Nina Simone – Nina Simone In Concert/Broadway, Blues, Ballads/ I Put A Spell On You / Pastel Blues / Let It All Out / Wild Is The Wind / High Priestess Of Soul

In the days before artists approved liner notes, jazz critic Nat Shapiro asked the following questions on the back jacket of the epochal Nina Simone In Concert: “Certainly there is no possibility — not the slightest — of being indifferent to this astonishing creature. Is she a jazz singer? A folk singer? A pop singer? An avenging angel? A witch?” Shapiro’s questions now seem trivial and perverse. By will and genius, Simone’s mercurial run with Philips Records extinguished the very idea of genre, provoking altogether different questions about the relationship between art and history, even art and nature.

Eunice Kathleen Waymon grew up in Depression-era North Carolina, where she sang and played piano in her mother’s Methodist church and dreamed of following in Marian Anderson’s footsteps, or perhaps of becoming the nation’s first black concert pianist. At 17, she went to New York to attend Juilliard, and then moved to Philadelphia, where she hoped to study music at the famed Curtis Institute. She was denied a scholarship, however, likely because of her color.

She was broke and brokenhearted when she began working the supper-club circuit in Atlantic City, where she took the name Nina Simone to conceal those gigs from her family. Syd Nathan, the owner of Bethlehem Records, heard her and recorded her first album, a collection of jazz standards — including her only hit, “I Loves You Porgy” — in 1957.

As the civil rights movement spread from the south to the north, she was drawn into politics by playwright Lorraine Hansbury and began to perform at fundraisers. In 1961, she traveled with Langston Hughes and James Baldwin to Nigeria to perform at an American Society For African Culture concert. She was beginning to expand her standard repertoire, yet no recording until 1964 hinted at her radical genius.

If she was, as Stokely Carmichael said, the “true singer of the civil rights movement,” it was because she embodied the movement’s deepest heroism, something inseparable from but indefinable by activism. “There is somewhat not philosophical in heroism,” Emerson wrote; “there is somewhat not holy in it; it seems not to know that other souls are of one texture with it; it has pride; it is the extreme of individual nature.”

The extremities of Simone’s choices on these recordings were often political, to be sure, but her voice constantly changed directions via radical irony and individualism. She could convey the same metaphysical shock of John Lydon or the alienation effect of Bob Dylan — and yet the sound of her voice was always awesomely beautiful.

Between 1964 and 1967, Simone released seven albums on the Philips label. Verve’s reissues contain the original sequencing (with only one bonus track, a novelty found on Broadway, Blues, Ballads that should have remained in the archives), art and liner notes, and precise session details. (It should be noted, however, that all of this material is available in one place, on the Four Women box set.)

Beginning with Nina Simone In Concert and ending with High Priestess Of Soul, Simone reasserted music as protest, in the strongest sense of the word — whether she was defending the pure formalism of a jazz standard, or reminding purists that the meaning of a Bob Dylan song could shape-shift with as much complexity as life during genuinely revolutionary times.

Nina Simone In Concert is as essential to any record collection as A Love Supreme or Sticky Fingers. Recorded on three separate nights in 1964 at Carnegie Hall, the album responds to history as it unfolds around a singer who still remembered her first piano recital at age 10, when her parents were forced to surrender their seats to a white couple. The concerts took place the spring before the Freedom Summer, and while the poll tax had just been repealed; it was the bombings in Birmingham and the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi that vibrated through her.

“This whole country is full of lies,” Simone sang, leaving no one uncondemned. “You all gonna die and die like flies.” She announced “Mississippi Goddam” as a show tune for a show that hadn’t been written; it was being written all around her. But she cursed the show and rebuked the pacifism and religiousness of the movement. And though the album begins on a nod to the past with “I Loves You Porgy” and “Golden Ring”, Simone reveals other intentions with “Pirate Jenny”. No singer before or after has ever achieved such transcendence in so much coarseness.

Her follow-up, Broadway, Blues, Ballads, seems to retreat into conventional jazz skill, but the opening “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” — one of six songs written by the team of Bennie Benjamin and Sol Marcus, and which Simone was the first to record — and the glowing regret of “The Last Rose Of Summer” overcome the succulent, somewhat gentrified orchestrations of producer Hal Mooney and arranger Horace Ott. “See-Line Woman”, another performance from the legendary Carnegie Hall concert, finds a statement in the intricacy of her rhythmic delivery.

I Put A Spell On You is generally regarded as among Simone’s best studio recordings, and on the surface, it’s her most accessible, even intimate. It includes her glowering interpretation of the Screaming Jay Hawkins title tune, and also “Feeling Good”, which, along with “Gimme Some” (one of two tunes written by her then-husband Andy Stroud), sounds remarkably open about sex and the physical world. The final scat on “Feeling Good” is less play than a heroic breakthrough, as though a massive weight has been lifted and an inarticulate soul speech is her release. On “Beautiful Land”, she sings a children’s song in a child’s voice, and the reminder of the possibility of human innocence is startling.

On Pastel Blues and Let It All Out, Simone’s piano moves to the fore, as the mood shifts from the reflective to the ecstatic. The first album builds through familiar material (including the most chilling “Strange Fruit” ever cut) toward the ten-minute climax of the traditional “Sinnerman”, which sounds less indebted to gospel than to tragic opera. On “Trouble In Mind” and “Nearer My God To Thee”, with Rudy Stevenson’s twangy guitar (he clearly knew his Hank Garland), the blues are given a surprisingly effective honky-tonk spin.

Wild Is The Wind is simply transfixing, in part for a sequencing that alternates between orchestral flashes and subtle groove of her regular combo. Simone finds the mirror image of “Pirate Jenny” in “Four Women”, which traces the evolution of consciousness through generations of servitude toward freedom — but freedom expressed in a violent howl: “MY NAME IS PEEEAAACHEZZZ!” The fourth woman would kill you as soon as look at you.

High Priestess Of Soul is indeed soul music, as close to a pop sound as Simone ever came in the ’60s, with Motown and Philly echoes on her version of Chuck Berry’s “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” and the Richard Ahlert/Robert Scott tune “Don’t You Pay Them No Mind”. Simone seemed to be reaching out without selling out, but on Oscar Brown’s “Work Song” she just lets her voice spill out, unrestrained, as if unconscious of anything but the percussion around her. Like her truest moments from her truest three years of recording, her voice seeks to arrest, and does — like a declaration, sometimes of war, sometimes of peace, sometimes of the vastly complex pleasure of singing.