(best work in COLOR)
1958: Little Girl Blue: Jazz As Played In An Exclusive Side Street Club (US, BETHLEHEMBCP 6028). 1959: Nina Simone And Her Friends (US, BETHLEHEM BCP 6041) * The Amazing Nina Simone (US, COLPIX CP 407) * Nina Simone At Town Hall (US, COLPIX CP 409). 1960: Nina Simone At Newport (US, COLPIX CP 412). 1961: Forbidden Fruit (US, COLPIX CP 419). 1962: Nina Simone At The Village Gate (US, COLPIX CP 421) * Nina Simone Sings Ellington (US, COLPIX CP 425). 1963: Nina Simone At Carnegie Hall (US, COLPIX CP 455). 1964: Folksy Nina (US, COLPIX CP 465) * Nina Simone In Concert (US, PHILIPS PHM 200-135) * Broadway. Blues. Ballads. (US, PHILIPS PHM 200-148). 1965: I Put A Spell On You (US, PHILIPS PHM 200-172) * Pastel Blues (US, PHILIPS PHM 200-187). 1966: Nina Simone With Strings (US, COLPIX CP 496) * Let It All Out (US, PHILIPS PHM 200-202) * Wild Is The Wind (US, PHILIPS PHM 200-207). 1967: High Priestess Of Soul (US, PHILIPS PHM 200-219) * Nina Simone Sings The Blues (US, RCA VICTOR LSP 3789) * Silk & Soul (US, RCA VICTOR LSP 3837). 1968: 'Nuff Said! (US, RCA VICTOR LSP 4065). 1969: Nina Simone And Piano! (US, RCA VICTOR LSP 4102) * To Love Somebody (US, RCA VICTOR LSP 4152). 1970: Black Gold (US, RCA VICTOR LSP 4248). 1971: Here Comes The Sun (US, RCA VICTOR LSP 4536). 1972: Emergency Ward (US, RCA VICTOR LSP 4757). 1974: It Is Finished (US, RCA APL 1-0421). 1978: Baltimore (US, CTI 7084). 1982: Fodder On My Wings (France, CA 67885). 1985: Nina's Back (US, VPI 100-7A). 1987: Live & Kickin' (US, VPI) * Let It Be Me (US, Verve 831 437-1). 1987: Live At Ronnie Scott's (UK, WHCD 006). 1993: A Single Woman (US, Elektra 7559-61503-2). 1994: The Rising Sun Collection: Nina Simone (Canada, RSC 0004).
For anybody entertaining abstract ideas of how artists evolve, Nina Simone’s autobiography, I Put a Spell on You, is a welcome reference. Very few rock/pop bios clue us in definitively on the working/growing psychology of the musician, or on how creative work comes to mirror personality. Simone was a musical prodigy; from an early age she trained as a classical musician. The goal was become “the first black classical concert performer.” She was devoted to piano practice and passionately loved classical music. Her interests developed around classical music and Simone treats her years as a popular music “artist” with a certain amount of disdain and pained disinterest. There is an irony at the heart of Simone’s popular music gifts. As told here, she didn’t even want to sing when she first started performing live. She was a pianist (not a piano player), and a musician (not a pop performer). She was often a horrid snob who idolized very few artists, almost none in the pop field:
“When you play Bach’s music you have to understand that he’s a mathematician and all the notes you play add up to something – they make sense. They always add up to climaxes, like ocean waves getting bigger and bigger until after a while when so many waves have gathered you have a great storm. Each note you play is connected to the next note, and every note has to be executed perfectly or the whole effect is lost.”
Simone’s pop music education came peripherally to her endeavors as a classical pianist. Her mother was a devout Christian who loathed secular music. Simone played in the church choir at an extremely early age. Her father and siblings all had their noses in music of one sort or another, but this had to be quieted down for mother’s sake. Later, as a music teacher, Simone absorbed the pop music demanded by her students. She had a voracious gift, but the condescending attitude towards this “inferior” music is always present in her autobiography:
“The kids loved the latest hits, their parents the old favorites, and we liked anything we hadn’t played before – so when they asked us for a song to learn we’d rummage about in our mind (or in the sheet music) for some old show-tune nobody had heard of. I didn’t know many numbers when I started, but Arlene [a fellow music teacher] ran through the most popular ones and I picked up the rest as I went along. I held them in my head rather than use sheet music – it saved time.”
After classical training, pop music doesn’t seem a challenge to Nina. Improvisation comes about as Simone is forced to dilute her intentions. After an aborted attempt to gain entry into a prestigious Philadelphia university on scholarship [she cites nepotism and racism as cause for the rejection], she drifted into her first job in New York City at a bar called the Midtown. She describes her novice days:
“The deal was I performed from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m., with a break of fifteen minutes every hour …I knew hundreds of popular songs and dozens of classical pieces, so what I did was combine them. I arrived prepared with classical pieces, hymns and gospel songs and improvised on those, occasionally slipping in a part from a popular tune. Each song – which isn’t the right way to describe what I was playing – lasted anywhere between thirty and ninety minutes.”
It’s unclear from her book if Simone noticed the effect she was having on customers. Simone’s thick skin protected her from even the thought that somebody could criticize her. Her future collaborator, guitarist Avram Schackman, wandered into a club after doing sessions with Burt Bacharach. He would return regularly. Simone notes younger people starting to drop in, forcing the old clientele out, but she doesn’t acknowledge why this was happening. Her new job found her adlibbing, on a lark, but people were noticing. Nina on cruise control is the sound of a musician playing very well. Snobbery had a positive impact:
“My attitude to performing was that of a classically trained musician: when you play you give all your concentration to the music because it deserves total respect, and an audience should sit still and be quiet. That’s how I played at Midtown…If a drunk started shouting or fighting while I was playing, it broke my concentration so I stopped playing until they were quiet, and if they weren’t quiet I wouldn’t play…. My attitude to live audiences was formed there at the Midtown and it’s never changed, no matter who the audience or how big the concert hall. An audience chooses to come and see me perform. I don’t choose the audience. I don’t need them either, and if they don’t like my attitude then they don’t have to come and see me. Others will.”
Even if Simone’s fine art tastes seem over-elevated and her popular music distastes wide-ranging, it should be mentioned that in many, if not all other, respects she fits the cliché of the pop artist perfectly. She signs away her record contracts on a handshake. A boyfriend beats the crap out of her, and she marries him. Her husband becomes her manager and she never looks at the books. Back taxes accumulate. She performs past the point of exhaustion and eventually runs away to escape. One day she’s dating a hotel porter; the next day she’s rooming with the prime minister of Jamaica. Much of the time, much more than usual in these cases, she doesn’t seem to like performing. During a stint in Africa she almost marries an extremely old man – but the intentions are never clear – though retirement does seem to be a part of the attraction. There is an odd mixture of wily feminine romance and cold-eyed assessments in many of the moments of “I Put a Spell on You.” Whatever it means to be a classical concert pianist is lost somewhere in the winds of time. What remains is the wall between Simone's accomplishments and a recognition of her accomplishments. A Citizen Kane like “Rosebud” haunts Simone’s career.
So the profound irony is in the way that the distance, the snobbishness, the stooping have resulted in such an astonishing career. The theory is that you have to love what you do. Here is an exception that disproves the rule. In Nina’s case she didn’t have to love it, she only had to kind of like it. To admit liking pop, may have been to admit defeat. There may be a certain dangerous off-the-cuff attitude in Simone’s demeanor, but the result was an unusual off-the-cuff greatness.
The high-toned education of this particular artist left a lot of musical positives. She was able to fuse a wide range of songs into a style focused around her piano playing and her vocals: startling gospel, smooth and tempestuous pop, fusillades of classical piano broadsides, jazz dexterity, rhythmic fortitude, cabaret showiness, edgy rock and stunning folk and gospel forms. On over forty albums she preformed hundreds of songs, with a notable lack of repetitive song choices. Nor, from 1958-1972, are there particularly long gaps between new releases. Her career, till the end, never became a rehash, partially because she easily bored, and partially because she never had the batch of hits that keeps a musical artist hemmed in by the past. Because of her musical adaptiveness, there are almost no album blunders of the sort most fifties singing artists made in trying to be hip to the sixties (she only enters this area in the outtake hell of the early seventies albums To Love Somebody and Here Comes the Sun – which are riddled with badly recorded Beatles/Bob Dylan fan-pandering. The results can soundly be blamed on RCA).
It is a blessing that Nina Simone never over-sings. But she also never seems to under-sing. Her emotion is sure-footed. She isn’t inclined to exaggeration. Her songs seem chosen with a certain value judgment in mind. They must ring true. A built-in concept seems required, much like a performer playing an important classical work. She will do justice to a good concept, and not usually add another concept. She doesn’t interpret so much as realize, and her stylistic persona springs from what she chooses to realize. The biggest linchpin of her style may be a purist taste, and a purist emotion. It isn’t that she cannot sing that which she doesn’t respect: she doesn’t have to sing what she doesn’t respect, and she will not sing what she doesn’t respect. And unlike many singers, she actually knows the difference between bad songs and good songs. For the most part, she does not accept the songs that producers and managers and money-chasing arrangers try to foist on her. Nina Simone did not compromise much. This is evident early on in her biography when attempts at musical suggestions are met with “Sorry, no, my way or let me go.” She is often credited with the arrangements on many of her albums and her work is consistently interesting.
The fifties and sixties albums are immensely listenable and there are classic takes in several idioms.
Folk songs: Start with the mind-boggling “Sinnerman” (apocalyptic rhythmic intensity as Biblical vengeance rains down on a poor, poor soul who runs but can’t hide – Nick Cave must love this one); and “Dambala” (a slave tale which exists in a quiet zone of spiteful retribution that sporadically explodes with the vicious accusations). “Tomorrow” “In the Evening by the Moonlight,” “When I Was a Young Girl,” Lass of the Low Country” and “The Young Knight” (showing Nina in finest voice and good humor running through the terrain of exotic folk drama). “Westwind” (African inspired drumming showing Nina chasing the Voodoo down – her ability to share the stage was a a part of her good artistic sense). “Ballad of Hollis Brown” (good Dylan). “Blackbird” (starkly fatalist, which is the tone for many of Simone’s songs).
Blues Songs: “Gin House Blues,” “Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer,” “Chauffeur,” “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” and “Sugar in My Bowl,” (Simone’s cold-eyed excavation of self-destruction is chillingly effective, heightening the sad boasts in the first two songs, and fully realizing the raw sexuality in the last song). “Trouble in Mind,” “No Good Man,” “Work Song” and “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” (solid sending with great piano and consistent viewpoint).
Jazz Pop and Pop: (Mostly Nina required a jazzy form of pop requiring elbow room for instrumental rambunctiousness, lively singing, and a little complexity so she could feign being challanged, though when she was singing a slow ballad she would refuse to be rushed): “You’ve Been Gone Too Long,” “Can’t Get Out of this Mood,” “The Other Woman,” “I Don’t Want Him Anymore,” “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” “I Love to Love,” “Forbidden Fruit,” “Will I Find My Love Today,” “Baltimore,” “End of the Line,” “Ain’t No Use,” “Another Spring,” “This Year’s Kisses,” “Love Me or Leave Me,” “Summertime” “Return Home,” “Hey Buddy Bolden,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” “Pirate Jenny,” “Love Me or Leave Me,” “Music for Lovers”
Instrumental: Nina loved her piano and her piano playing and we are allowed to love it too, clear and unadorned on many tunes. It could be by turns pretty or bluesy (“Central Park,” “Good Bait,” “African Mailman,” “Return Home” and “Nina’s Blues”), psycho (“Under the Lowest”), complex (“Music for Lovers” “Satin Doll”) or simple as a bell (“Theme from Sayonara,”). Her piano accompaniment to her vocals is superb, and certain tunes are classics of piano/vocal interaction ("Mood Indigo," "My Baby Just Cares for Me," "Love Me or Leave Me, "Porgy," "Music For Lovers," "You've Been Gone Too Long," "I Don't Want Him Anymore," In the Evening by the Moonlight," "It Don't Mean a Thing" and "Ain't No Use").
All of these great and near-great performances are spread out over a wide variety of albums that, for the most part, never fall below the ranks of the coolly inspired. Simone never plays from a sense of desperation or pandering and she knows how to get the job done. The smaller virtues of craftsmanship: taste, understatement, controlled production standards are seldom lacking. And the big virtues come together enough to make Simone one of pop musics most important sixties artists. By virtue of their consistentcies and glorious peaks, the following albums are a tentative suggestion of the best by Nina Simone: Little Girl Blue, Nina Simone at Town Hall, Nina Simone at Newport, Forbidden Fruit, Nina Simone at Carnegie Hall, Pastel Blues and Nina Simone and Piano!
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Pg. 23: When you play Bach’s music you
Pg. 45: We taught mainly popular songs Pg. 52: My attitude to performing
Pg. 57 – “Starring Nina Simone” is a bootlegged release from one of her earliest dates.
Pg. 50. The deal was I performed from 9 p.m to 4 a.m.,