Nina Simone

Nina Simone was one of the most important artists the United States produced in the twentieth century: an iconic jazz singer, reaching heights probably matched only by Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday; a woman with a tormented life who experienced firsthand the discrimination faced by Black people in the southern states, and who later became an advocate for that cause; a pianist of great flair, able to shine across multiple contexts thanks to the many layers of her cultural background.

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon, she took the stage name Nina Simone, officially as a tribute to French actress Simone Signoret, but in practical terms so that her mother, a Methodist minister, wouldn't find out her daughter was playing immoral music. That intention couldn't be kept up for long, though, given the rapid and unstoppable rise of her live reputation, followed by her recording debut toward the end of the 1950s.

For her debut album, “Little Girl Blue” (Bethlehem, 1959), she naively chose to be paid a one-off fee, which cost her a substantial amount in lost earnings. Jumping from the frying pan into the fire, she left the label and signed with Colpix, who took her on under the condition of having full control over the material she recorded. Keen to secure financial support so she could continue her academic path as a pianist, she accepted the condition and released nine albums, some in the studio and some live, up until 1964.

At the end of that experience, she moved to Philips, and that's where her real career began, even though the artistic freedom she gained there came, in private, alongside a period of abuse at the hands of Andy Stroud, her husband and manager, who had left his military career to better handle his wife's.

Her work for Philips stands out for the political and social edge that had previously been off-limits to her, on top of a wide-ranging reclamation of songs from Black culture. With no restraints left, Simone performs — and at times writes herself — songs that directly attack the United States of racial segregation, in perfect sync with the peak of black power.

It's hard to pick just one album among the seven she recorded in this phase, undoubtedly her most brilliant, since they're all fairly close in attitude and quality: if “Pastel Blues” has an edge over the others, it's that it contains one particularly long track, which reveals the full extent of Simone's power in a format more expansive than she usually worked in.

The record is produced by the celebrated Hal Mooney, an arranger hired by pretty much every jazz singer who cut a record in the United States between the Fifties and Sixties (rarely has hyperbole come so close to reality). With Nina Simone, though, the relationship would prove especially intense and long-lasting.

"Be My Husband" opens the tracklist with Simone's voice ringing out powerfully over a stripped-down arrangement made up of nothing more than a drum kit's hi-hat and the clapping of hands and stamping of feet. Built on a repetitive melody influenced by traditional songs of enslaved Black Americans, the narrator laments her husband's mistreatment of her:

Keep the promise that you made me,

that you'll stay away from Rosalie, yeah.

If you want me to cook and sew, yeah,

there's nowhere for me to go but you.

Please don't treat me so damn mean,

you're the cruelest man I've ever seen.

What listeners at the time couldn't have imagined is that Simone was suffering this and worse behind closed doors: it's almost paradoxical that the song was written by Stroud himself, as if it were a confession of his own guilt.

"Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out" is a faithful rendition of the blues standard dating back to the Twenties, written by James Cox and made famous by Bessie Smith. This is where the piano enters, and it remains the protagonist for the rest of the album.

"End Of The Line" is a previously unreleased track written by two freelance authors, Cynthia Medley and John Edmonson, who left no other significant trace beyond this song. It's a ballad sui generis, with Simone adopting an androgynous vocal timbre (it's almost like hearing Anohni thirty-five years ahead of time) while her piano indulges in delightful baroque flourishes, showcasing an ever-present love of classical music (worth remembering, it was the first music Simone ever played).

"Trouble In Mind" takes us back to the Twenties, to the roots of jazz and blues. The song was written by Richard M. Jones and later brought to success by Bertha "Chippie" Hill and Louis Armstrong. Simone had already recorded it live for the album "Nina Simone At Newport" (1960), but this new version is more concise, running half as long, and highlights the song's blues character with a delicate electric guitar line.

With "Tell Me More And More And Then Some" she digs up, probably rescuing it from oblivion, a little-known song written and recorded by Billie Holiday in 1940, while side one of the LP closes with "Chilly Winds Don't Blow", a blues streaked with ragtime. Here too it's her second version of the song, written for her in 1959 by producer Hecky Krasnow and composer William Lovelock.

"Ain't No Use", which opens the second half, is a slow blues swept along by pianistic virtuosity, written for Simone by Rudy Stevenson, the guitarist who was part of her backing band from 1965 to 1967.

"Strange Fruit" returns to Billie Holiday's repertoire: a poem written in 1937 and later set to music by its own author, Abel Meeropol (a Jewish teacher and committed communist, repeatedly investigated for his political views), it was recorded by Holiday in April '39 and is now considered one of the most important American songs of the century. Hailed as the first cry for civil rights in a nation still far from organized protest and mass movements, its origins fittingly combined a white man persecuted for his ideas and a Black woman discriminated against for the color of her skin, as if it were some sign of fate.

Simone sings it accompanying herself on piano, in a surreal stillness, spacing the notes out with long pauses, her voice captured in every last nuance, from the rasp to the sigh, as she delivers lyrics written twenty-eight years earlier, as if to underline how little had changed in the meantime.

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,

blood on the leaves and blood at the root.

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,

a gallant pastoral scene of the South,

those big bulging eyes and the twisted mouth.

The scent of magnolia, clean and fresh,

then suddenly the smell of burning flesh,

here's the fruit ripe for the crows to pick

It's the closing track, however, that stands out and reveals a new dimension to the artist. "Sinnerman" is a traditional song recorded by a multitude of musicians starting in the 1950s, but Simone was the first to acknowledge its folk origins.

The first version was recorded, under the title "On The Judgement Day", by the Sensational Nightingales, a gospel quartet who claimed authorship of it. Two years later, under the title "Sinner Man", it was folk singer Willie Holt's turn, backed by Les Baxter's orchestra, and in this case too the performers credited themselves with the words and music. In 1971 it would be Peter Tosh who took the credit, in a version featuring him on vocals with the Wailers, titled "Downpressor".

Simone, however, knew the song all too well, having learned it from her mother as a child: she therefore listed it as traditional and claimed only the arrangement. The lyrics tell of a sinner fleeing on Judgment Day:

Oh sinner man, where you gonna run to?

All on that day we're gonna run to the rocks.*

Please hide me, I run to the rock.

But the rock cried, I can't hide you, the rock cried,

I won't hide you here.

I said to it: rock, what's wrong with you, rock?

Can't you see I need you, rock?

So I ran to the river, it was bleeding,

I ran to the sea, it was bleeding,

so I ran to the river, it was boiling,

I ran to the sea, it was boiling.

So I ran to the Lord,

please hide me Lord, can't you see I'm praying?

Can't you see me down here praying?

But the Lord said, go to the Devil,

so I ran to the Devil, he was waiting

*Note: the image evoked comes from a passage in the "Apocalypse of John".

It should be noted that large portions of the text are missing from the above translation, because Simone repeats phrases and names over and over, as if to mimic the sense of frenzy and chaos of the situation described, which is in any case fully conveyed by the music: 147 beats per minute with clattering piano runs chasing an off-beat rhythm section. The chase goes on for over ten minutes, allowing room for interludes of handclapping games or moments where the rest of the band gets to shine, particularly bassist Lisle Atkinson and drummer Bobby Hamilton.

This titanic, apocalyptic Simone also sounds like a metaphor for the social unrest of the United States of that era, and transcends any label, blending Black culture (jazz, soul, blues, spirituals) and white culture (classical music, but also the theatricality absorbed from her past covers of Broadway numbers, the chansons of Charles Aznavour and Jacques Brel, and the works of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht).

Over the decades, Simone's "Sinnerman" has been sampled by Timbaland, Flying Lotus, Kanye West, Felix Da Housecat and many others, becoming a touchstone for Black culture, as indeed the whole album containing it has.

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06/06/2021