Monday, March 28, 2016

Nostalgia For A Hipper New York

With a black and Jewish heritage and a classical musical pedigree, cellist-singer Marika Hughes mixes it all together.


Sandee Brawarsky, Culture Editor, for The Jewish Week   

City breezes and nightlights infuse a lot of Marika Hughes’ songs, and so does love and its longings. Born of classical musical royalty, she’s an urban poet who writes music and lyrics, plays the cello, sings and fronts a band. Her latest CD, “New York Nostalgia,” is a love song to this city.

“A lot of the songs are about an ‘almost love,’” she says in an interview near Lincoln Center, close to where she studied at Juilliard and visited her “tantes,” or aunts, on Central Park West. The nostalgia is for an earlier New York City, one that was grittier, friendlier and more racially integrated, when many artists and musicians lived on the Upper West Side. Her New York of the 1970s and ’80s was a city “with everything not so precious, a little dirtier in a beautiful way.” During high school, her string quartet would play at the corner of Columbus Avenue and 73rd Street, but as things shifted in the city, the police would chase them away.

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