Goodbye to Nina Simone

Nina Simone was the singer with the perfect pitch, the enchantress of words, a master instrumentalist, an astute technician. She inspired civil rights activists with songs like To Be Young, Gifted and Black. She sold lots of Chanel No. 5 when her recording of My Baby Just Cares for Me was used as its commercial jingle. She died last Monday, April 21 in her home in Carry-le-Rouet, a small Mediterranean town by the sea in the South of France. She was 70 years old.

I do not know how aware current generation is about her extraordinary gifts as an artist. All I know is that there was a time when I listened to her songs a lot. Her voice – dark, smoky, powerfully expressive – was unlike any I had heard. She jolted you into listening and then hypnotized you into wanting more. I should have written about her a week ago after I read about her death in the papers. I felt though that it would be unfair to write about her without listening yet again to that magnificent voice, so I took out her albums again.

As she did many years back, Nina Simone lulled me into playing her songs over and over until the deed took on an unconscious quality. As a result, I have once become a fan. I know now that it will take a lot of effort to get the tape out of the machine to replace it with something (Natural, Daniel Bedingfield, Evanescense, Domino and others) that I have to listen to because there will be fear, a great deal of fear that hearing the new music will not be as rewarding.

It is a tape. That’s how old my A Single Woman by Nina Simone is. I do not know if it was ever made available locally on CDs but it is my favorite. It shames me to say that it does not have what is considered her great songs, the socially relevant ones like To Be Young, Gifted and Black, Mississippi Goddam, Brown Baby or Old Jim Crow. But it has beautiful songs that talk about love and she sings all of them with so much emotion.

The album must be a compilation. The songs come from various periods and sources. The Michel Legrand tune from Barbra Streisand’s Yentl, Papa Can You Hear Me keeps company with the ’40s vintaged Just Say I Love Him and The More I See You. There is the sweet promise of undying love in Jerome Kern’s and Oscar Hammerstein’s The Folks Who Live on the Hill from probably the ’20s, ranked alongside Love’s Been Good to Me by Rod McKuen.

The American poet and musician was actually the one who cued me on to Simone. I was fair game for anything by McKuen years ago and there was this album with several of his songs. What I had heard about her was that she was an anti-racial activist who also sang jazz and protest songs. The album A Single Woman had three McKuen songs, the title track plus Lonesome Cities and Love’s Been Good to Me. McKuen and Simone, what a combination! And I discovered Nina Simone.

Nina Simone was a child prodigy who studied piano at the Julliard School of Music in New York where she was one of the very few black students. To support herself she played the piano and sung in local music joints. However, her dream of becoming a great classical pianist was cut short when her application for a scholarship was rejected by the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. She was told that she failed to pass the school’s talent requirements. She felt though that it was because she was black. Bitter, she soon left the US in 1973 and made France her home.

This was just as well. That experience forced Nina to go into playing and eventually singing more popular music. She soon became a star, a figure much admired for her magnificent vocals as well as her piano-playing. This, in turn, was also what brought her international fame. Though Curtis has said her talents were inadequate, Nina wrote songs, arranged them and recorded them, just like what Alicia Keys does these days. Keys, Vanessa Carlton, Norah Jones and all those other piano-playing divas owe a great deal of their success plus more, to Nina Simone.