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how I lost them.”) But her final act also had its triumphs. Following many inconsistent years, she would ultimately emerge—against all odds—as a financially solvent, beloved icon. She would appear on stages until the last year of her life, often entertaining lengthy standing ovations after a show.

      “What I hear about Nina is either ‘Her music is fantastic’ or ‘Oh, she was a difficult person,’ ” said Gerrit De Bruin, her close and trusted companion throughout the tumultuous 1980s and ’90s. “But she was a very lovely person as well, a very loving person. If she hadn’t been such a genius, nothing would have happened. She would have been in the gutter, a bag lady or whatever. But the world accepted a lot because it was the genius artist Nina.”

      Most of this troubled existence, of course, had to do with her specific circumstances: being a piano prodigy who grew up in the rural and segregated South, with complicated relationships to her family, her music, and her sexuality. Her mother was a traveling minister who, Simone always felt, cared more about her parishioners than her daughter, while her beloved father eventually (inevitably?) disappointed her late in his life, causing her to disown him before his death. Her letters and diaries reveal a woman who feared her own husband, questioned her sexual preference, battled depression.

      But it’s hard not to look at Nina Simone’s triumphant, tortured life as, in some ways, a reflection of her time, her race, her gender. If she was both brilliant and unstable, did she not live through a moment in history that was also brilliant and unstable?

      Attallah Shabazz, one of Malcolm X’s daughters—whose family lived next door to Simone’s family for several years in Mount Vernon, New York—put it another way. Simone “was not at odds with the times,” she said. “The times were at odds with her. When a person moves to their own kind of clock, spirit, flow, you’re always in congress with yourself. The challenge is, how does the congress around you accept you? How do we fit in in the world that we’re around, but be exactly who we are? Was Nina Simone allowed to be exactly who she was? No. So she had to seek places to be at one with her congress—to Africa, to Paris. But then she was away from other comforts, people, family, roots.

      “How does royalty stomp around in the mud and still walk with grace? Most people are afraid to be as honest as she lived.”

      “She is loved or feared, adored or disliked, but few who have met her music or glimpsed her soul react with moderation. She is an extremist, extremely realized.” This was Maya Angelou’s description of Nina Simone in a 1970 profile for Redbook magazine. If it feels a bit overstated now, it seems to be an accurate representation of Simone’s standing at the height of her powers. Her commercial success may have been slight next to that of the pop giants who emerged during the same era (“I’ve only got four very famous songs,” she would later say), but her impact was profound.

      Simone’s music was singular, inimitable, uncategorizable. “In many ways,” wrote Princeton professor Daphne Brooks in an essay examining several different performances by Simone of “Four Women,” “Nina Simone would shape the bulk of her career in response to an aesthetic conundrum: what should a black female artist sound like?”

      Trained as a classical pianist, she was often called a jazz singer, but it was a label she deeply resented, seeing in it only a racial classification. She grudgingly accepted the popular nickname “the High Priestess of Soul” but gave it little significance. If anything, she claimed, she was a folk singer, and her dazzling, unpredictable repertoire—Israeli folk tunes, compositions by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, songs by the Bee Gees and Leonard Cohen and George Harrison, traditional ballads, jazz standards, spirituals, children’s songs—is perhaps unmatched in its range.

      Her piano playing, the blazing focus of her early life, was accomplished and sophisticated well beyond that of her peers. And her delivery, on her best days, was unparalleled in its intensity and force. Her voice, a husky contralto, was untrained and, for some, a bit of an acquired taste but was incomparably equipped to express certain emotions, and Rolling Stone ranked her number 29 in its list of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. “I heard her sing a song in French—I didn’t even know what she was saying, and I started crying,” Mary J. Blige told the magazine. “Then she goes from that to ‘Mississippi Goddam,’ singing it like a church record, but she’s cursing out the system. Nina could sing anything, period.”

      “She was hip-hop twenty years before the beats arrived,” writer/musician David Was, best known as part of the band Was (Not Was), told NPR in 2005. “In the 1960s, no black woman was any more ‘gangsta’ than Nina Simone. . . . Nina Simone may have been embittered by racism and social injustice, but that gave shape to her persona as a kind of female black Bob Dylan, albeit with a bit more swing than twang and an unmistakable passion and intensity that remain unrivaled to this day.”

      Simone herself would not allow her work to be reduced simply to a product of anger, a push-button reaction to white racism that could be dismissed without an acknowledgment of the music’s layers. “I sing from intelligence,” she said. “I sing from letting them know that I know who they are, and what they have done to my people around the world. That’s not anger—anger has its place, and fire moves things. But I sing from intelligence.”

      That intellect was noticed by many of the leading black thinkers and writers of her time, including Langston Hughes and LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), who became her fans and champions. Simone’s good friend James Baldwin spoke of her artistic role in a 1973 interview. He addressed the concept of the artist as lover and offered that Simone and Billie Holiday (a singer with whom Simone was often linked, in a comparison that she would always be sensitive about) were at once poets and lovers because they “gave you back your experience . . . and you recognized it for the first time because [they were] in and out of it . . . and made it possible for you to bear it.”

      From her earliest days onstage, Simone’s live performances were their own kind of drama. She was always quick to cut a concert short or scold an audience if they were not giving her their full attention, and those tendencies were exacerbated in the latter half of her career; her shows could be scattershot, and she sometimes didn’t bother to show up. “White people had Judy Garland,” Richard Pryor once said. “We had Nina.”

      But witnesses agree that when she was at her best her power onstage could be astonishing, transformative. “When you saw her in person, she could make you believe whatever it was she wanted to make you believe,” said jazz writer and cultural critic Stanley Crouch.

      Simone seems to have been better suited for recording in front of an audience rather than in a studio; though of course live settings ran the risk of disaster, they also offered the chance to capture her at her most passionate and intense, displaying the playfulness and engagement that proved harder for her to reveal in the colder confines of a studio. She was well aware of her power as a performer, her gift for transmuting raw energy into a message. She once described her own reactions to music as a child in terms that were vibrantly physical: “Anything musical made me quiver ecstatically, as if my body were a violin and somebody was drawing a bow across it.” Early in her career, she would prepare for a show the way an athlete scopes out a stadium before a big game—pacing the theater to get a sense of the sound and sightlines from different seats, feeling out the vibe of the city, the day, the crowd. It was an exercise in mapping out the best way into her audience’s heads.

      “Actually, what I do when I’m at my best is mass hypnosis,” she said. “You can hypnotize an entire audience and make them feel a certain way. I think about what they’re feeling, because I’m making sure they feel a certain way. And I know when I’ve got them.

      “It’s a spell that you cast. You start with a certain song and you build the mood with it. Another song that’s related to the first song, and the third song is related to the second song, and so forth and so on, until you reach a certain climax in feeling. And by that time you’ve got them hypnotized. I always know that they’re with me when I hear nothing but silence—then you’ve got them.”

      George Wein, the legendary promoter of the Newport Jazz and Newport Folk Festivals, booked some of Simone’s most triumphant shows (her 1960 Newport debut) and some of her most disastrous

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