LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER 4

      My music had such power, I was so good at it, that [club owners] were scared of me. People believed me when I told them things.

      Though Simone was unhappy with the support she was getting from Bethlehem Records, something strange was happening. Sid Mark, a disc jockey at WHAT in Philadelphia with whom Simone was friendly, had started playing her recording of “I Loves You, Porgy” on air, sometimes multiple times in a row. Ironically, part of Simone’s frustration with Bethlehem came from their resistance to issuing a single. Eventually, prompted by Mark’s support, they put out this one, which was becoming a local and then a regional hit.

      In June of 1959 the song entered the national charts, and as the year wore on “Porgy” kept gaining steam. It peaked at number 18 on the pop charts, number 2 on the R&B list. At age twenty-six, Nina Simone had arrived as a recording star. The song she had learned overnight to humor Ted Axelrod would remain her signature number for the rest of her life, and the biggest hit she would ever have in the United States. In 2000, forty-one years after it was first cut, the recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

      “Porgy” was an ideal introduction to Simone’s approach, a distillation of her strengths—emotional but not overwrought, a familiar standard given a new mood, occupying an indefinable space between pop and jazz, with a hint of the direct impact that would come to be called “soul.” In addition to the single’s surprising commercial appeal, it was also immediately clear to the music cognoscenti that Simone’s was a talent both unique and special.

      “When I heard the real version of ‘I Loves You, Porgy’ after hearing hers, I was like, ‘They need to throw that version away and go study her version,’” said critic Stanley Crouch. “She makes the lyrics extremely important. Oftentimes, singers who sing songs written by George and Ira Gershwin, they’re perhaps overly impressed by the melodies. Nina Simone doesn’t ignore the melody, but her idea is that she’s going to sing every one of these words with ultimate value emotionally. So she lifts the song up in the air that way.

      “She may have discovered how to solve the problem of aviation in music. What makes an aviator what he is? An aviator is a person who deals with getting heavier-than-air objects off the ground. She could do that, musically and emotionally. She could take a feeling and actually lift it off the ground, and it would stay there. That’s what she does with ‘I Loves You, Porgy.’ ”

      She had signed with a new manager, a literary agent in New York named Bertha Case who had initially contacted Simone when a young writer submitted a potential musical project to Case’s office. The singer on the demos he gave her was Nina, and Case reacted immediately to her voice. Under this new management, and with the success of “Porgy,” Simone was approached by Colpix Records, the music division of Columbia Pictures. Joyce Selznick (niece of the legendary movie producer David O. Selznick) made the initial contact, and in April 1959 Simone and Case inked a new deal with Colpix.

      As her bookings in New York grew following the release of Little Girl Blue, Simone and Ross moved to the city, initially staying in the East Village apartment of a friend of ever-loyal Ted Axelrod’s. As she started playing the club circuit, word quickly started to spread about Simone’s mysterious alchemy of showmanship, technical prowess, and husky vocals.

      “She did One Fifth Avenue, and that was prestigious for that level of playing,” said Al Schackman. “Suddenly, the jazz aficionados discovered her, and she really became the darling of the upper crust of the music. People were awestruck by her ability, and also by her presence and her formality. You just didn’t get close to Nina. She was extremely cautious and protective of her space.”

      From her very first shows, Simone was frequently showing up late, sometimes in a prickly mood. This hard line had been her attitude from before she came to New York, even before she had made a record. On the very first night Schackman met her in New Hope, people in the audience were talking and she just sat at the piano and waited them out, refusing to start playing until they had quieted down and given her their full attention.

      “My first piano teacher taught me, you do not touch that piano until you are ready and until they are ready to listen to you,” she said, referring to her beloved Mrs. Mazzy. “You just make them wait.”

      Schackman asserted that audiences truly weren’t prepared for what Simone was offering them. “What Nina was doing in her performances was a far higher level than people might assume a so-called jazz artist was going to do,” he said. “When Nina did a concert, it was truly, in a classical sense, a concert. I think people are uplifted when they identify with something that’s truly unique, that’s with us only for a very limited time. There are some people in the world [who] know it when they see it. Nina has been touched with that gift of transmitting, and people want to be in its presence.”

      Promoter (and sometime pianist) George Wein pointed out that Simone was part of a new generation of singers that were emerging in the 1950s, following the “four reigning queens”—Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, and Dinah Washington. She was coming up alongside such vocalists as Betty Carter, Abbey Lincoln, and Dakota Staton. Wein liked Simone and was impressed by her musicianship and the range of her repertoire, but he hadn’t singled her out.

      “But I had a partner at that time whose name was Albert Grossman,” said Wein. “He ended up managing Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary and Odetta and many important artists. He saw Nina at my club and he said, ‘She’s the one.’ ”

      Crouch felt that Simone’s actual approach lifted her into a category above her peers, creating music that was genuinely unique—a talent that would serve as both a great strength and a challenge. “She could bring deeper meanings to songs, that was her gift,” said Crouch. “She didn’t sing jazz, because in jazz you have to submit to the force of the band—it’s a collective experience, and I don’t think Nina liked to play like that. I think she liked it to be about her.

      “Her sound is freer than many sounds, because she doesn’t imitate an instrument,” he continued. “She actually wants her sound to be a human sound. Many jazz singers miss the boat by trying to sound like a horn, and that’s a mistake, because the human voice actually has greater freedom than any horn has. But Nina Simone knew that—different registers, different inflections, she knew all that. And so nobody sounded like her.”

      In May 1959, Simone had made enough of a name for herself to play at the Village Gate, a club run by Art D’Lugoff that would become a consistent and important venue for her for many years. The Gate was a nexus of the creative explosion happening in Greenwich Village at the time: Woody Allen opened for her there, and she shared bills with Richard Pryor, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Richie Havens, Yusef Lateef.

      Even as a new artist at this vibrant club, Simone had an uncompromising, often challenging onstage personality. During her first stand at the Gate, she noticed a piano string that had a buzz in it. She apologized to the capacity crowd for the condition of the instrument and then made it her night’s mission to destroy the faulty string. She used it as a pedal tone through the evening, and in the last set, toward the end, the string finally broke. “There!” she exclaimed triumphantly.

      But more exciting for music buffs than her onstage antics was her sheer inventiveness as a performer. “It was almost always electric, exciting,” Art D’Lugoff would say in 1991, looking back on Simone’s early appearances on his stage. “You never knew what she would do. She would start playing a Bach riff, and she had the most unusual musical arrangements. I don’t think anyone in the world could get people as excited as she did, and for me, her greatness was what kept me going with her, because she was a very difficult person.”

      She often arrived at the Gate so late that the first set started at the time announced for the second set. She also had bodyguards with her—though, according to at least one bouncer at the club, not for the usual reasons that a celebrity would hire security. They were “to protect the public from her, not to protect her from the public,” as on at least one occasion she got into a fight with a fan who wasn’t sufficiently grateful for an

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