Judy Collins is at New York’s famed Cafe Carlyle for the next three nights, and then all next week.
She is a legend you don’t want to miss, whether she’s singing the original version of “Both Sides Now” or telling stories about Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.
Before she sings Cohen’s “Suzanne,” she reminisces about how she literally grabbed and recorded the song the minute after he played it for her in 1965.
Dylan she remembers as Robert Zimmerman, a skinny kid in the mid west who sang Woody Guthrie songs and wasn’t very good. Years later in Greenwich Village, he asked Collins why she wasn’t writing her own songs after having hits with everyone else’s. That changed everything.
By the way, there is no retirement in sight. She’s trying out a song called “Dreaming About Democracy,” which she just co-wrote. She received a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album in 2023 for her album “Spellbound,” which was her first to feature all-original material.
Collins says she’s 86 but doesn’t look it or sound it. She appears with her guitar and a pianist on the Cafe Carlyle stage and transfixes the audience. She is also a well trained classical pianist who is mesmerizing when she sits down to play a couple of her own compositions including the extraordinary, “The Blizzard,” about love and loss in her home state of Colorado.
It’s the voice, though. It’s a clarion bell, that rings rich with colors and subtext. She has high notes that still thrill. She told me before the show that after she performed at the Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a woman said: “We’ve never heard anyone sing like that in the Temple.”
You bet they hadn’t. Collins loves trying her legendary voice out at the Cathedral of St John the Divine, too, where it soars like an eagle through the cavernous church.
Collins has never gone away, but she’s having a Renaissance right now. She tours and does gigs for at least two thirds of every year. Her show at the Carlyle is a mix of humorous and sometimes disarming stories mixed with the songs, like “Send in the Clowns” and “Amazing Grace.”
Collins has her own amazing grace, connecting with the audience — which by the way had a lot of young people. Taylor Swift, all the other songbirds that now crowd the charts and stadiums? Judy Collins is the blueprint, and don’t forget it.
