Trouble in Mind

Nina Simone.

A sad little girl from North Carolina who became the high priestess of soul.

Today she could have turned 88. If life were simple and straightforward.

Like a deck board ...

And why would it be soul?

It seems that she is not the founder of the style and it seems that she does not own the best albums in the style?

And from the fact that each of her songs is someone's lost and suddenly found soul.

This is something not once expressed by any of us, but sung and lived by her.

The brilliant Nina Simon.

Absolutely impossible and incredibly fickle.

In everything.

Besides worshiping Music.

Because of this, she had to change record labels more than once.

And on each of them, Nina managed to record a dozen albums.

Cоlpix Studios, Phillips Studios, RCA Studios ... Oh yes, she was extraordinarily prolific creatively.

In addition, she has consistently recorded and released live releases.

One of the most famous - Nina Simon at Newport - from the Newport Jazz Festival on June 30, 1960.

Nina Simone did all the arrangements for the recordings of this album herself, and the inimitable sound of the completely unusual in her reading Trouble in Mind plunges us into an atmosphere of transparent and light sadness, as if warning: what has been done once cannot be turned back.

Be able and able to dispose of the life given to you in the best possible way.

It just so happened that we listen to her standards of the 60s and 70s more.

Not songs of protest (and there are plenty of them in her repertoire), but songs of the time when it seemed that the sun was still rising and would someday rise for all of us.

She was born on February 21, 1933 in the town of Tryon, North Carolina under the name Eunice Kathleen Waymon.

She was the sixth child (and there will be eight in total) in a poor - no, the poorest family of a black preacher.

America, you know, America ...

Perhaps it was from her father, whom she listened to in church almost from infancy, that she passed on the gift of an excellent storyteller of musical stories.

A wizard, with his voice casting such powerful spells that, once falling under their power, we cannot break the spell.

We want to be in them.

Forever.

Nina Simone is one of the few divas of the past, whose albums you can listen to almost constantly.

If you have three or four dozen of them at your fingertips, you cannot help but choose the one that best suits your mood - a rare quality of the performer, reflecting the degree of his depth and "authenticity."

Extremely rare today.

And yes, since childhood, Nina Simone was very well versed in classical music, not least thanks to the piano lessons she was able to take from a teacher next door.

For mere pennies.

But only if there were more of them.

Bach, Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven and Schubert accompanied her relentlessly.

All life.

"Realness" in everything.

Only this she recognized and understood.

And this, you see, is not easy.

And it's worth something.

She made up her stage name, assembled it from two halves - Nina in Spanish "girl", and Simon - a tribute to her favorite actress, Simone Signoret.

The ways of the Lord are confessed to Him alone.

And where did the old piano, broken by time and ailments come from in their modest little house?

Maybe because my mother led the church choir?

And all the daughters sang in it, like little birds of an angel's garden.

And one especially ... especially - and always unlike anyone else.

Perhaps it was her little and quivering soul who sang so much about the future, inevitable and inevitable?

Maybe ... who knows ...

Simon was ten when her first concert took place in the city library.

Overshadowed by an ordinary business, not worth, it would seem, and a damn egg.

While.

In America.

For many.

But not for her.

And she stubbornly refused to play the piano and sing until her dark-skinned parents were invited to their seemingly legitimate front row seats.

Sometimes one not the most significant event subsequently causes an inevitable mountain collapse.

So it happened with Nina Simone.

Throughout her life, she fought for the rights of her fellows in skin color, for the rights of women of all colors.

She was filled with rage whenever she faced injustice, and she was also friends with Martin Luther King, who once told her: “Inside yourself, inside your thoughts, occupied with music and the despair of the world around you, never separate people according to any from external signs, but only according to their deeds and according to the movements of the soul. "

To gallery page

Least of all, speaking of music, I want to mention politics.

However, the figure of Nina Simone is inseparable from politics.

Politics ruined her life, broke her plans, led to serious illness and mental anguish.

But that was how she was, this indomitable Nina Simone.

She has not learned to find a common language with her men, with her daughter, and even with herself.

But here she felt her listener incredibly.

Piercingly accurate.

Leaving no doubt to those sitting in the hall or near the turntables: “Your love and pain are also my love and pain.

Your faith is my faith too ... "

Thanks to divine providence, never forgetting about the stubborn, as well as the support of close family friends, Nina Simone was educated at the very prestigious New York college Juilliard School of Music, where the great Miles Davis also studied.

Unprecedented luck for a dark-skinned girl.

The tuition fees were significant, and Nina earned as much as she could, including as an accompanist with her vocal teacher.

In 1953, she auditioned for a nightclub in Atlantic City, where she became a full-time pianist.

By this time, Nina was already more than seriously engaged in vocals, and therefore, plucking up the courage, she asked to add singing with variants of jazz improvisation to her playing.

She was mercifully allowed - maybe because she was unusually young and persistent, or maybe because the Angel of Soul always stood behind her shoulder.

The owners of the club made the right decision - visitors began to drop in in the evenings just for the sake of her voice.

So, almost by accident, Nina Simon's brilliant vocal career began, which brought her an impeccable reputation as a great performer of jazz, blues and rock standards.

"And rock?"

- you ask again.

And rock.

For example, The House of the Rising Sun, performed for the first time by her, became later the greatest hit of The Animals.

Nina Simone signed her first contract in 1958 with a small and not very well-known studio Bethlehem Records.

Here she released her debut single I Loves You, Porgy based on George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess.

After the single became extremely popular in the USA, Nina's debut album, the tender and piercing Little Girl Blue, was released.

She sang and accompanied herself on the piano, accompanied by a double bass and muted drums.

It was an undeniable triumph - unfortunately, one of the few.

After all, she had frighteningly few clearly successful, truly commercially successful singles and albums.

Yes, she did not strive for fame, could not and did not want to build a singing career "like everyone else."

Constantly expressing in songs her civic position, partly completely irreconcilable, she, releasing album after album, gradually turned into a symbol of protest, heard, but not accepted by too many in her homeland, America.

She became Queen without a kingdom.

A ruler without power.

With a heart overflowing with bitterness, pain and fire ...

Her records were notable for variegated arrangements and mixing of styles.

Jazz, blues, ethnic music, ballads, church hymns ...

She never did without oddities in her life.

Her second husband was a man incredibly far from art - New York detective Andy Stroud, who suddenly changed his profession as a producer and even tried to influence the choice of musical material for his wife's albums.

However, she always reserved the last word for herself.

Ridiculousness.

Or maybe fate.

They got married in 1961, and a year later they had a daughter.

But nothing has ever been cloudless in her amazing life.

It seemed that God had given her so much that she could not even hold in her hands ...

In the late 70s, Nina Simone completely unexpectedly and almost forever leaves America and her family, not having, in her words, the opportunity not even to reconcile - to endure constant racial discrimination.

We will never know if it was only this that drove her.

Most probably not.

Most likely, she never managed, could not accept and understand the world in which she had to be born.

She leaves for Barbados, travels around Europe for a long time, living here and there, and eventually finds refuge in France.

She hardly ever appears in the studio.

Performs occasionally in nightclubs.

One of the rare albums of that time was the 1978 Baltimore.

Beautiful, and as always, piercingly sad.

In 1993, her last disc, A Single Woman, with a quite prophetic name, will be released.

Before leaving for her planet in 2003, Nina Simone will not record anything else.

But what is left to us is enough for us - over 40 numbered albums, mostly recorded in the 60s, and a total of 170 studio, live albums and singles.

An incredible woman.

And enough words on this - let the blame and her voice continue.

Miss Nina Simone's voice ...

The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.