Postby bhoywonder » 11 Sep 2008, 17:57
I'm too busy right now to reply properly, in the meantime I'll very lazily copy and paste an article i wrote that was published shortly after her death (this is copyrighted so please don't use it anywhere, and so on). It will give newcomers a place to start and might even tell the fan something too. I forget. It was ages ago now.
Oh, and if you want to hear the greatest live album ever made, and the reason why I think Nina was an out and out genius, buy It Is Finished. It's as good as music gets.
Anyway, hope you enjoy the article.
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If you pick up any of the many, many books telling the story of popular music in the 20th Century, or even that century’s most exceptional decade, the 1960s, and turn to the index, chances are the list will go from Simon, Paul to Sinatra, Frank. Even those books that do have an entry between these two great singers will mostly direct you to a single page, where our cover star [Nina was on the cover of the mag, but you'll have worked that out already] features merely in a list of names who played at some festival or benefit concert.
Turn on the TV, however, and it seems that every ad break will be gloriously sound-tracked by one of her songs. The movies use her music to enhance their most tender, profound or joyful moments. At the time of writing, over three years after her death at the age of 70, a collection of her best-loved songs sits on the UK album chart at number 6. Ask around and not many people will be able to tell you much of her story, but play them any one of 30-odd songs and they will instantly light up and say “Hey, I love this song”.
Nina Simone was born Eunice Waymon, in Tryon, North Carolina, during the depression to a family descended from African slaves and native American Indians. Despite suffering extreme poverty, the Waymon household was rich with love and prayer. Her mother, a Methodist minister, was shocked one day to find her three-year-old daughter sat up at the family organ playing God Be With You ‘Til We Meet Again. Eunice was playing at church services by the age of four and, by six, was the church’s regular pianist. This continued throughout her childhood, playing five services each Sunday as well as rehearsals, bible meets and revivals during the week. A local white woman named Mrs Miller for whom Eunice’s mother kept house was so impressed that she took it upon herself to pay for the child prodigy to take formal lessons. When she couldn’t continue the financial burden alone, she instigated the Eunice Waymon Fund within the town which would cover all the girl’s tuition right through to her eventual enrolment of one year’s study at the celebrated Juliard School of Music in New York. When she was turned down for a scholarship at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute for music, she was devastated. She’d studied hard, her tutors felt she was good enough, what could be the problem?
The answer was to come to dominate much of Nina’s life and work. Enrolling black students was rare enough. Enrolling unknown black women from very poor families was rarer than hen’s teeth. As she recalled in her 1993 autobiography, I Put A Spell On You, “I knew prejudice existed, but I never thought it could have such a direct effect on my future. Nobody told me that no matter what I did in life the colour of my skin would always make a difference.”
Determined to somehow complete her classical studies and become America’s first black concert pianist, Eunice took jobs as an accompanist to a singing teacher, eventually taking pupils of her own. Adopting the stage name Nina (from a nickname a boyfriend had given her, ‘small’ in Spanish) Simone (after the French actor Simone Signoret), she began playing at the Midtown Bar & Grill, a dive in Atlantic City that she would turn from a bum’s refuge to a venue of considered listening, packed until 4am each morning. Over the coming years her reputation would grow and so would the size of nightclub she would play until eventually she found herself recording her first album, on the Bethlehem imprint and headlining the Town Hall in New York City.
Following her debut, Simone was quickly snapped up by Columbia Pictures Records – Colpix – on a long-term deal. She delivered 10 LPs in just five years, including a number of incredible live recordings that document her rise in New York and the world at large. Later, she recorded for Philips, having been seduced by the charming ‘Big’ Willy Langenberg, owner of the label, after he’d seen her perform at the Village Gate. They pair remained close friends until his untimely death, after which she signed with RCA, for whom she made records that would not only stand as among her finest, but as contenders for the finest that anybody made in the ‘60s.
But it’s the development of her style, perhaps, more than her career that goes some way to explain why, although respected the world over, Nina Simone is rarely championed as the genius that her records would suggest she was. Having learned to play gospel music intuitively from an exceptionally young age, Simone knew before she even hit her teens how to work an audience. “Gospel music was improvisation within a fixed framework and it never occurred to me to analyse it.“ she would later explain, “Gospel was part of the church, which was part of normal life, and you don’t sit around wondering how it is you walk, or breathe, or do any other everyday thing. Even so, gospel taught me about improvisation, how to shape music in response to an audience and how to shape the mood of the audience in response to my music.”
Once her formal training began the lessons frightened her at first as she was made to play Bach, who seemed so complicated and at odds with the music she knew so instinctively. She soon grew to love Bach and credited him with shaping much of her musical life. “He is technically perfect”, she wrote. “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. Once I understood Bach’s music I never wanted to be anything other than a concert pianist; Bach made me dedicate my life to music.”
The jobs Nina took playing and singing in bars or taking in students were a chore. She had no interest in popular music, even growing to despise the popular songs her students attempted, or that she was forced to mix with her classical improvisations at the clubs, never playing them for her own amusement. “Why should I when I could be playing Bach, or Czerny or List? That was real music.” Throughout her career, she was said to be a “difficult” artist, even condescending to her audience. In truth, she felt the music was deserving of respect. If people were going to talk when she was playing, she would simply stop playing and wait for them to stop before continuing. This is a device she would incorporate to positive effect later in her life, when she would build a song to such an incredible climax, then pare it right down to the point of complete silence for seconds at a time, at which point she could almost hear the breath caught in the audience’s throats. She knew then that she had them and would give them the satisfaction they ached for with one final, monumental climax. She took her music very seriously indeed and anyone who didn’t do the same could leave. Nothing was left to chance. “As I moved on from clubs into bigger halls I learned to prepare myself thoroughly: I’d go to the empty hall in the afternoon and walk around to see where the people were sitting, how close they’d be to me at the front and how far away at the back, whether the seats got closer together or further apart, how big the stage was, how the lights were positioned, where the microphones were going to hit – everything.”
Over the years playing the clubs, Nina developed a style of her own and one that she believed in as much as her beloved Bach. She used devices from her classical training, particularly in using counterpoint typical of Bach, with elements of the blues, jazz and folk music she heard whist playing places like the Village Gate in Greenwich Village alongside Bob Dylan and Odetta. The indefinable nature of Nina Simone’s music is, quite possibly, the biggest factor in explaining why she seems so often overlooked. Of course, she’s hardly a distant memory, but in an age where such singers as Johnny Cash, Ray Charles and Sam Cooke are (rightly) revered as genius contributors to music’s golden age, surely someone who made records and put on concerts as utterly spell-binding and saturated in greatness as Nina Simone did, well, shouldn’t there be a new accolade invented purely for the purpose of honouring her?
Not content with being a great musician, songwriter and singer, Nina Simone dedicated much of her life and indeed her art to the improvement of mankind. Her involvement in the civil rights struggles in the US in the 1960s was such that one of her songs, To Be Young, Gifted And Black, was named as the Black National Anthem. Her songs became the soundtrack to the activists’ lives – I Wish I Knew How It Wold Feel To Be Free, Mississippi Goddam, Backlash Blues – while her appearances at marches and benefits, like anything she did, was the result of careful study and learning as to which was the correct course of action to support.
In music, as in any walk of human life, there is a natural desire to define. It’s easy to talk of Bob Dylan being a great folk singer, or Otis Redding as an unparalleled soul man, easier, in fact, than to address the real content of an artist’s work. But this inherent laziness leads to situations where those who don’t tick all the boxes can get left behind. If asked to pick the greatest blues, jazz, soul, pop or folk singers of all-time, few, if any, would pick Nina Simone because, of course, she wasn’t a blues singer any more than she was a jazz singer. Even Sonny Rollins claimed that if Nina Simone was a jazz singer, well, he didn’t understand jazz. Simone was all of these things and more. She didn’t excel in somebody else’s field, she created a field all of her own and excelled in that instead.
Only now that she is no longer here to shout her own corner will history begin to pick up the pieces to the jigsaw of her remarkable life and assemble what is surely one of the richest pictures that the 20th Century ever painted.
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I absolutely fucking love Nina Simone.
