Renowned vocal coach Norma Garbo: From backing Billy Joel to mentoring Taylor Swift

Behind some of the most renowned singers is often a vocal coach who saw their potential and helped nurture their talent.

Norma Garbo, a former Riverdale resident, has ,over the course of her career and life, worked with Tommy James, who rose to fame in the 1960s with the Shondells; R&B singer Melba Moore; Eddie Kendricks, a founding member of the Temptations; “Gloria” singer Laura Branigan, reggae star Jimmy Cliff, and many more.

Garbo also gave lessons to a young Taylor Swift.

She has worked with actors such as Lori Loughlin on the art of proper cadence and vocal range. She has also been a performer — a backing vocalist for Billy Joel and actor Danny Aiello and many others — who also toured with a group of her own, Garbo The Band.

Garbo, now a Manhattan resident, was born in 1951 on Long Island, where she got her start through a music program at Freeport High School. 

She later attended Cabrini University in Radnor, Pennsylvania, where she majored in English. 

After graduating from Villanova University for theater and teaching in 1974, Garbo and her boyfriend at the time decided to move to Riverdale.

“I liked it because it wasn’t the craziness of the city at the time,” Garbo told The Press. “It was just perfect for me.”

Garbo recalled living in her Johnson Avenue apartment on a hill that overlooked the Bronx and where Pat Kenny, the owner of Kenny’s Castaways, lived in the unit upstairs. 

She also recalled going to Mother’s Bake Shop, a neighborhood staple in Riverdale that shut down in 2016.

“I remember getting home at like 2 a.m. from a gig or whatever ,and I’d go ‘I might as well just stay up until 6 a.m. and get those croissants or those cookies and I’d run over there,” Garbo said. 

Garbo initially considered being an English teacher, but was encouraged by her partner at the time, Jimmie Young, who was a musician in the city, to take vocal lessons.

While living in Riverdale, she took lessons on voice and music theory at a private school in Manhattan. She supported herself by working at an advertising agency as a casting assistant.

She taught a friend who could not afford music lessons and, through some word-of-mouth, gained more people interested in taking lessons with her. 

Her big break came when Billy Joel hired her to work as a backup singer in 1978 and she performed with him in three concerts at Carnegie Hall.

“Billy was the sweetest guy in the world,” Garbo recounted. “You know… Long Island boy. I felt like he was the guy next door — he was great.”

That was the end of her working at the advertising agency, because that was when the job offers for vocal work started pouring in.

“Once I said, ‘Now I’m a singer,’ then the jobs just kept coming in,” Garbo said. 

“I think the way you perceive yourself is the way the world sees you… and if you say, oh, I’m studying to be a singer, no one’s going to take you seriously.”

Garbo would go on to sing with groups such as the Peter Duchin Orchestra and the Danny La Rue band. She performed at President George H.W. Bush’s inaugural ball and at the Robert Kennedy Human Rights Golf Tournament.

Garbo remembered how surreal it felt walking through Ethel Kennedy’s home and looking at Kennedy family photos.

She also worked with the acclaimed pop band The Scissor Sisters, and has both their gold and platinum records, gifts from the group, hanging on her wall.

One of her greatest accomplishments, she said, was working as a voice teacher at the Manhattan School of Music from 1988 to 2006 as the only one on staff who taught jazz, pop, rock and roll, R&B, country and other genres.

At the height of Garbo’s career, she was doing eight to 10 lessons a day, four days a week. Currently, she does hour lessons with musicians as young as eight and as old as 81.

Asked about the effect a lifetime of music has had on her worldview, Garbo said, “It sure has gotten me through a lot of stuff … you have the ability to belt out a song or play an instrument and the stress goes out the window.”

“Join a chorus, join a band, join an orchestra,” she said. “It keeps kids off the streets doing bad things, you know? What music does is it gives people an intelligence…I think that’s why the smartest kids that I went to school with…80 percent of them were musicians.”

Those in the greater Riverdale area interested in taking virtual lessons can contact Garbo at CocalCoachGarbo.com.