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After school she signed a publishing cope with John Lewis’s MJQ, a premier house for jazz writers, and labored as a secretary at Impulse!, the producer Creed Taylor’s new jazz label. Guryan’s songs received observed; they had been recorded by Harry Belafonte, Chris Connor, Anita O’Day and others.
Among the revelations on “Words and Music” are Guryan’s demos from this era, 1957 to 1966 — songs which can be without delay playful, emotionally potent and strikingly daring for the time. “Kiss & Tell” instructs a lover, with cool motive, tips on how to go away his partner. “Four Letter Words,” recorded on the peak of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, sings a lexicon of “soiled phrases” that begins, “wars, kill, weapons, hate, damage, hurt, dead.”
In 1966, Guryan was dwelling within the West Village of Manhattan, the place David Frishberg, a kindred songwriter, dropped by with a duplicate of the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds.” Wowed by Brian Wilson’s “God Only Knows,” Guryan started writing in a brand new model for “Take a Picture.”
Befitting its cultural second, that album is stuffed with love songs draped in Sgt. Pepper-ish splendor: orchestral strings, psychedelic guitar, Dixieland brass, harp, harpsichord, flutes. Guryan’s openhearted attraction, together with the songs’ melodic indestructibility, saved every thing afloat. One excessive level 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 gross sales, its songs discovered different retailers within the late Nineteen Sixties and early ’70s, the sneakily horny “Sunday Morning” particularly. It was a minor hit for the group Spanky and Our Gang, and received traction by way of rewritten lyrics in France (Marie Laforêt’s “Et Si Je T’aime”) and Israel (Shula Chen’s “Bo Habaita”).
Guryan saved writing and making new demos, which typically veered topical. A music trilogy impressed by the Watergate hearings included “The Hum,” its title referring to the sound of the well-known tape erasures, with thinly veiled lyrics like “The A.G. mentioned he’d do something/To assist the President grow to be the King.”
