Impulse

I’m hooked on Nina Simone. I only recently dis­cov­ered her music, and it’s not left my playlist since. So, I’m going to break my rule of not doing reviews in this blog to talk about this excel­lent artist.

Described as “quite the shit” by one Sonic Boom Records employee, Nina Simone’s music is diverse and fero­cious. She plays jazz, clas­si­cal, blues, bal­lads, african, rock, funk, and stuff I don’t even know how to clas­sify. More inter­est­ingly, she effort­lessly com­bines these styles: In “Mood Indigo”, she goes from straight jazz into a Bach-like toc­catta, sail­ing to hard blues, then back to jazz in time for the next cho­rus. “Little Girl Blue” sings a soul­ful jazz lyric over a piano play­ing “Good King Wenceslas”, of all things. These could have all ended up in an inco­her­ent mish­mash, but Simone’s skill makes it sound nat­ural — almost as if this was the way the pieces were writ­ten.
I first encoun­tered her on the excel­lent Verve Remixed albums (she appears on all three col­lec­tions: 1 2 3), par­tic­u­larly the Masters at Work remix of “See-Line Woman”. You’ll also rec­og­nize Simone’s “Sinnerman” from The Thomas Crown Affair — the song forms prac­ti­cally the entire sound­track (the use of this song in this movie is sheer bril­liance). Naturally, I went out and bought her orig­i­nal discs.
Simone’s musi­cal tal­ent isn’t her only admirable qual­ity. She was fear­less. In the midst of the civil rights wars of the 60’s, she coura­geously sang her out­rage at racial inequal­i­ties with raw, emo­tion­ally charged songs like “Mississippi Goddamn”, and her lament over Martin Luther King, Jr’s death in “Why?”. But, she wasn’t purely angry. In “To be Young, Gifted and Black”, she sought to inspire the young with pride (her mes­sage is almost iden­ti­cal to what I’ve recently heard Spike Lee and Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr call for). Here is a pas­sion­ate woman who was not afraid to speak her mind to the world.
So, if you like music at all, I heartily rec­om­mend going out and buy­ing some of Nina Simone’s records. Oh, and while I’m not review­ing any­thing, the Verve Remixed albums are excel­lent as well.