A tortured, lonely soul
A documentary released this week sheds light on the complicated, tempestuous and tormented American jazz singer, Nina Simone
no problem to do stunts and to do the action. Nothing has changed,” he told his fans. “I’m older but not obsolete.” Like in the original, John Connor, played by Jason Clarke, sends Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back in time to protect his mother Sarah Connor, portrayed by Emilia Clarke, but there are some dramatic changes.
“It’s incredible but Arnold’s reprising this role,” Game of Thrones actress Clarke said on the red carpet.
“He’s added so many more textures to it with the fact that our script has a really already built-in human relationship between himself and Sarah, so you get so much more of a human element added to that relationship,” Clarke said. — Reuters
NINA Simone is, at one level, everyone’s favourite jazz singer. Everyone remembers My Baby Just Cares for Me from the Chanel advert, or Sinnerman being used to sell Renault Clios. She’s the background music of choice for candlelit dinners, which, for some jazz aficionados, makes her suspect. The standard reference work, Grove Dictionary of Jazz, doesn’t even mention her.
There’s a graven-image perfection about some of her best recordings, which are outside jazz’s loose, improvisatory spirit. But she had such a prodigious imagination as a piano player that she never repeated an accompaniment. And of course there was that fabulous voice, about which she said, “Sometimes I sound like gravel, sometimes I sound like peaches and cream.”
A handful of songs keep popping up on compilations while much of her output is ignored, particularly the fiery songs she wrote for the civil rights movement.
Compared to Simone, the other great female jazz singers – above all Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday – seem familiar. Simone is more of a mystery, that amazingly beautiful face gazing alone from the album covers.
What Happened, Miss Simone?, a documentary commissioned by Netflix and released this week, reveals the complicated, tempestuous and tormented human being behind that intense and impeccable art.
Using archive footage and interviews with Simone’s daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, director Liz Garbus tells a story that swings between two poles: an obsession with classical music, and a passionate engagement with the black liberation movement during the ’60s and ’70s.
Simone was born North Carolina as Eunice Waymon, and her family combined churchgoing with a determination to better themselves.
Nina’s aptitude for the piano was obvious, and she was sent for lessons with a Englishwoman who led her through the classical canon: Bach suites, Chopin waltzes, Debussy preludes.
The seeds of her career were sown here. “She always said she wanted to be known as a black classical artist,” says Kelly, a considerable jazz and Broadway performer herself.
Even more remarkable than the young Simone’s technical mastery was the total fluency with which she improvised. “One day she was playing the hymn Come ye for her parents .... First it was in the style of Bach, then Beethoven, then Chopin. She just did that, as a child! To me that’s genius,” says Kelly.
Genius or not, Simone also had to deal with the realities of being a black girl in the era of segregation. Her heart was set on studying at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, but the result of her audition was a one-line rejection letter. “To the end of her life my mother was convinced that racism was behind that failure.”
Suddenly she was just another black girl who had to earn a living. She got a job as a restaurant pianist in Atlantic City. It was impressed on her that to please customers she would have to sing.
“That’s how she discovered she had this amazing voice,” says Lisa, “and pretty soon she was getting offers to sing in jazz clubs”.
She was noticed by talent scouts, and before the end of the ’50s had released recordings that would become her signature songs: Plain Gold Ring, Little Girl Blue and I Loves You Porgy. She met the policeman Andrew Stroud, who would become her husband and manager, and father to Lisa. “For the first time I knew what it was not to be floundering out there,” Simone says in one archive interview. She talks of the bliss of being on stage when all is going well, when “everything I had learnt from classical music comes together … it’s a total freedom, it’s indescribable”, she says. “It’s like being in love.”
However, she resented the pressure of touring, and became moody and erratic. She was incensed by the church bombing that killed four black schoolgirls in Birmingham, Alabama. Her anger inspired her song Mississippi Goddam, but it was a disaster for her career.
Recording contracts dried up, and her marriage, marred by Stroud’s violence from the beginning, went into a downward spiral.
Disillusioned with the “United Snakes of America”, she drifted to Liberia, then Switzerland, then Paris. Finally she was reduced to singing in a Paris nightclub until spotted by a Dutch fan, one of several friends who helped to rebuild her career in the ’80s and ’90s.
One answer to the question in the film’s title – posed by Maya Angelou in her 1970 interview with the singer – appears simple. It now seems clear Simone suffered from undiagnosed bipolar disorder, which led to terrifying rages.
Kelly suffered from her mother’s violence, but her love and admiration for her mother shine through. “She was suffering from a illness and no one knew. When she felt protected she could blossom, but then she would push me away.”
There was something essentially lonely in Nina Simone, caught in the electrifying opening of the film. She’s gazing out over a huge audience in Paris, her face impassive, almost contemptuous. She sits at the piano, still impassive. Then she starts to play, and suddenly there’s a smile.
What Happened, Miss Simone? is available now on Netflix — The Sunday Telegraph