You Won't Forget Me: Exploring Maeve Brennan in Words and Music

Preview from the Irish Times ahead of Performance at the National Concert Hall, September 12, 2017

You Won’t Forget Me is vocalist Emilie Conway’s celebration of the life and work of Maeve Brennan, the Ranelagh-born writer who, as the Long-Winded Lady, was a much-admired social diarist with the New Yorker during the 1950s and 1960s. The ethereal Conway has woven together extracts from Brennan’s writing – read by actor Cathy Belton – with an eclectic musical selection that charts Brennan’s progress from daughter of Irish revolutionaries (her parents were both active in the 1916 Rising) to doyen of New York’s high society to respected short story writer to abject destitution in later life. There’s a pre-concert talk from academic Angela Bourke, author of the Maeve Brennan biography Homesick at the New Yorker.

Preview by the Irish Times ahead of Performance at Dunamaise Arts Centre, February 16, 2018

Dublin Vocalist Emilie Conway’s celebration of Irish born author and New Yorker columnist Maeve Brennan, reaches well beyond the normal jazz vocalist’s fare combining readings and spoken word with original music and song book standards.  Conway has presented this imaginative show to great acclaim in Chicago, New York and at the National Concert Hall, Dublin. Played by a stripped back trio with silky pianist Johnny Taylor and admired Australian bassist Damian Evans, You wont Forget Me, Exploring Maeve Brennan is a fresh and unusual piece of musical chamber music

From Emilie - why I created this work.

In You Won’t Forget Me, I wanted to celebrate and explore the soundscape of Brennan's life and work through short readings, spoken word and music ranging from traditional to jazz to originals. The performance follows Maeve's journey from post-civil war Ireland to the glamour of cosmopolitan New York in the 1950s, taking inspiration from her writing. While creating this work and reading Maeve’s columns for The New Yorker it struck me how much they read like jazz: their cleverness, lightness and incisiveness show the dexterity of a master improviser which belies a deeper, Rembrandt-like meditation on the human condition, which is hauntingly audible in the ballad-like quality of her short stories and her novella.

I called this concert You Won’t Forget Me because the life of that song echoed that of Maeve’s. It’s a beautiful song by Kermit Goell and Fred Spielman, sung by Joan Crawford in the movie, Torchsong, 1953 - a time when Brennan would have been at the height of her powers in Greenwich Village. The movie marked Crawford’s comeback after ten years absence. However, the song itself fell into obscurity until it was re-discovered by Shirley Horn. Well, she recorded the song for her album, of the same title, with a stellar group, which included Miles Davis and the brothers Marsalis - and that album reached Number 1 on its release in 1991. At the same time Maeve Brennan was in a nursing home, anonymous to the world and those who were taking care of her until her death in 1993.

Here’s a video of an excerpt of her work that particularly struck me. Music and reading by me. Video and Editing by Eoin Byrne.

US Tour 2017

Musical and literary explorations into Maeve’s work led to invitations to perform in the States in 2017 at the opening of the wonderful American Writers Museum in Chicago, and for a very special inaugural event in NYC: The Village Trip, a new annual Greenwich Village Festival, celebrating the cultural life of that infamous village. This event took place in the art-heart hotel of the village, The Washington Square Hotel.

Review of “The Long Winded Lady Speaks Again,” at The Village Trip, performed in The Washington Square Hotel, May 2017, from the Irish Times here: Culture/books Maeve Brennan is Feted in her Adopted Homeland

Promotional video of The Village Trip inaugural festival 2017.

Update from the New York Times, Jan 4, 2019

Cornelia Street Café, a Pillar of Greenwich Village Experimentation, Closes Its Doors

After almost 42 years, the club, which hosted jazz, comedy, burlesque, “The Vagina Monologues” and more, falls victim to rising real estate costs.””

“The cafe’s owner, the writer Robin Hirsch, who started it along with two other artists, is shutting down reluctantly in the face of soaring real estate costs. The restaurant upstairs has continued to thrive, and he has had no trouble booking more than 700 shows a year in the basement. But the monthly rent, $33,000, is now 77 times what it was when the cafe began, he said, and he cannot make ends meet.” Read the full article here.