She may be the only artist to find the link between Sam Cooke and Edith Piaf, between Bertolt Brecht and Malcolm X. Too large to be subsumed under one description, the 74 songs contained herein cover all corners of the Simone musical universe, from the bright and lacy Sunday best of “Nearer Blessed Lord,” to the hellfire and brimstone of “Sinnerman,” from the lush, indulgent ennui of “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” to the bold, agonizing solemnity of “Strange Fruit.” Nearly every song in this far-flung cycle has its opposite, because Nina Simone was the nexus point of nearly all the western musical ideas of her time. The set, simply called, Nina Simone: The Philips Years, covers a period of time that is arguably her creative best. These songs and scores more all appear on the seven albums she recorded at Philips from 1964-1967, which have been re-released as a boxed set. Her cover of “Pirate Jenny” from Threepenny Opera is one of the creepiest recordings of all time for a great many reasons, one of which being Simone’s implicit understanding of how closely 1930s Germany paralleled the violent psychosis of American racism. Brecht and Weill would prove consistent and proper antecedents to the particular brew of theatricality and revolution that defined much of Ms. The tune is based on a passage on Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s “Alabama Song” from the 1927 experimental play, Mahagonny-Songspiel aka The Little Mahagonny.
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#NINA SIMONE DISCOGRAPHY DOWNLOAD SERIES#
And within months Nina Simone switched labels to Philips and unleashed a series of songs about civil rights and anger and freedom, the most noted of which is “Mississippi Goddamn,” a sprightly show tune that slow-builds into an unrestrained call to arms. And several months later a bomb ripped through a black church in Birmingham, Alabama murdering four children.
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After a rejection from a conservatory in Philadelphia, she took on gigs at a supper club, and eventually earned a recording contract first with Bethlehem and then Colpix where she released eight albums, became a darling of the folk scene and culminated with a performance at Carnegie Hall in 1963.īut then civil rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated in his driveway by a Klan member. Simone attended Juliard with money her hometown collected to further her career, but left the school when her cash ran out. Born a classical prodigy in a hot and rural segregated North Carolina town, she was formed into (or perhaps already was) a warrior of unmatched regality a woman in possession of kind, delicate fingers and the kind of emotional bloodlust that only comes when you grow up in a place where people are lynched for looking just like you. She played Bach fugues and cantatas with the same urgent grace that she lent to the hammer-busting work ballads of the black south. Having been dropped to the earth in Depression-era America, she sang this pain through blues and Broadway, through jazz and campy lovestruck standards. It is a human pain, a ghostly, ancient suffering that comes through her more than it does from her.
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Her pain becomes yours, and her pain is eternal and without limit. She does it by staring you down and withering your resolve looking at you the way death looks at you, and in so doing giving you life. She does it through words, delivered sometimes like poisoned darts, other times like butterfly kisses from a child on the cheek of an exhausted mother. She does it with her voice, which is sharpened and ready, versatile as a set of top flight chef’s knives able to slice through the music making a myriad of purposeful and precise incisions, wounds, gashes or lacerations.