At some point Friday night, legendary folk singer Judy Collins might just slip behind the piano and perform a song she wrote as an homage to the Grand Canyon State.
She’s never recorded “Arizona,” and Friday night in a special fundraising concert with the Tucson Symphony Orchestra might be the first time she ever plays it before any audience of note.
Don’t ask her to describe “Arizona.”
“I won’t tell you anything about it,” she said. “I’ll just tell you I wrote it and I might sing it. It has never been recorded so it would be a way of premiering it in Arizona.”
Collins’ concert Friday, April 22, is her first with the TSO since 1992, although she’s been back to Tucson several times in the convening quarter century. But Tucson serves as a major footnote to Collins’ life. When she was 22 years old in the early 1960s, she was in Arizona playing a small club show when she became ill. She was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent a month in Tucson Medical Center before being transferred to Denver’s National Jewish Hospital.
Collins said she had been sick for months “but I was too dumb to go to the doctor and see what was going on.”
“I had a month in Arizona in isolation at the hospital with this gorgeous first-floor on the far wing of the Tucson Medical Center,” the 76-year-old singer recalled during a phone interview last week.
“Arizona” will likely be one of the highlights of the concert, which is a fundraiser for the TSO. All of the orchestra musicians are donating their time for the event, TSO officials said.
Collins has been doing concerts with orchestras throughout her career. She estimates she has performed with every major U.S. orchestra as well as some in Europe.
“It’s very exciting. I grew up among classical musicians and I have always done some orchestra dates throughout my history,” she said. “I have these wonderful orchestrations.”
Her concert here will cover her greatest hits — “Amazing Grace,” “Some Day Soon,” “Both Sides Now” — and two new Sondheim songs — “Move On” from “Sunday in the Park With George” and “There Won’t Be Trumpets” from his musical “Anyone Can Whistle.” She’ll also perform a couple songs from her latest album, “Strangers Again,” a collection of duets featuring Jeff Bridges, Jackson Brown, Jimmy Buffet, Don McLean and a handful of other friends. The album, released last September, debuted at No. 1 on Amazon, something that was a little surprising for the veteran singer/songwriter.
“I didn’t know anything about what to do about this promotion, but we had a wonderful album and people began to play it and it made me very happy,” she said,
The album’s success is a testament to Collins’ longevity in the industry, but also to music fans’ rushing back to tried-and-true songsters like her.
“They know they can count on us to do something that will be memorable and interesting and musical,” she said.
Tucson is among the 100-plus shows she will do this year, including a couple orchestra dates in Europe over the summer. It is a schedule she has maintained throughout her career.
“I love touring. I have toured ever since I started doing this 57 years ago,” she said. “I think retirement is the key to death. I have no intention of even contemplating such a thing.”
For those who saw Collins in her last Tucson show at Fox Tucson Theatre in 2014, Friday’s concert will not be the same-old-same-old.
“That’s my job as an artist. It’s like (piano great Vladimir) Horowitz said, my job is to make that Chopin sound like you’ve never heard it before. And that’s what I do,” said Collins, who as a young girl had toyed with the idea of being a classical pianist. “That’s why people keep coming to see me. They’re never going to hear it the same twice and I get to write and sing and perform new songs.”
In addition to her standards, Collins said she also will perform “Beyond the Sky,” a song NASA commissioned her to write to celebrate Eileen Collins, who in 1999 became the first woman to command a space shuttle.
“She not only conquered the sexist barrier, but she conquered the sound barrier,” Collins said.
