Margo Guryan - Words and Music (2024)

Margo Guryan Died in 2021. Her Music Keeps Getting Rediscovered. “Words and Music,” a new anthology, shines light on a little-known but increasingly beloved master of pop and jazz songwriting. In the late summer of 1970, Elton John arrived at Los Angeles International Airport for his debut U.S. shows and was greeted by another wildly talented piano-playing singer-songwriter: Margo Guryan. Her husband, David Rosner, worked for the company that signed John, and together they helped him get sorted in the run-up to his legendary performances at the Troubadour, kicking off a long, spectacular career. Guryan’s career proved less of a spectacle. After modest success as a jazz-pop songwriter, she recorded one album of her own, with Rosner’s encouragement. “Take a Picture” was alive with dazzling melodies, lyrical wit, strikingly intimate vocals and marvelously florid arrangements — a small masterpiece of the microgenre known as sunshine pop. But Guryan was a reluctant performer who refused to tour, and her album, released in 1968, was a commercial flop, after her label barely promoted it. And yet, in a unique twist on a familiar story, the 11 songs of “Take a Picture” became a shared secret around the world; pirate pressings overseas earned her the sobriquet “The Soft Pop Queen of Japan.” In 2000 the LP was officially reissued, followed by others collecting her demo recordings — lean performances that could pass for 21st-century indie-pop.

Her work caught the ears of music supervisors in TV (“Minx,” “I Think You Should Leave”), film (“Sam & Kate”) and advertising (Tag Heuer). Her demo of “Why Do I Cry” became a TikTok meme, spurring thousands of video clips by (presumably) nostalgia-loving sad girls and sad boys; at last check, the song had 23 million streams on Spotify.

The apotheosis of this snowballing rediscovery — or “discovery,” as Guryan, who died in 2021, preferred to say — arrives this week with “Words and Music,” a lavish collection of recordings, many previously unreleased, from the boutique label Numero Group. The archival flush, illuminated with a historical essay by the music critic Jenn Pelly, shows the scope of Guryan’s talent to be even wider than fans have known.

Some of those fans are fellow musicians. “So many of Margo’s recordings are in the magic zone that songwriters try to reach where everything is pure and beautiful,” Molly Rankin of the band Alvvays wrote in an email. “She had such a powerful sense of pop harmony,” Rankin added, “but she often tempered the sweetness with a dead-eyed realism.”

Azniv Korkejian, who records as Bedouine and has covered Guryan’s songs, also marvels at her craft. “You can tell there’s a very opinionated person behind those melodies, whether it’s on love or politics,” Korkejian said in an email. “I think she’s inspired a lot of music that gets released nowadays,” she said, which probably makes her music “feel just as current.”

MARGO IRIS GURYAN grew up in the Far Rockaway section of Queens, in a large matriarchal household presided over by her grandmother Bertha, a Russian Jewish immigrant. Margo’s mother, Evelyn, was a radiologist; her stay-at-home dad, Seymour, was forever playing Tin Pan Alley standards on their grand piano.

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He spurred a musical passion in his young daughter, who also had an unusual way with words: In a 2017 Instagram post, Guryan shared a yellowed letter from Young America magazine dated Feb. 17, 1949, noting that her poem titled “Rocktwirp Yeldersbirth Bittington Eweese” had been accepted for publication, and that the magazine, aimed at primary school children, “would like to see more of your work in the future.” She was 11.

As a music composition major at Boston University, Guryan adored Bach but had her head turned by jazz. She took lessons from the pianist Jaki Byard, and a jazz history course with the promoter George Wein, who let the musician attend shows at Storyville, the club he managed. During a Miles Davis Quintet gig, she was persuaded after a few drinks to sub for the intermission pianist; after playing some originals, Guryan earned an approving “Yeah, baby!” from Davis.

Her acceptance into the short-lived Lenox School of Jazz in 1959 was pivotal. The school, a groundbreaking center for legitimizing jazz education, was set up in the Berkshires as an offshoot of the Music Inn — a culture resort run by a New York City arts power couple, Philip and Stephanie Barber.

According to Jeremy Yudkin’s “The Lenox School of Jazz,” the dean was John Lewis, of the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Guryan’s classmates included many future notables: the pianist Steve Kuhn, the composer-educator David Baker and two already-accomplished musicians, Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. Guryan was one of just two women among about 40 students, and suffered the expected hassles. But there were also important moments of respect; Coleman performed her composition “Inn Tune” alongside his own in the semester’s final concert.

Guryan liked writing and disliked performing. According to her stepson, Jonathan Rosner, who helped produce the new anthology, she changed from a piano major to composition “because she didn’t want to give the senior recital.” He chalked up some of it to stage fright. Guryan was critical of her vocal shortcomings, and she noted the toll that gigging life took on her first husband — the trombonist Bob Brookmeyer — and their marriage.

After college she signed a publishing deal with John Lewis’s MJQ, a premier home for jazz writers, and worked as a secretary at Impulse!, the producer Creed Taylor’s new jazz label. Guryan’s songs got noticed; they were recorded by Harry Belafonte, Chris Connor, Anita O’Day and others.

Among the revelations on “Words and Music” are Guryan’s demos from this period, 1957 to 1966 — songs that are at once playful, emotionally potent and strikingly bold for the time. “Kiss & Tell” instructs a lover, with cool reason, how to leave his spouse. “Four Letter Words,” recorded at the height of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, sings a lexicon of “dirty words” that begins, “wars, kill, guns, hate, hurt, harm, dead.”

In 1966, Guryan was living in the West Village of Manhattan, where David Frishberg, a kindred songwriter, dropped by with a copy of the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds.” Wowed by Brian Wilson’s “God Only Knows,” Guryan began writing in a new style for “Take a Picture.”

Befitting its cultural moment, that album is full of love songs draped in Sgt. Pepper-ish splendor: orchestral strings, psychedelic guitar, Dixieland brass, harp, harpsichord, flutes. Guryan’s openhearted charm, along with the songs’ melodic indestructibility, kept everything afloat. One high point is how she weaves the Bach chorale “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” into the swinging march of “Someone I Know,” a reverie of hooking up with a stranger.

Notwithstanding the album’s poor sales, its songs found other outlets in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the sneakily sexy “Sunday Morning” in particular. It was a minor hit for the group Spanky and Our Gang, and got traction via rewritten lyrics in France (Marie Laforêt’s “Et Si Je T’aime”) and Israel (Shula Chen’s “Bo Habaita”).

Guryan kept writing and making new demos, which sometimes veered topical. A song trilogy inspired by the Watergate hearings included “The Hum,” its title referring to the sound of the famous tape erasures, with thinly veiled lyrics like “The A.G. said he’d do anything/To help the President become the King.”

The release of Guryan’s stripped-down demos allowed their gemlike structures to resonate anew, as breathily intimate, perfectly imperfect singing grew in popularity; see Lana Del Rey and Billie Eilish. Even Guryan’s topical songs felt timely. When Korkejian first heard “The Hum,” which she would cover, “my jaw dropped,” she said. “I couldn’t believe how relevant it was.” Guryan’s songs continue to connect with artists, and a tribute LP is scheduled for later this year.

Guryan lived to see her belated canonization, though much of her later life was devoted to giving piano lessons, something she also excelled at. As a teaching tool, she composed “The Chopsticks Variations,” a virtuoso reimagining of the instructional standard that shimmers with her trademark wit, emotion and invention. The singer-songwriter-pianist Ben Folds last year called it “freakish,” “beautiful” and one of his favorite piano recordings. (It’s included in a deluxe version of the new anthology.)

“She loved teaching,” said Jonathan Rosner, who recalled regularly coming home from school to his stepmother in the living room with a student at her Blüthner grand piano. “She taught a lot of students. She couldn’t have been happier.”

Tracklist
CD1
1. If I Lose (1:23)
2. You Promised (1:41)
3. The Wise Man (1:56)
4. The Morning After (5:28)
5. Moon Ride (2:52)
6. More Understanding Than a Man (3:19)
7. More Understanding Than a Man (2:03)
8. There I Was (2:06)
9. Kiss and Tell (2:47)
10. Half-Way In Love (2:19)
11. Goodbye July (2:31)
12. Four Letter Words (1:36)
13. Hurry On Home (1:58)
14. I Ought To Stay Away From You (2:40)
15. I Love (2:08)
16. Under My Umbrella (2:01)
17. I Don't Intend to Spend Christmas Without You (2:20)

CD2
1. Sunday Morning (2:20)
2. Thoughts (2:15)
3. Love Songs (2:54)
4. Don't Go Away (2:05)
5. Take A Picture (3:09)
6. Sun (2:36)
7. What Can I Give You (2:32)
8. Come to Me Slowly (2:23)
9. The 8:17 Northbound Success Merry-Go-Round (2:11)
10. Something's Wrong with the Morning (1:46)
11. Think Of Rain (2:25)
12. Can You Tell (2:09)
13. Someone I Know (2:46)
14. Love (5:27)

CD3
1. Why Do I Cry (2:15)
2. Spanky And Our Gang (2:05)
3. Most of My Life (2:12)
4. It's Alright Now (2:02)
5. Timothy Gone (1:47)
6. The Hum (2:45)
7. Please Believe Me (3:54)
8. Yes I Am (3:17)
9. I Think a Lot About You (2:18)
10. I'd Like to See the Bad Guys Win (1:42)
11. Values (2:32)
12. California Shake (3:28)
13. Hold Me Dancin' (2:55)
14. Shine (3:03)
15. Goodbye July (3:54)