Nina Simone hurts you. She does it with her voice, which is sharpened and ready, versatile as a set of top flight chef’s knives able to slice through the music making a myriad of purposeful and precise incisions, wounds, gashes or lacerations. She does it through words, delivered sometimes like poisoned darts, other times like butterfly kisses from a child on the cheek of an exhausted mother. She does it by staring you down and withering your resolve; looking at you the way death looks at you, and in so doing giving you life.
Her pain becomes yours, and her pain is eternal and without limit. It is a human pain, a ghostly, ancient suffering that comes through her more than it does from her. Having been dropped to the earth in Depression-era America, she sang this pain through blues and Broadway, through jazz and campy lovestruck standards. She played Bach fugues and cantatas with the same urgent grace that she lent to the hammer-busting work ballads of the black south. Born a classical prodigy in a hot and rural segregated North Carolina town, she was formed into (or perhaps already was) a warrior of unmatched regality; a woman in possession of kind, delicate fingers and the kind of emotional bloodlust that only comes when you grow up in a place where people are lynched for looking just like you.
Ms. Simone attended Juliard with money her hometown collected to further her career, but left the school when her cash ran out. After a rejection from a conservatory in Philadelphia, she took on gigs at a supper club, and eventually earned a recording contract first with Bethlehem and then Colpix where she released eight albums, became a darling of the folk scene and culminated with a performance at Carnegie Hall in 1963.
But then civil rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated in his driveway by a Klan member. And several months later a bomb ripped through a black church in Birmingham, Alabama murdering four children. And within months Nina Simone switched labels to Philips and unleashed a series of songs about civil rights and anger and freedom, the most noted of which is “Mississippi Goddamn,” a sprightly show tune that slow-builds into an unrestrained call to arms. The tune is based on a passage on Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s “Alabama Song” from the 1927 experimental play, Mahagonny-Songspiel aka The Little Mahagonny. Brecht and Weill would prove consistent and proper antecedents to the particular brew of theatricality and revolution that defined much of Ms. Simone’s work after she joined Philips. Her cover of “Pirate Jenny” from Threepenny Opera is one of the creepiest recordings of all time for a great many reasons, one of which being Simone’s implicit understanding of how closely 1930s Germany paralleled the violent psychosis of American racism.
These songs and scores more all appear on the seven albums she recorded at Philips from 1964-1967, which have been re-released as a boxed set. The set, simply called, Nina Simone: The Philips Years, covers a period of time that is arguably her creative best.
Too large to be subsumed under one description, the 74 songs contained herein cover all corners of the Simone musical universe, from the bright and lacy Sunday best of “Nearer Blessed Lord,” to the hellfire and brimstone of “Sinnerman,” from the lush, indulgent ennui of “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” to the bold, agonizing solemnity of “Strange Fruit.” Nearly every song in this far-flung cycle has its opposite, because Nina Simone was the nexus point of nearly all the western musical ideas of her time. She may be the only artist to find the link between Sam Cooke and Edith Piaf, between Bertolt Brecht and Malcolm X. Her thorough and strict classical training (she was in the truest and least sensational sense a diva) allowed her to treat the music of black Americans—soul, jazz, blues, roots and folk—with a level of deference typically reserved for Rachmaninov.
On display in these recordings is Simone’s vast and unmatched set of gifts, technical and otherwise. Her pure jazz keyboard work on tracks like “Mood Indigo” makes her one of the few pianists to legitimately rival Duke Ellington’s combination of clarity and melodic complexity. Although she largely interpreted other people’s songs, some of the strongest lyrical content in her catalogue comes from her own compositions, particularly “Four Women,” a spare, trenchant character study that manages to capture all the impossible contradictions of black American womanhood in just 16 lines. And the impact of her vocals went beyond her distinctive voice. She was an incisive and adroit singer, who could seamlessly navigate the vulnerable passages that appeared in ballads like “Don’t Smoke in Bed,” and “I Loves You Porgy,” while also bringing a virtuosic gravitas even to syrupy standards like “One September Day.”
The other end of her skill set was her unmatched ability to make listeners feel every bit of what she was feeling. Think of the vast and prickly joy of a track like “Feeling Good,” how it conveys a manic freedom, a heart-bursting love that shoots from the chest in nerve-sized lightening bolts, tingling like chandeliers shattering throughout your limbs. Or the meandering mourning of “Plain Gold Ring,” that unfolds itself slowly over the dark, creeping motive that comprises the song’s melodic underpinning. She delivers, “In my heart it will never be spring” in a way that darkens the skies of your own heart, stripping the foliage, laying bare the branches of your skeleton. At their peak, Simone’s powers bordered on emotional clairvoyance.
Predictably it was when she turned the full power of these weapons to the cause of affirming the rights and humanity of black people that her career began to falter in ways from which she could never fully recover. It is difficult to overstate how strident and militant she was about ending racism and injustice, how unabashedly she proclaimed her love for blackness and the preciousness of the lives of black people. My own mother and her sisters have told me for years that of all the civil rights leaders of their generation, it was Ms. Simone, dark-skinned, natural-haired, big lipped, seated at a piano with a head wrapped in queenly cloths, and fingers that have mastered Western music, who meant the most to them. It was Ms. Simone who loved them when she sang their pain. It was Ms. Simone who entitled them when she sang their anger.
This boxed set contains some of the best pure music ever recorded. It doesn’t really matter what your genre loyalties are. At its essence, music is about chords, melodies, and harmonies, and an artist whose humanity is so fully on display that you, as a listener can’t help but to vibrate sympathetically. When you hear “Mississippi Goddamn,” sung in 1964 in New York City, you are hearing a song that is so honest and fearless that it is still impossible to deny. And 2016 is a lot like 1964. Racially motivated murders still take place under the cover of night. Black people are still killed in churches to advance the cause of white supremacy. A nation still threatens to devour itself. At its most glorious, the work collected here is an affirmation of the level of humanity needed to keep the soul in tact and fight for one’s freedom. At its most mournful, it is evidence of the cost.
