POP MUSIC REVIEW : Backups Spice Up a Bland Nyro

In her salad days 20-plus years ago, Laura Nyro was a gifted songwriter and a singer with limited tonal range. Her show at the Mayfair Theatre in Santa Monica on Saturday enhanced that image.

Working with her own piano-synthesizer accompaniment and a group of six female singers, Nyro worked her way through a blandly performed, uneven collection of original songs. Almost without exception, her earliest material was the best--”Wedding Bell Blues,” “Save the Country,” “And When I Die.”

Unfortunately, most of the program in the first of the evening’s two concerts was devoted to pieces from her current album, very few of which possess the sometimes startling harmonic shifts and lyrical twists that characterized her music of the late ‘60s.

Numbers such as “Oh Yeah Maybe Baby” indicate that Nyro can still put together a convincing pop song. Others--”Lite a Flame,” “Louise’s Church” and “Broken Rainbow”--deal with politically correct subjects, but lack the inner transformations typical of Nyro’s finest efforts.

The saving element of the evening was the vocal ensemble, whose warm textures provided welcome contrast to Nyro’s accurate but thin sound.