Post by rayge on Dec 20, 2019 16:25:20 GMT
Nina Simone is one of those sui generis artists that deserves a minutely detailed exegesis of a truly astonishing recording career: she's not going to get it here, though. There's more than 40 albums for a start. For those that want to know, there's a really good account of her life, her attitudes to music and the, *ahem*, complexities of her personality on wikipedia, so I'll eschew that in favour of an anecdote about how I was drawn in to her music in the mid-60s, a brief overview of her career and a few embedded clips showing off facets of her extraordinary genius.
In 1964, I joined the Irma Thomas fan club, set up by one Dave Godin (and no, scoffers, this isn't the Alzheimer's kicking in, I know who I'm supposed to be writing about). Anyway, it did not really take off, and Dave sent a letter to the would-be members suggesting that we should widen the appeal by including other artists. One he mentioned was Nina Simone, the only one of whom I knew nothing. So I asked the mods at my local record store, and they played me her single of Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood, on Philips. Reader, I bought it. And I Put a Spell on You.
I started buying the albums too, several a year. It was kid-in-a-candystore stuff; not only was she very prolific, but all the older stuff – she had been recording at least a couple of LPs a year since her breakthrough single, I Loves You Porgy, in 1958 – was being released on Pye's budget label, Golden Guinea, an album for the price of three singles. These budget albums had, I later discovered, been recorded originally for the Colpix label; she had switched to the Dutch-based Philips in 1964 and would switch again, in 1967, to RCA. Normally, this sort of biz-shenanigan isn't worth mentioning, but in Nina's case it neatly slices her career into three different stages (or indeed four, if you count the post-RCA releases – although I don't, really - I'd stopped listening at that point).
The Colpix albums – The Amazing Nina Simone, Nina Simone at Town Hall, Nina at Newport, Forbidden Fruit, ...At the Village Gate, ...Sings Ellington, ...At Carnegie Hall and Folksy Nina (as well as her first album, Little Girl Blue, on Bethlehem, the label that released I Love You Porgy: it was much later remastered and reissued and snappily retitled Jazz as Played in an Exclusive Side Street Club) – are basically jazz. The majority of them were recorded live, usually with a trio – Al Shackman (g), Chris White (b), Bobby Hamilton (d) – and with her piano very much to the fore. Nina was essentially a pianist, classically trained, who in the early years had to be persuaded to sing, and extended piano-led instrumentals, in jazz, spiritual and classical styles, decorate these albums. Some of the material is self-penned, the rest mostly jazz standards or rearranged show tunes.
Philips clearly had ambitions to make her over as a more mainstream star, and her key albums on the label – In Concert, Broadway-Blues-Ballads, I Put a Spell on You, Sincerely Nina, Pastel Blues, Let It All Out, Wild Is the Wind and High Priestess of Soul – are marked by her exploration of other genres and movie-lush orchestral studio arrangements, often on theatrical pieces. Instrumentals are rare. As the wiki piece mentioned earlier points out, she was increasingly active in the Civil Rights movement, and her choice of material often expressed this. The policy made for some cracking records, but it didn't make a hit machine out of Nina. In her whole career she never topped the low-teens chart position of her first single in the USA (although she had four top five hits in the UK, three in the late 1960s with RCA material, and one in 1987 with a re-release of a late 1950s track, My Baby Just Cares for Me). Of the albums, only Nina at Newport cracked the top 100 albums in the USA.
In 1967, she moved to RCA. There, she lost her mojo more or less completely - a contentious thing to say, I know, and I would prefer to be more nuanced about this, but tempus fuggit and all that jazz. Actually, the first four RCA albums – which generally featured a more stripped down, youth-friendly sound and contemporary material, as well as the nearest thing to pop she ever managed – aren't that bad, but they are all flawed in a way in which most of her previous albums simply weren't, largely due to the choice of material. ...Sings the Blues (has anyone else ever released so many albums with their name in the title?) suffers from not being particularly bluesy, while Silk & Soul was likewise on the soulfulness front, although it does have a lovely version of I Wish I Knew How It Would feel to Be Free. Nuff Said, recorded partly live three days after the assassination of MLK, is nothing like as powerful as it ought to have been, while her fourth, ...And Piano, an attempt, I guess, to recreate the intimate magic of her Colpix albums, is ruined by the song choice: Jonathon fucking King anyone? After that, I stopped listening, so can't comment at all on her later career.
With so much material to choose from, deciding which clips to choose is going to be difficult, so I'm going to try to find some lesser-known stuff from before 1967.
Nina's classical roots show through at Carnegie Hall Black Swan is by 20th-century opera composer, Gian Carlo Menotti, showing off both her piano and the big sound her trio can get in concert, particularly the guitarist – Al Shackman, I presume.
Al's finest hour comes in my favourite Nina track, Just Say I Love Him, six minutes of dissembled longing and desultory, off-hand beauty
That track is from Forbidden Fruit, a truly great album, and my personal favourite by Nina. It's available in full on youtube, but I won't try to embed it, as it makes loading the thread laborious. What makes it so glorious is the way the group create such different atmospheres and textures on such an eclectic section of songs. The sultry glory of Memphis in June and the wild swing of Work Song? It's a Proper Album, by a Proper Band. In 1961. I could have played anything to show how different but connected the material is, but how about the title track, one of three with out-there lyrics by 50s hipster and jive poet Oscar Brown Jr?
Here's how the group treated show tunes and standards in her Colpix days, with this one by Irving Berlin featuring some beautifully nuanced and expressive piano fills, a lovely bass and a beautiful vocal climax. It was actually released on a single, all six minutes of it. I bought one in a remainder bin for pennies. Thrift shop score indeed.
Speaking of singles, here's the one that sucked me in, her first on Philips
An impeccable mid-60s soft soul production with choir and strings. You can't hear her piano, but as this was the first track of hers I heard, I didn't care about that. Eric Burdon made a reasonable fist of it later. Apparently it was Nina's version of Rising Sun, released on one of the Colpix albums, rather than the later one of His Bobness, that inspired that single, too.
Here's some album tracks from the Phillips years
Mississippi Goddam is my favourite of her Civil Rights songs, with its accelerating rhythms and that pummeling left hand on the piano, and the growing sense of anger and menace. She does anger brilliantly.
So, for contrast, let's have some joyful, lustful R&B and Nina's Ray Charles impression.
Here's a typical Philips take on a show tune, produced so that her voice is virtually in your ear, ringing out clear no matter how loud the piano builds
Here she un-covers the Dame
And one more for luck, one of her self-penned efforts. What's your name, dearie?
In 1964, I joined the Irma Thomas fan club, set up by one Dave Godin (and no, scoffers, this isn't the Alzheimer's kicking in, I know who I'm supposed to be writing about). Anyway, it did not really take off, and Dave sent a letter to the would-be members suggesting that we should widen the appeal by including other artists. One he mentioned was Nina Simone, the only one of whom I knew nothing. So I asked the mods at my local record store, and they played me her single of Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood, on Philips. Reader, I bought it. And I Put a Spell on You.
I started buying the albums too, several a year. It was kid-in-a-candystore stuff; not only was she very prolific, but all the older stuff – she had been recording at least a couple of LPs a year since her breakthrough single, I Loves You Porgy, in 1958 – was being released on Pye's budget label, Golden Guinea, an album for the price of three singles. These budget albums had, I later discovered, been recorded originally for the Colpix label; she had switched to the Dutch-based Philips in 1964 and would switch again, in 1967, to RCA. Normally, this sort of biz-shenanigan isn't worth mentioning, but in Nina's case it neatly slices her career into three different stages (or indeed four, if you count the post-RCA releases – although I don't, really - I'd stopped listening at that point).
The Colpix albums – The Amazing Nina Simone, Nina Simone at Town Hall, Nina at Newport, Forbidden Fruit, ...At the Village Gate, ...Sings Ellington, ...At Carnegie Hall and Folksy Nina (as well as her first album, Little Girl Blue, on Bethlehem, the label that released I Love You Porgy: it was much later remastered and reissued and snappily retitled Jazz as Played in an Exclusive Side Street Club) – are basically jazz. The majority of them were recorded live, usually with a trio – Al Shackman (g), Chris White (b), Bobby Hamilton (d) – and with her piano very much to the fore. Nina was essentially a pianist, classically trained, who in the early years had to be persuaded to sing, and extended piano-led instrumentals, in jazz, spiritual and classical styles, decorate these albums. Some of the material is self-penned, the rest mostly jazz standards or rearranged show tunes.
Philips clearly had ambitions to make her over as a more mainstream star, and her key albums on the label – In Concert, Broadway-Blues-Ballads, I Put a Spell on You, Sincerely Nina, Pastel Blues, Let It All Out, Wild Is the Wind and High Priestess of Soul – are marked by her exploration of other genres and movie-lush orchestral studio arrangements, often on theatrical pieces. Instrumentals are rare. As the wiki piece mentioned earlier points out, she was increasingly active in the Civil Rights movement, and her choice of material often expressed this. The policy made for some cracking records, but it didn't make a hit machine out of Nina. In her whole career she never topped the low-teens chart position of her first single in the USA (although she had four top five hits in the UK, three in the late 1960s with RCA material, and one in 1987 with a re-release of a late 1950s track, My Baby Just Cares for Me). Of the albums, only Nina at Newport cracked the top 100 albums in the USA.
In 1967, she moved to RCA. There, she lost her mojo more or less completely - a contentious thing to say, I know, and I would prefer to be more nuanced about this, but tempus fuggit and all that jazz. Actually, the first four RCA albums – which generally featured a more stripped down, youth-friendly sound and contemporary material, as well as the nearest thing to pop she ever managed – aren't that bad, but they are all flawed in a way in which most of her previous albums simply weren't, largely due to the choice of material. ...Sings the Blues (has anyone else ever released so many albums with their name in the title?) suffers from not being particularly bluesy, while Silk & Soul was likewise on the soulfulness front, although it does have a lovely version of I Wish I Knew How It Would feel to Be Free. Nuff Said, recorded partly live three days after the assassination of MLK, is nothing like as powerful as it ought to have been, while her fourth, ...And Piano, an attempt, I guess, to recreate the intimate magic of her Colpix albums, is ruined by the song choice: Jonathon fucking King anyone? After that, I stopped listening, so can't comment at all on her later career.
With so much material to choose from, deciding which clips to choose is going to be difficult, so I'm going to try to find some lesser-known stuff from before 1967.
Nina's classical roots show through at Carnegie Hall Black Swan is by 20th-century opera composer, Gian Carlo Menotti, showing off both her piano and the big sound her trio can get in concert, particularly the guitarist – Al Shackman, I presume.
Al's finest hour comes in my favourite Nina track, Just Say I Love Him, six minutes of dissembled longing and desultory, off-hand beauty
That track is from Forbidden Fruit, a truly great album, and my personal favourite by Nina. It's available in full on youtube, but I won't try to embed it, as it makes loading the thread laborious. What makes it so glorious is the way the group create such different atmospheres and textures on such an eclectic section of songs. The sultry glory of Memphis in June and the wild swing of Work Song? It's a Proper Album, by a Proper Band. In 1961. I could have played anything to show how different but connected the material is, but how about the title track, one of three with out-there lyrics by 50s hipster and jive poet Oscar Brown Jr?
Here's how the group treated show tunes and standards in her Colpix days, with this one by Irving Berlin featuring some beautifully nuanced and expressive piano fills, a lovely bass and a beautiful vocal climax. It was actually released on a single, all six minutes of it. I bought one in a remainder bin for pennies. Thrift shop score indeed.
Speaking of singles, here's the one that sucked me in, her first on Philips
An impeccable mid-60s soft soul production with choir and strings. You can't hear her piano, but as this was the first track of hers I heard, I didn't care about that. Eric Burdon made a reasonable fist of it later. Apparently it was Nina's version of Rising Sun, released on one of the Colpix albums, rather than the later one of His Bobness, that inspired that single, too.
Here's some album tracks from the Phillips years
Mississippi Goddam is my favourite of her Civil Rights songs, with its accelerating rhythms and that pummeling left hand on the piano, and the growing sense of anger and menace. She does anger brilliantly.
So, for contrast, let's have some joyful, lustful R&B and Nina's Ray Charles impression.
Here's a typical Philips take on a show tune, produced so that her voice is virtually in your ear, ringing out clear no matter how loud the piano builds
Here she un-covers the Dame
And one more for luck, one of her self-penned efforts. What's your name, dearie?
