Nancy Harrow (born October 3, 1930, New York City) is a dedicated and talented American jazz composer , lyricist and singer. She may not be a household name, but in the early 1960s and again starting in the late '70s, she recorded with some of the best jazz musicians in the business. Modeling her vocal style on her favorite singer, Billie Holiday, Nancy specialized in a crying blues sound. In all, Nancy has recorded 16 albums.
Harrow was born in New York City, the youngest of three children. She was educated in N.Y.C. and at Bennington (Vermont) where she studied literature and dance and graduated with a B.A. Her musical education began with the study of classical piano at the age of seven (with her aunt, May Harrow) and continued through college years (with pianist Claude Frank) but was abandoned shortly after that. Many years later when Nancy wanted to learn how to accompany herself she studied harmony and improvisation with Sanford Gold and later with Norman Gold.
While Nancy was at she toured with the Bennington Dance Group, choreographed dances to jazz scores, and was bitten by the performing bug. She majored in literature and at graduation was encouraged to accept a fellowship at Harvard and become an academic. But instead she worked as an editor in a publishing house (William Morrow & Co.) until leaving to become a singer.
She learned to sing jazz from records and later from sitting in at clubs where musicians she knew were playing. During those years, Nancy was editing by day, and at night sitting in with Kenny Burrell, Bob Brookmeyer, Clark Terry, and Bill Triglia at clubs in and around New York. She also got a job touring (briefly) with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, at that time under the direction of Warren Covington.
Here's " On The Sunny Side Of The Street" from above album
Nat Hentoff heard Nancy in a club one night and ended up producing her first album, Wild Women Don't Have the Blues. It was released in 1961 on the Candid label and featured Buck Clayton, Dick Wellstood, Buddy Tate and Dickie Wells, among others For her second album (Atlantic/1963), You Never Know, John Lewis served as A&R man, arranger, and pianist. That album also featured Dick Katz, Phil Woods, Jim Hall, Richard Davis and Connie Kay.
She performed at clubs in New York and Paris, but when rock came in and jazz jobs were scarce, she went back to editing, working as the editor of a literary magazine, American Journal, which had a brief life. Nancy married young and had two sons in the 60's and left music to raise a family,She returned to singing in 1975 with an engagement at the Cookery with Richard Wyands and Richard Davis. Since then she has made fifteen more albums. Several of these were self-I produced and then leased or sold to record companies. Since then she has worked with Katz and Woods, Clark Terry, Roland Hanna, and Bob Brookmeyer.
She recorded albums based on The Lost Lady by Willa Cather and The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Her album Winter Dreams, based on the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, was used for the musical This Side of Paradise, which ran for six weeks in New York City in 2010 at the Theatre at St. Clements and in 2013 at the History Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota. For the Last Time, a jazz musical based on The Marble Faun, ran for six weeks at the Clurman Theatre on Theatre Row in New York City in 2015.
Two of Harrow's song cycles were based on children's stories. The Adventures of Maya the Bee, based on a story by Waldemar Bonsels, ran as a puppet show in New York City for seven years, was translated into Japanese, and was performed in Japan for two years. The Cat Who Went to Heaven, based on a story by Elizabeth Coatsworth, had short runs in New York City at the Mercer Street Theater, the Asia Society, and the Harlem School of the Arts. It had elevens performances at the Kennedy Center in the spring of 2011 and was performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2014.
Her latest recording, The Song Is All, was recorded at East Side Sound in February/March of 2016 and was released by Benfan Music on October 3, 2016. As of November 2017 Nancy was still performing at New York Society Library. She sang songs from her 1994 Lost Lady album, which was based on the Willa Cather novel, A Lost Lady.
Harrow is the mother of Damon Krukowski, a musician with the band Galaxie 500 and the duo Damon and Naomi. (Edited from Wikipedia & nancyharrow.com)