invited to meet her afterwards by our gracious host, Richard Hillman, long time publicist for this most beautiful of rooms.

And here are some shots of the Marcel Vertes murals, created in  1955 and restored to its pastel glory in 2007 after the tarry brownness of years of cigarette smoke.

 Thanks again Richard!