NINA SIMONE
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1958– 1993 |
Vocal jazz / Soul |
Wild Is The Wind (1966) |
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Album
released: February 1959 |
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Tracks: 1) Mood Indigo; 2) Don’t Smoke In
Bed; 3) He Needs Me; 4) Little Girl Blue; 5) Love Me Or Leave Me; 6) My Baby
Just Cares For Me; 7) Good Bait; 8) Plain Gold Ring; 9) You’ll Never Walk
Alone; 10) I Loves You Porgy; 11) Central Park Blues; 12*) He’s Got The Whole
World In His Hands; 13*) For All We Know; 14*) African Mailman. |
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REVIEW
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Some might find
these parallels absurd, rightfully indicating that Billie was, first and
foremost, an entertainer — in spite
of all the intimacy and personal emotions which she so naturally injected
into most of her performances, she had no qualms about her «diva» status and clearly
enjoyed her commercial success — whereas Simone was a mentor, an uncompromising artist iron-bent on giving the people
what (she thought) they need rather
than what they want. But one must
not forget that the very role of such a mentor
in popular music did not even exist until the late Fifties, when people like
Nina, profiting from the slowly accumulating changes in social mores, began
sculpting it out. The important thing about Billie Holiday is not that she
was a warrior — she most certainly wasn’t — but that she managed to sneak in
a shade of something genuine and serious under the generic glitz of the
entertainment world, in more or less the only way in which it was at all
possible in the pre-WWII era. Nina Simone, following in her footsteps, was
allowed by her own era to take it further and try to outright replace the generic glitz of the entertainment
world with something genuine and serious. Like most people with similar
ambitions, she failed — as far as popularity and commercial success are
concerned — but hey, she did give us all a nice enough alternative to Diana
Ross, didn’t she? In some ways,
it was quite a good thing that she was rejected from the Curtis Institute of
Music in 1951 after applying there to study as a classical pianist. Had she
been accepted, she might have spent all her life as a solid second-rate
musician, known at best to a small handful of classical fans, with barely a
chance to become notorious on the level of, say, a Martha Argerich (to name
just one mega-famous female classical pianist from her generation) — Simone’s
classical «inserts» into her performances, at least to my ears, do not expose
her talent as a tremendous loss to the classical world. She herself has
always insisted that her application was rejected because of you-know-what, a
claim which many people understandably take for granted but which should probably
be taken with a grain of salt, given that the Curtis Institute was known for at least occasionally
accepting black students before Nina, and that she was apparently one of a
whoppin’ 75 applications for 3 positions in 1951. But in any case, think about
it this way: first, how many people today fondly remember Nina Simone and
still listen to her records? and how many people today fondly remember the
recently deceased Blanche
Burton-Lyles, the first African-American woman pianist to graduate from
Curtis (in 1954; she was already studying there at the time of Nina’s
application) and to actually play at Carnegie Hall? For better or worse,
Simone got the better deal of the two. Second, I
suppose what is more important is not whether or not Eunice Waymon was
rejected because of racism, but the fact that she believed it for her entire life — there may or there may not have
been an injustice, but it was a serious scar that probably kept on aching for
ever and ever, and without that scar there would have been no ‘Strange
Fruit’, no ‘Mississippi Goddam’, and not even a Little Girl Blue, an album on which that scar manifests itself in
much more subtle ways, never really jumping out at first listen, but it is
there all right if you just keep your ear down to the ground. Nina Simone was
tough, stubborn, uncompromising, emotionally unstable and maniacally
depressed for most of her earthly existence (it is quite possible, by the
way, that it was precisely all those qualities, rather than her skin color,
that led to the Curtis rejection: after all, regular classical training, like
sports, presumes the importance of self-discipline and obedience above all
else), and all these qualities could never have made her as much of a major
figure in the classical world as they served her in her pop music career
(well, we know that bipolar disorder worked wonders for Schumann, but in the
late 20th century it is really more of a hassle than an advantage). Anyway, let’s
finally get to business. Little Girl
Blue, Nina Simone’s first and last album for the small jazz indie label
of Bethlehem Records, was, much like the Beatles’ Please Please Me, recorded over a one-day session in New York at
the end of 1957, and for much the same reason: Simone had already glossed
most of those songs over three years of continuous live gigs in the various bars
& grills of New England. Her partners for the recording were Jimmy Bond
on double bass and Albert "Tootie" Heath on drums, both of them
professional jazzmen from Philadelphia who had already developed plenty of
synergy with Nina — yet their presence here is exclusively as loyal henchmen;
despite the standard jazz trio format, neither of the two ever takes a solo
turn, not even on the instrumental numbers. (Cue the question of who is
actually the bigger «diva», Billie or Nina? there are very few Billie Holiday
recordings in existence on which none of the musicians surrounding her are
allowed to shine in their own ways). The actual
setlist does not yet reflect Nina’s future expansive interest in the folk,
R&B, or rock scenes — browsing through the titles as they are reveals
nothing out of the ordinary for a typical vocal jazz album by somebody like
Sarah Vaughan or Carmen McRae (Nina’s then-current competitor on Bethlehem
Records). We have ourselves some Gershwin (‘I Loves You, Porgy’ was Nina’s
second and only mildly «commercial» single, cracking the US top 20), some
Rodgers and Hart (title track), some Rodgers and Hammerstein (‘You’ll Never
Walk Alone’), some Duke (‘Mood Indigo’), some Peggy Lee (‘Don’t Smoke In
Bed’), and two whole numbers from the Donaldson-Kahn soundtrack for 1928’s Whoopee! musical — compared to
Simone’s future recordings, the album is almost remarkably devoid of anything
contemporary; the lone exceptions are ‘Plain Gold Ring’, an Earl Burroughs
composition that had originally appeared in a hauntingly stripped down,
percussion-driven version by Kitty White in 1956 (the original is still
well worth getting to know), and Nina’s own stab at composing, the stately
mid-tempo instrumental ‘Central Park Blues’. From listening
to these songs, though, it is rarely clear if Simone actually had a fondness
for them as they were, or if she merely treated them as inescapable vehicles
to develop her own style and force-feed you her own personality. Already
‘Mood Indigo’, opening the record, takes more cues from the Thelonious Monk
cover of the song than any of Ellington’s numerous versions, and although
Nina’s piano playing is nowhere near as unpredictable and shocking as Monk’s
(well, whose is?), it is still bold, dashing, and manages to already reflect
her classical background in the very first minute. And once that voice comes
in... well, all it takes is the opening "you ain’t never been blue, till
you’ve had that mood indigo" to realize that you are not in the presence of an
eager-to-please entertainer — this is the stern, unobjectionable voice of your
teacher which tells you, in so many words, that it has been scientifically
verified that you have, in fact, never been blue until you have been exposed
to mood indigo, and that you will be most severely punished if you ever try
to assert that mood indigo may not be an absolutely
necessary condition to being blue. This iron grip
will forever remain the trademark sign of Nina’s vocals — even when she makes
efforts to sound vulnerable and miserable, she will never allow herself to
remain at the listener’s mercy. Yet the iron grip of the vocals does form a
fascinating contrast with the anything-goes approach of her piano playing,
which, on ‘Mood Indigo’, seems to go from pseudo-Monk to a bit of Gershwin
and then, at the end, get closer to the bombastic boogie of late-Fifties Ray
Charles, all played with such energy and confidence that you never, not for
one second, get to doubt about whether this or that particular phrase
actually belongs in this particular spot. If the High Priestess of Soul says
it belongs, then it belongs. End of story. Next position, please. For all the
intimidating qualities of Nina’s voice, I hold the opinion that Little Girl Blue is still first and
foremost the work of an inventive and imaginative pianist — we do know, after
all, that she began to sing almost by accident (when the owner of the piano
bar at which she worked demanded that she also sing for her supper), and
there are as many as three fully instrumental numbers on the record as well;
most importantly, I am not sure that some of her vocal performances on this
record really add all that much to the original versions — for instance,
‘Don’t Smoke In Bed’ largely follows the same vocal and emotional patterns
that had already been laid down in Peggy Lee’s seminal version from 1948, and
the song in general is a more appropriate vehicle for Peggy’s
smoky-melancholy femme-fatale style. Likewise, I cannot insist that Nina does
a better vocal turn on ‘Plain Gold Ring’ than Kitty White — she does free the
tune from excessive melodrama, but somehow Kitty’s exaggerated, over-the-top
lilt of the line "I can’t stop these teardrops of mine" still comes
across as more natural than Nina’s dark-ice delivery of the same line, as she
is incapable of or, at least, unwilling to lower the emotional barriers in
order to fully connect to the song’s desperate lyrics. Still, far be it from
me to claim that such an interpretation has no right to exist — it is quite
possible that in some emotional contexts, it will come across as the
stronger-hitting one. In any case, on
the whole it would be futile to deny that the primary focus of Little Girl Blue is on the piano.
‘Love Me Or Leave Me’, in particular, is famous for its insertion of a
lengthy solo based on Bach’s Inventions, probably the first such experiment
within the context of a vocal standard — and one that works bloody well,
considering how naturally the fugue merges with the general groove. ‘My Baby
Just Cares For Me’ (which would unexpectedly become a belated hit for Simone
in 1987 in the UK after being used in a Chanel No. 5 commercial — capitalism
always gets the last laugh, doesn’t it?) sort of continues with the
Monk-inspired piano logic of ‘Mood Indigo’, starting out with a deceptively
simple kiddie music hall riff and then, in the instrumental break, heading
off to improvisational territory (more Bud Powell than Monk, probably, but
still, the transition between the opening riff and the scale travels in the
instrumental is quite impressive). And then there is her purely instrumental
reading of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, which she luxuriously rearranges as a
dreamy Rachmaninoff-style ballad, giving the left hand almost free rein on
the bass chords in what is probably the closest she ever comes to a downright
virtuoso performance. The other two
instrumentals are somewhat more restrained. Count Basie’s ‘Good Bait’,
utterly unrecognizable in this slow, funky-bluesy version, actually comes
across as a composition about, well, baiting
— the first minute and a half is Nina setting the bait to the hook, then,
when Bond and Heath come in with the support, begins the careful guiding of
the fishing line across the water, then, at around 3:30, it bites, and after
a brief, but tense struggle the poor fishie is triumphantly hauled to shore.
Thus we actually get a five-and-a-half-minute long dynamic dramatization, and
one can only hope that the whole "bait" thing is supposed to be
symbolic, rather than some actual Proustian elevation of a mundane twist of
events to transcendental status. As for Nina’s
own ‘Central Park Blues’, well, as somebody who has actually been blessed
with enjoying many a happy stroll through Central Park on a nice hot summer
day, I can certainly confirm that this particular instrumental... has nothing
to do with happily strolling through Central Park whatsoever. Actually, given
how the mood of the tune is squarely inverted from carefree-happy to
wary-paranoid around the 1:40 mark, I would not be surprised to learn that
this is Nina’s musical preview of something like Stevie Wonder’s ‘Living In The
City’ — one minute, you’re happily enjoying the green lushness of your
surroundings, the next one, you’re arrested by the nearby cop for suspicious
loitering. Am I reading too much into this? Well, go ahead and stop me if you
can. Rounding it all
up, it is interesting that Little Girl
Blue generally remains one of the highest rated and most beloved records
in Nina’s catalog — despite the fact that, this being her very first album,
it is so heavily dependent on old standards and has almost no traces of her
sociopolitical spirit. Personally, I have always thought that this was
precisely the way it was supposed to be: every musician has a right to
express his or her social and political stance in their output, but that
right has to be earned — anybody
who loves their politics more than they love their music is a political
pundit first, musician second (here’s looking at you Riot grrrl, ho hum).
With an album like Little Girl Blue
under her belt, who could ever deny the immense musical talent and general
artistic appeal of Nina Simone? These eleven tracks amply demonstrate that
the lady had nothing to prove to anybody once she got involved with the Civil
Rights movement — here is a firmly established, wilful, original musical
personality, not afraid of going against the grain from within a relatively
formulaic genre and, consequently, open for going against the grain in just
about any other sphere of artistic and social existence. It could,
perhaps, be argued that on her subsequent albums she would gradually lean
toward more and more theatricality, neglecting actual musical development in
favor of more and more social provocation — even that something like ‘My Baby
Just Cares For Me’ is musically superior to the likes of ‘Mississippi Goddam’;
would that, however, mean that everybody would be better off if she’d just
continued to mine the territory of ‘My Baby’ for the rest of her life? Probably
not. That said, I cannot deny that I, too, have a very special place in my
heart reserved exclusively for Nina’s piano work (and some, not all, of Nina’s singing) on Little Girl Blue, and that I do not think she ever made an album
richer and more inventive than this little collection with her faithful trio.
It is probably wiser to compare it not to Please Please Me, but to Elvis’ Sun Sessions — another example of an early, fresh, inspired
minimalistic triumph that was followed by others, but whose original spirit
has never been properly replicated or «officially surpassed». Technical note:
although the album was very recently remastered and reissued on CD and vinyl,
it makes sense to look for an earlier version which appends three bonus
tracks from the same session — the gospel number ‘He’s Got The Whole World In
His Hands’, the pop song ‘For All We Know’, and, most importantly, another of
Nina’s early originals, the lively and ever so slightly «tribal-sounding»
instrumental ‘African Mailman’, with Heath going wilder than usual on
percussion and Nina going much
wilder than usual on the ivories in her first straightforward ode to African
roots. All three of these were originally released on Bethlehem Records in
late 1959 together with a selection of outtakes by Carmen McRae and Chris
Connor as Nina Simone And Her Friends,
already after Nina and all her «friends» had left the label, presumably in a
desperate last attempt to make an extra bit of money from their former stars
(the label itself would be sold to King Records three years later — serves
them right, as they essentially cheated Simone out of royalties for Little Girl Blue). |
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Album
released: July 1959 |
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Tracks: 1) Blue
Prelude; 2) Children Go Where I Send You;
3) Tomorrow (We Will Meet Once More); 4) Stompin’ At The Savoy; 5) It Might
As Well Be Spring; 6) You’ve Been Gone Too Long; 7) That’s Him Over There; 8)
Chilly Winds Don’t Blow; 9) Theme From "Middle Of The Night"; 10)
Can’t Get Out Of This Mood; 11) Willow Weep For Me; 12) Solitaire. |
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REVIEW
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Not that Nina Simone
ain’t «amazing», of course — when she is at her best, few performers can
match her triple punch of intensity, honesty, and professionalism, which is
indeed a situation that we typically describe with superlative semantics.
Unfortunately, precisely this second studio LP of hers, put out by Colpix
just half a year after Little Girl
Blue, hardly stands up to the original power of the word, before it began
to apply to everything, from getting new shoelaces to the most recent album
by Imagine Dragons. Apparently, Colpix (one of Columbia’s sub-labels) were so
happy about getting their hands on Nina that they decided to market her as
the greatest jazz vocalist of her generation or something, the one who might
be able to pick up Billie Holiday’s crown (especially since Billie had just
so conveniently died the same month that The
Amazing Nina Simone was released). They even gave Nina creative control
in the studio — not that they had much choice in the matter, since just one
look at Nina’s face will tell you this gal was pathologically unable to take
orders from anyone, not even back in 1959. The problem is
that Nina was relatively rarely interested in having full creative control in
the studio; according to some sources, she usually treated her recording
contracts as merely a means to make a living. The rule of thumb — which does
know its exceptions, but is most certainly a real thing — is that if you want
to hear Nina at her best, you have to search out her concert performances,
where she exercised her power over the audience without any mediation. In the
studio, the usual attitude was professionalism with, at best, a slight whiff
of inspiration. Little Girl Blue
was a bit different from the rest, since it had to serve as Simone’s visit
card for the musical establishment; but on her subsequent studio LPs, the
«amazing» Nina Simone had nothing left to prove to said establishment, and
could easily allow herself not to stay on top of her game whenever she didn’t
feel like it... which was quite often. Take this
sophomore effort, for instance. Unlike Little
Girl Blue with its largely unpredictable selection of material, extended
song durations (whenever necessary), piano improvisations, instrumental
musings, and (every once in a while) the clear, tragic emergence of that
repressed African-American spirit, The
Amazing Nina Simone is largely restricted to relatively formulaic
three-minute renditions of selections from the Songbook, seriously
downplaying Nina’s skills as a pianist (in favor of fairly generic string
arrangements) and featuring very, very few truly distinctive vocal passages
that could leave you in awe of «Nina Simone’s enigma», chained to all the
little subtleties of her intonation swings. It is not a bad record by any means, but much, if not most of it, is simply
giving you Nina Simone as just another entry into the talent contest of
contemporary vocal jazz ladies, from Sarah Vaughan to Blossom Dearie and the
like — where the overall tendency is that if you like the voice, you’ll like
the record, if you hate the voice, you’ll hate the record. And it didn’t
really have to be that way, not if you judge by the quality of the
exceptionally outstanding opening number, the old standard ‘Blue Prelude’ —
which already in 1959 you could hear performed by everybody from Bing Crosby
to Peggy Lee, but I don’t really know of any version that could match the
howl-at-the-moon intensity of Simone’s, not when she draws out each syllable
of "let me sigh, let me cry, when I’m blue" in her deep, low,
forworn voice. The nighttime jazz arrangement, all thundery bass and faraway
echoey trumpets, complements the vocals perfectly, and the old lyrics really
click with the vocal and instrumental mood: her "won’t be long ’fore my
song will be through / ’cause I know I’m on my last go-round" will make
you empathize so much that I wouldn’t advise listening to this song in
headphones while walking past a local hobo with a thousand dollars in cash in
your pocket. There is hardly
one number among the remaining eleven tunes, though, that would dare compete
in intensity with this opening blast. It’s mainly a hodge-podge of rather
random standards, most of which, as I already said, depend only on the amount
of love for Nina’s voice — for instance, the Rodgers & Hammerstein number
‘It Might As Well Be Spring’, or Jerry Silverman’s ‘Tomorrow (We Will Meet
Once More)’. The light orchestral arrangements are neither here nor there,
and the vocal interpretation of the songs is predictably tender and
melancholic, not really enough to begin thinking about these old chestnuts in
any eye-opening brand new ways. Some things are
just weird, like the well-ridden warhorse of ‘Stompin’ At The Savoy’, which
just begs the question why? Hearing
such a song performed by Nina Simone, set to an upbeat tempo and decorated with
a flashy, glitzy brass section, is comparable to the likes of Nick Drake
trying to adapt himself to performing ‘Rock And Roll All Night’ with a
full-scale rock band at his heels; at best, it’s a historical curiosity, at
worst, a pointless embarrassment. Neither it nor the other fast-tempo songs
on this album, e.g. ‘Can’t Get Out Of This Mood’, work well for Nina at all,
and I get a feeling that she was probably just running a lottery at this
point, pulling out random musical titles out of a hat to fill up the empty
spaces. At least thank Heaven she did not pull out the likes of ‘Cheek To
Cheek’ or something like that. Even some of
the songs that could have worked,
such as ‘Willow Weep For Me’, end up spoiled by uninspired and overdone
arrangements — here, the recording is so cluttered with brass, woodwinds, and
vibes, that Nina’s piano ends up buried and shunned from sight, while the
singing part feels at least a couple keys higher than would be appropriate
for Nina to bring in a properly tragic flavor. In the end, it’s just another
case of a piece of «nice work if you can get it», certainly not something I’m
looking for if I want to astound my friends with a convincing slice of Nina’s
personality. In the end,
there are only two tracks in addition to ‘Blue Prelude’ which I would find
above-average-interesting. One is more for novelty reasons than anything
else: ‘Chilly Winds Don’t Blow’, a song that takes a single line out of the
traditional ‘Going Down The Road Feeling Bad’ and integrates it into a different
tune (albeit with more or less the same basic melody), with a fast-paced,
percussion-and-brass-heavy R&B arrangement that could be mistaken for a
Little Richard romp for the first few bars. Judging by the credits, this was
an experiment coming from Nina’s producer, Hecky Krasnow, and she adds quite
a bit of «mooing power» to the overall energy level of the tune. Throw in a
weirdly epic high-pitched string solo, echoed by pastoral recorders, and you
get a bona fide theme for some epic Western here, How The West Was Won or something like that. It’s sort of a
ridiculous experience, but at this point I’ll certainly take a ridiculous
experience from Nina Simone than a flat-out boring one. The other
really nice inclusion is ‘Children Go Where I Send You’, arguably the only
song here whose emphasis on the piano and overall «deceptive lightheadedness»
could make it a worthy contender for Little
Girl Blue. Nina does not do «gospel» too often, and whenever she does,
you always sense that she means much more by it than just gospel, even if you
can never prove it; at the very least, there is always a sense of irony and
bitterness mixed with depth of feeling, and it is precisely what makes this
little counting-out rhyme so attractive on this record. Her strained vocals
somehow make it feel more like a covert protest song than a Christmas carol —
an effect that, unfortunately, is unreachable for most of the standards she
covers on the rest of the LP. This
underwhelming reaction, even if I am not implying that it should be counted
as universal, is still a factor that one has to take into consideration when
thinking about Simone’s notorious lack of chart success — something that
could never be remedied by the word «amazing», either. While a part of it
does have to do with Nina’s «anti-star» positioning and the discomfort
experienced by too many people at the sight of a militant African-American
female protester, an equally large part of it has to do with Nina simply not
working enough for it — which is a statement of fact rather than an
accusation, of course; but the fact remains that Nina never really expected
her records to be bought, and invested about as much care into making them as
any person with such lack of expectations could be supposed to invest. Which
means, in turn, that you have to spend some time carefully scrutinizing this
precious stone in order to properly discern its genius. |
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Album
released: December 1959 |
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Tracks: 1) Black Is The Color Of My True
Love’s Hair; 2) Exactly Like You; 3) The Other Woman; 4) Under The Lowest; 5)
You Can Have Him; 6) Summertime (Instrumental); 7) Summertime (Vocal); 8)
Cotton Eyed Joe; 9) Return Home; 10) Wild Is The Wind; 11) Fine And Mellow. |
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Now this is more like it. The first in a long string of Simone’s live
albums, At Town Hall achieved
everything that The Amazing Nina
Simone failed to achieve, and more. Recorded in New York on September 12,
1959 (although it is said that several of the tracks were later re-recorded
live in the studio), the album features Nina firmly planted at the piano,
supported only by the small rhythm section of Jimmy Bond on bass and Tootie
Heath on drums — the same guys who stuck behind her throughout Little Girl Blue. Thus, we are back
to the most natural and comfortable setting for Nina, and in more ways than
one, this, rather than her
sophomore effort, is the true sequel and «expansion pack» for the spirit,
form, and technique of Simone’s debut. |
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Even the
proportions are just about right — there’s plenty of vocal standards, but
interspersed with a little dark folk (‘Black Is The Color...’), a little
urban blues (‘Fine And Mellow’), and a couple of jazz instrumentals to
unleash the Demon of Piano Improvisation. Besides, in this setting she is the
master of those vocal standards, bending them to her own rules and whims,
rather than having to compromise with the laws of orchestration; under these
conditions, even some of the cutesy old standards may occasionally come out
as quite disturbing, darker than the darkest folk when she really puts her
heart and mind to it. Some of the performances may be more memorable than
others, but there isn’t a truly weak spot anywhere on the album; it all makes
perfect sense — of rebellious appropriation, that is. If Web sources
can be trusted, the track that opens the album was not the first one in the
actual setlist, but its positioning here immediately gives the record a sense
of grandioseness — Nina’s rendition of ‘Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s
Hair’ turns it into a grim, suicidally romantic extravaganza, with more of
those quasi-Rachmaninoff piano stylizations and dark — let’s actually say black, not necessarily in the racial
sense of the word — vocals that strongly bring on the idea of death rather than just unfortunate
separation of two lovers kept apart by fate, as the ballad’s lyrics suggest.
Even more important is how she makes the song, which is supposed to be
relatively «static» like most folk ballads, into a veritable tempest of
emotions, contrasting the highly expressive, dynamic, romantic, powerhouse
piano playing with a remarkably icy, cold, strictly controlled vocal — that
intro feels like an onslaught of ocean waves, racing each other towards a
sandy beach... and breaking up on the ironclad iceberg of the opening vocal
line. No matter where that vocal goes, up or down, no matter how much it
stretches, bends, or wobbles, the icy chill is always there. No humanity,
just chill. If you still have not accustomed yourself to the idea that Nina
Simone has agreed to carry all our suffering for us in exchange for a ticket
to the Town Hall, you’d better start accustoming yourself now. Then, just as
you have finally found yourself a comfy position inside that coffin, wham, the mood shifts abruptly to...
joyful? It would be natural, but boring to call the mood of ‘Exactly Like
You’ joyful, because Nina Simone is unable to convey, let’s say, conventional joy even if she wanted
to. She can be a caretaker, or she can be a prosecutor, but she cannot be
Tony Bennett. On ‘Exactly Like You’, she’s being as possessive as always —
even that insistent bassline from Jimmy sounds like the impatient ringing of
a bell, with Nina’s piano soon joining in as an impatient knocking on the
door, because she’s been waiting each day for someone exactly like you and she
just can’t take it anymore. Listen to how her voice trembles from overworked
impatience on the "now I know why my mama / she taught me to be
true" bit, or to how she completely smashes that piano solo while
humming along to each note like a jazz paragon of Glenn Gould’s. This is not
so much a romantic performance as a psychotic one, even if, formally, she
never allows herself to go hystrionic — the wildness and violence in the
voice and in the piano playing is subtle, bottled up and implied rather than obvious.
It is this combination of hinted-at-emotionality and total self-control that
really gets me every time. To better
understand the depth that Nina brings to Jessie Mae Robinson’s ‘The Other
Woman’, it would make sense to compare Nina’s version with
the previously released original interpretation by Sarah Vaughan.
Vaughan’s version, with its light orchestration and fluttery vocal vibratos,
is almost cheerful, a sly and largely self-complacent rumination on the
long-term ruinous effects of adultery. Simone turns the whole thing to mutual
tragedy, a situation that has already emotionally destroyed the protagonist
and will soon enough catch up with her "rival" as well. Had Billie
Holiday ever sung the song, she would have shrouded it in her «feather-light
ironic sadness» atmosphere; Simone’s sadness goes much deeper and hardly has
any humor or irony to it, but never once feels theatrically exaggerated. The same theme
continues with ‘You Can Have Him’, that one Irving Berlin song that seems
like it has been specifically written with Nina in mind — or, rather, with
the idea that Nina would eventually come along and transform it from a gay,
casual assertion of female independence in Doris Day’s or Ella Fitzgerald’s
versions into a Lieder of epic
proportions. Put this song on an orchestrated album like The Amazing Nina Simone and you probably miss the boat; but with
her piano, Nina manages to amplify the emotionality of the tune to just the
right — occasionally gargantuan — proportions. Watch out for the classic
Rachmaninoff «swell» toward the end of the final verse ("then I’d go out
and buy the papers..."); beyond the point that it’s technically
impressive how she can play that constantly changing and evolving melody and sing at the same time, it is also
one more fine example of putting all the emotional outburst baggage on the
ivories, while remaining reserved and defiantly aloof on the vocals. Most of these
thoughts and impressions apply in equal proportions to the second side of the
album, so I’ll be brief about it: this is where you first meet Nina’s
interpretations of ‘Summertime’ (everything said about ‘You Can Have Him’
more or less works for this one, too) and ‘Wild Is The Wind’, which most
people for the past half-century have probably associated with David Bowie’s
cover version — yet Bowie’s version was in itself a loyal tribute to Simone,
whereas Nina actually remade the song from the 1957 movie in her own image.
The difference is, when Johnny
Mathis sings "don’t you know you’re life itself", this is more
or less what he means. When Nina sings the same lines, it is rather clear
that you’re... that’s right, death,
you guessed it. This is her own Liebestod,
and this is why Bowie, a great admirer of this vibe no matter if it came from
Simone or Brel, latched on to it so tightly. She sensed the eerie,
otherworldly potential of the song and was the first to realize it. Next to all
these vocal highlights, one might dismiss the two lengthy instrumental
pieces, ‘Under The Lowest’ and ‘Return Home’, as passable filler — but I beg
to differ. She may not have been a virtuoso player along the lines of Art
Tatum, or a mind-blowing rule-breaker like Thelonious Monk, but she did take
her inspiration from both of those and
more, and hearing Nina jam on the piano for five minutes is nearly always interesting, at the very least, in
almost the same manner as it is interesting to hear a great psychedelic rock
jam from Cream, for instance. ‘Under The Lowest’ is Nina’s exercise in the
blues — think of it as a jazzified rendition of something like ‘Further On Up
The Road’ — and it’s five minutes of a slow, but constant musical crescendo,
during which she eventually turns the piano into a battleground, while the
trusty rhythm section is churning those bass and drum generators for her.
‘Return Home’ is even better, with Jimmy and Tootie setting up a danceable,
tempestuous rhumba rhythm while Nina is throwing out fast-and-furious piano
ideas left and right and getting so wound up in the process that her humming
eventually turns to scatting, and the «dance» aura of the performance
eventually evolves into «primal religious ritual». There’s an almost childish
delight in how she buzzes her way through the piece, slamming it close at the
end with a satisfied exclamation of "that’s
it!!" Who knows, maybe she even smiled at the end. It’s the only
moment on the album I could associate with a proper smile, anyway. I suppose the
only thing that prevents At Town Hall
from the status of the definitive
live Nina Simone experience is the near-total lack of political content —
1959 was just a little too early for her to begin writing stuff like
‘Mississippi Goddam’ — but while her live shows did eventually become even
more intense and even less predictable with her evolving abilities to convert
social protest into musical expression, I’m not sure that there is anything
in her later catalog that would properly surpass the depth and soulfulness of
that expression as it is already conveyed in here. And, subtle as it is,
there is actually a lot of social
protest embedded in the words, sounds, and atmosphere of this performance — from
the feminist overtones of ‘You Can Have Him’ and ‘The Other Woman’, to the
probably non-incidental fact that the very first word sung (and drawn out) on
the album is ‘black’, to, well, the general expression of near-complete
artistic freedom for a black female musician, on levels quite unprecedented
for the late 1950s. It is certainly a unique record for 1959, and echoes of
its uniqueness are still easily felt today if you only give it the proper
attention it deserves. |
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Tracks: 1) Trouble In Mind; 2) Porgy; 3)
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REVIEW Except for two or three single
A-sides, Nina made no studio recordings in 1960; however, the critical (if
not commercial) success of At Town
Hall opened Colpix’ eyes to Nina’s real strength, and for all of her
remaining time on that label, she would have at least as many live albums as
she would have studio ones — a tradition that, unfortunately, would later be
throttled with her transition to Philips Records. Also, 1960 was the first
year for Nina to be admitted to the Newport Jazz Festival — the exact same
festival that yielded Muddy Waters’ epochal At Newport album, and ended in riots, scandals, and a temporary
suspension of the Festival due to its becoming far more popular than it could
allow itself to be (for more details, refer to my Muddy Waters reviews).
Naturally, with most of the Festival having been professionally recorded, it
made perfect sense to make use of the tapes — and it didn’t hurt, either,
that by this time Nina had a whole new band under her command, and had
assembled a completely new setlist that did not overlap at all with either At Town Hall or any of her first two
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The final
product, on the whole, cannot properly compete with At Town Hall. The large open-air venue was much less suited to
the technical limitations of recording equipment, especially when it came to
artists like Nina, where subtlety and quiet were every bit as important as
loudness and energy; there are times when her vocals barely come through the
smokescreen of the piano and the rhythm section, while the rhythm section
muffles itself into a humming mess. There are also fewer songs, sacrificing
some of Nina’s diversity for the sake of extended improvisation — this is,
after all, a jazz festival, where you are implicitly obliged not to lose face
before the likes of Dave Brubeck and Cannonball Adderley (both of whom
performed on the same day with Nina — June 30, 1960). And in terms of
unforgettable stand-alone tracks, At
Newport, I think, really only has one, but we’ll get to that a little bit
later. From what I can
tell with the aid of Web sources, the album reflects the original setlist and
its sequencing quite faithfully, perhaps with one or two omissions due to the
limitations of the LP format. The first three songs, taken together, form
sort of a collective «legacy statement»: ‘Trouble In Mind’ is a classic Delta
blues number, ‘Porgy’ (or ‘Blues For Porgy’) is an update on Gershwin’s opera
by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields, and ‘Little Liza Jane’ is an old folk
song that is sometimes traced back to slavery-era African-American
beginnings. (It’s possible that it might have come to Nina’s attention
through the recent, and quite lively, Huey "Piano" Smith cover from
1956 — or Fats Domino’s from 1959). We thus get sort of a triple perspective
on the «black spirit» — through mid-tempo blues, slow pensive soulful opera,
and fast playful dancing; this is the part of the album which is the least
«Nina-centered», even if she does try to waltz away into some distant and
unpredictable piano direction in the middle of ‘Trouble In Mind’. From a symbolic
point of view, it’s all cool, but not necessarily «jaw-dropping». ‘Trouble In
Mind’ is better suited for the likes of Big Bill Broonzy — it works best when
it is sung in a nonchalant, careless voice; Nina’s is a little too agitated
to properly use the contrast between the song’s «sunny» melody and bleak
lyrics. ‘Porgy’ is emotional, but not emotional enough to justify yet another
revival of Gershwin’s ubiquitous characters. ‘Little Liza Jane’ is fun, but
the only striking thing about it is to hear (and see) such a somber
and serious artist as Nina Simone give such a playful (but also quite somber
and serious) rendition of such a lightweight trifle. (Perhaps it is supposed
to show that Nina Simone has a sense of humor — she does not and never did —
or perhaps it is supposed to remind us that slaves back in the 19th century
had a sense of humor, which, even if they did, has since then been lost by
the likes of Nina Simone, with all due respect and stuff). Still, with the
diverse atmospheres of all three tracks and Nina’s deeply involved delivery
of them all, it is not likely that you shall get properly bored before we get
to the real highlight — Nina’s
interpretation of Cole Porter’s ‘You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To’, which
really just takes the lyrics of the song and puts them in the context of
something completely different, as far removed from the traditional light
approach of Dinah Shore, Frank Sinatra, and / or Helen Merrill (to name just
a few of the most popular versions) as possible. In fact, for the first three
minutes of the song we barely get to understand what it is at all — a slow,
moody, pensive shuffle, which Nina gradually develops into a Bach-like piano
fugue, alternating between bass and treble runs and reaching full sonic
awesomeness when Nina’s new guitarist, Al Schackman, joins in the fun with
his own fugue that echoes Nina’s.
By the time she finally begins to sing, a requiem-like mood has already
congested upon the audience, and it is crystal clear that "you’d be so nice to come home to, you’d be
so nice by the fire" can no longer refer to a living person — from a
song of hopeful expectations it has been transformed into a chilling finale
for a Gothic novel. Coming right after the giddiness of ‘Little Liza Jane’,
this is like having a snowstorm in July — but an utterly mesmerizing
snowstorm; the skill with which Nina and her band build up to a tempestuous
crescendo is admirable for a mere four-piece unit. The second side
of the album never quite lives up to the gripping culmination at the end of
the first one, but at least it does not break the mood. ‘Flo Me La’ and
‘Nina’s Blues’, both credited to Nina herself, are essentially instrumental
numbers (the first one does have short moments of vocalize where Nina just
chants the nonsensical title over and over) that continue the somber
atmosphere. ‘Flo Me La’ subtly explores Nina’s «tribal» side, with her piano
operating as a punchy percussive instrument along with Bobby Hamilton’s drums
(in the middle of the song, Bobby takes an extended solo) — it’s basically
just a seven minute-long vampy groove that invites you to get high and bob
your head along with the rhythm, and it will be either dreadfully boring or
irresistibly hypnotic, depending on your DNA arrangements for the day. I am
generally more pleased with ‘Nina’s Blues’, which gives guitarist Al
Schackman a second chance (after ‘You’d Be So Nice’) to show his talents —
yet I could hardly insist that ‘Nina’s Blues’ would be enough to blow all the
bluesmen and jazzmen on the Newport stage away. It’s just a decent six-minute
«jazzy-blues» jam where everybody in the band gives their best in this genre,
but, just like Ray Charles playing jazz, it’s not really the genre for Nina Simone. Finally, lively
excitement returns in the finale, with Nina really putting her foot on the
gas for her rendition of ‘In The Evening By The Moonlight’, another old
minstrel classic usually associated with James A. Bland and typically
performed in a slow and solemn manner... which is also the way Nina starts it,
before blowing out the brakes and launching into a fast, jubilant
performance. It is telling how she injects a little change of her own into
the lyrics of the song (which were already quite heavily expurgated from the
antiquated 19th century lexicon over the previous fifty years of recording) —
instead of "how the old folks they
would enjoy it", she has "how
my mother she would enjoy it", thus establishing a more direct and
personal link to the song — which she then proceeds to «slay» with an all-out
attack on the ivories; eventually, it’s the Bach-like fugue all over again,
only played at thrice the speed of ‘You’d Be So Nice’. For all the overall
inferiority of this album to Town Hall,
it sure has a much more rousing finale. The overall
impression is that At Newport is
much more of a social statement than At
Town Hall; in the open air of Newport, the music is becoming increasingly
«physical», as befits the traditional African-American way of doing things,
as opposed to the more «lyrical» and sentimental mood of the enclosed urban
concert space. We are still quite a long ways away from ‘Mississippi Goddam’,
but the only performance on this entire album that cannot be directly tied in
to the plight of the black man is ‘You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To’ — and
that one, in its turn, is a bit of a mockery of the aristocratic suaveness of
the white man, so it all ties in in the end. This is by no means the main
reason why At Newport is not Nina
at her finest — of all 20th century artists, she is truly the one who knows how to turn politics into art, and
how to use art as politics — but I generally prefer her ways of turning happy
musical numbers into chilling anthems of death and depression to her shaking
the tambourine to childrens’ songs, and her jazzy fire-and-brimstone
contemporary sermons to her relatively straightforward covers of old blues
material. I’m pretty sure the performance worked wonders for all those young
white kids on the green grass lawns of sunny Newport, though. |
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Tracks: 1) Rags
And Old Iron; 2) No Good Man; 3) Gin House Blues; 4) I’ll Look Around;
5) I Love To Love; 6) Work Song; 7) Where Can I Go Without You; 8) Just Say I
Love Him; 9) Memphis In June; 10) Forbidden Fruit; 11*) Porgy I Is Your Woman
Now; 12*) Baubles, Bangles And Beads; 13*) Gimme A Pigfoot; 14*) Ev’rytime We
Say Goodbye; 15*) Spring Is Here; 16*) Lonesome Valley; 17*) Golden Earrings;
18*) My Ship; 19*) ’Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-Ness If I Do; 20*) Try A Little
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REVIEW Finally, after almost two years of
nothing but concert recordings, Colpix puts out Nina’s second studio album
recorded for the label — and in doing so, reminds us once again that the
studio is really not a natural habitat for Ms. Simone. It’s a decent enough
experience, but pretty much everything Nina did in her prime years is decent
— her professionalism and good taste always ensure a «quality listen» — and
so what we are looking for are signs of outstanding
achievements, which are quite scarce on Forbidden
Fruit. Recorded with her usual band (the very same that played at
Newport), it consists, for the most part, of old standards, with special
attention directed to the classic repertoire of Billie Holiday and Bessie
Smith; not the best sign, perhaps, given how difficult it is even for Nina to
«override» the massively distinctive personalities of those two — and it
hardly helps that on many, if not most, of the tracks neither Nina, nor her
band members seem like they’re trying hard enough to put a fresh, unusual
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One thing that
bugs me about Simone’s covers of Billie’s or Bessie’s material is a certain
disconnection between all three characters. They represent three different
worlds in three different ages, after all, and Nina (who was, coincidentally,
born in the very same year when Billie made her first recordings and then
made her first recordings in the
very same year when Billie passed away!) got to interpret their old-fashioned
classics at a time when the world was readying itself for some big changes —
which is why songs like ‘No Good Man’ or ‘T’Ain’t Nobody’s Biz-Ness If I Do’,
celebrating woman’s voluntary submission to her no-good man as an expression
of her inner freedom, feel a bit odd when sung by a freedom fighter like
Nina. Of course, we should be cautious about pigeonholing her into today’s
liberal stereotypes — her personality was more complex than what we see in
simplified algorithmic codes of moral conduct — but still, there is no
denying that "I ought to hate him
but I still love him so" is a line that sounds perfectly natural
when Billie sings it, but takes quite a bit of getting used to when it’s
delivered by the likes of Simone. Even worse, ‘No
Good Man’ is definitely not
outstanding in any way. It just rolls along like any decent midnight vocal
jazz number could be expected to roll along. A little relaxing bass, some
nice atmospheric piano runs, Nina’s familiar soothing vocal tone — I can
easily imagine just about everybody from Peggy Lee to Julie London landing
with the same results. No imaginative reinventions of melody, no turning an
old blues song into a Bach fugue or anything like that. The same goes for at
least half of the other selections on here: stuff like ‘Where Can I Go
Without You’ will always be enjoyable to those who simply love the sound of
Nina’s voice, her deep «weeping» vibrato and the quirkiness of her phrasing,
but I am personally craving for musical ecstasy, and I don’t find it on
tracks like this. Some of the
covers are downright psychological mismatches where you have to work really hard to suspend the proverbial
disbelief. ‘Gin House Blues’, for starters, is mistitled — this is a cover
not of Bessie Smith’s original ‘Gin House Blues’ from 1926, but rather of her
‘Me And My Gin’ from two years later (this mistake would then be perpetuated
for eternity, e.g. the Animals would also record the same song as ‘Gin House
Blues’ in 1966, etc.). But this is not nearly as important as the fact that
Nina simply does not sound convincing when singing "Stay away from me everybody cos I’m in my sin / If this joint is
raided somebody give me my gin". While in her real life she was no
stranger to booze, her performance is just too thin and even «whiny» to
properly convey the image of somebody who is ready to «fight the army and navy» for her gin — which Bessie, right in the
middle of Prohibition, was fully prepared to do, or, at least, this is
precisely what she sounds like on
the original recording: a fierce, tough mama willing to give her life for her
right to be as totally depressed, wasted, and «drowning in sin» as she wants
to. Roughly
speaking, Bessie Smith is the kind of character who overwhelms and suppresses
you with her sheer physicality and (figuratively) mass, a sort of living embodiment of Mother Earth herself,
against which there is no defense or counteraction by definition. Billie
Holiday’s weapon is her subtlety and vulnerability: she appeals to everything
within you that is human and responsive to the call of empathy. Next to them,
Nina Simone is the voice of your conscience, the Attorney General of human
decency and morality — her
fierceness and toughness comes from the indomitable look in her eyes rather
than from the «bigness» of Mama Bessie or the «smallness» of Lady Day. And
this is why ‘No Good Man’ shall always belong to Billie and ‘Me And My Gin’
shall always belong to Bessie and these
versions, enjoyable as they are in a background-ish kind of way, won’t ever
replace them or make me re-evaluate them in a new light. That said, there
are still quite a few really nice moments on Forbidden Fruit that all qualify for justified inclusion into the
«golden canon» — and, interestingly enough, all of them have to do with Nina’s discovery of the artistic
talents of Oscar Brown Jr., formerly known as «the world’s first black
newscaster» and only recently having released his first LP of original
material, Sin & Soul, on the
Columbia label. Two of his compositions from that album make it here — and
the third one, ‘Forbidden Fruit’ itself, lending its name to the title of the
LP as a whole, would later appear on Brown’s 1962 LP, Between Heaven And Hell. Unlike Bessie or Billie, Oscar Brown
would seem to be a true soulmate for Nina — a fighter for the cause, and with genuine musical talent to
burn — and so there is hardly anything surprising about the fact that not
only is his material superior to everything else on here, but that it is also
the only material on here where she is capable of improving upon the original
sound. ‘Rags And Old
Iron’ opens the album on a great note, so great, in fact, that most of the
record feels like a sharp letdown in comparison. Folksy, bluesy, and soul-sy
at the same time, this nicely metaphoric lament of a love betrayed was pretty
good on Brown’s original
album, but Nina’s band adds extra suspense to the tune, and Nina sings
directly into the mike instead of retaining Oscar’s «cavernous» sound —
putting her hurt right under your nose instead of acting all ghostly and Wuthering Height-ish about it. Her
snarly and snarky overtones help immensely, too: the bitterness and contempt
just sweep out of the speakers as she compares the remains of her love to "rags
and old iron" over and over again. Now this is the kind of song that I’d have a pretty hard time
imagining Billie Holiday ever being able to cover properly. On the other
hand, ‘Rags And Old Iron’, with its exploration of a failed relationship,
does fit in thematically with most of those oldies. The second Brown cover, ‘Work
Song’ — originally released as an instrumental on Nat Adderley’s album of the
same name, and later as a vocal number by Brown himself — is strictly a social
statement, and I occasionally have fun playing it back-to-back with Sam Cooke’s
‘Chain Gang’, released on the exact same subject around the same time. Naturally,
Sam’s sweet and catchy pop song is not at all devoid of empathy to its
characters; but Brown’s
take on the issue is sung from the first, not third, person perspective,
concentrating not on pity and empathy but on the pain — and then along comes Nina,
and she concentrates not on the
pain, but on the suppressed fury and anger. In 1961, it was still a rarity
for a prison-themed song to sound angry
on a record — typically, a convict would be expected to feel sorry, or, at
best, stay cold and emotionless in such a setting — but Nina does her best to
let the feeling of the unjustness of the situation get through to the
listener. The opening stop-and-start chords hit you the same way as John D. Loudermilk’s
‘Tobacco Road’ (curiously, also written and recorded about the same time) —
creating an atmosphere of desperate protest right away — and the song, short
as it is, never looses its grip until the very end. (Nina would later
re-record it with a big band arrangement for 1967’s High Priestess Of Soul — a much softer and more compromising
version, if you ask me). Next to the acute
bitterness of ‘Rags’ and the fuming fury of ‘Work Song’, the third of Brown’s
compositions chosen for the album — the title track, that is — might seem like
a silly Sesame Street throwaway; but if so, why would Nina choose it to be
the title track? Actually, the song is pretty naughty, taking up a «folk»
interpretation of the Original Sin as fornication between the two culprits ("See that apple over yonder if you’ll take
a bite / You and Adam both are bound to have some fun tonight") and
inviting us all to share in the consumption of the fruit in question. Well,
given how many legends there are out there about Nina’s own sexual appetites,
you can be sure she sang the song with the utmost glee — and, in fact, given
that it is the only number here that sounds relatively «happy», and that it
also concludes the record, the moral lesson we are supposed to take home from
it is probably quite simple: no matter what sort of stress you are under, no
matter how much pain, injustice, and disillusionment you encounter — there is
nothing that just a little piece of forbidden fruit can’t really cure. Simplistic,
crude, and... efficient. To round things
out, I should probably mention that ‘Just Say I Love Him’ (an English-language,
female-perspective version of an old and quite popular Neapolitan song) is
often extolled as a highlight here — perhaps because of an extended romantic
guitar solo from Al Schackman, because in all other respects it feels just
like most of the «generic» sentimental ballads on the album; next to the Brown
covers, it is hard for me to treat it as something more than pleasant
background music. Then again, it might just be my instinctive mistrust of Neapolitan
songs speaking, but I think one can be excused for doubting that Nina Simone
on her own is sufficient to expurgate all the legacy sins of Johnny Desmond, Frankie
Avalon, Tony Bennett, Dean Martin, and all the other nightingales to leave
their imprints on the song. Also, for
technical reasons, there is a special EMI CD edition of the album from 2005 which
adds eleven (!) previously
unreleased songs recorded during the same sessions — in slightly inferior
quality, but worth a listen or two, if only to expand our understanding of Nina’s
repertoire at the time. There are two more Bessie Smith covers in there (with
the same criticisms that I apply to ‘Gin House Blues’ also applicable), a
little Gershwin, a bit of Kurt Weill, a touch of Cole Porter, and even a Jewish
dance (‘Od Yesh Homa’), but behind all the diversity there are hardly any
individual highlights worth gushing over. That Nina was keeping busy, there
is no doubt of that; but the time, apparently, had not yet come for her to
keep busy only with the kind of
material that God had tailored specifically for her spirit. Yet even despite
all the mismatches, one thing you could never
say about Forbidden Fruit is that the
artist is attempting to do something against her will — and there is even
some perverse fascination in watching her trying on all those Bessie Smith
numbers for size and failing, because you can clearly see the effort,
understand why it fails, and still leave with a hella lot of respect for the
artist. |
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