(Credits: Far Out / Jean-Pierre Leloir)
To devote your life to music is not merely to dedicate hours upon hours to mastering your instrument or learning the craft of songwriting. In the case of most musical geniuses, Nina Simone being a prime example, a life devoted to music is a life of surrendering to suffering, turmoil, and the beauty that that darkness conjures up.
From her earliest gigs in the smoke-filled jazz clubs of Atlantic City, Simone’s story was awash with tragedy and darkness. After all, the 1950s presented a number of institutionalised barriers for women of colour, in an age of segregation, lynchings, and everyday brutality. Music was an escape for Simone, but even in those clubs she found herself exploited and dictated by venue owners and record company executives. For, in reality, Simone had little interest in the world of pop.
Despite a deep appreciation for the likes of Billie Holiday, who first alerted her to the liberating power of jazz, Simone always felt as though her skill as a pianist was being wasted away in those jazz clubs, performing pop-centric music for audiences of disinterested punters. In the years that followed, she always made a point of saying that she only played in that pop style in an effort to raise funds for her true passion: classical music.
To her credit, Simone did imbue a lot of her work with the timeless power of the classical composers who inspired her, particularly during those early albums like Little Girl Blue. Even in the throes of her subsequent flurries into the world of soul and passionate civil rights activism, though, the pianist always yearned to be taken seriously solely as a classical pianist. After all, that is what she had trained for since her adolescence, regardless of the fact that mainstream audiences weren’t likely to respond to it.
When Simone was only 12, her very first public performance had been of classical music, and throughout her multiple decades as a musical and cultural icon, she never forgot the early inspiration of those classical figures, Johann Sebastian Bach being among her favourites. “Once I understood Bach’s music, I wanted to be a concert pianist,” Simone once declared.
“Bach made me dedicate my life to music,” the pianist added, heaping praise onto the Baroque mastery of the German composer. While other performers of Simone’s generation and jazz sensibilities might cite Thelonious Monk or Duke Ellington as being their guiding light into the musical realm, Simone was never one to follow the trend. Sure, she embraced the jazz revolution in time, but that core appreciation for a genius like Bach never truly left her.
Even though Simone herself might have resented the fact that the music industry demanded she abandon those dreams of being a classical performer to pursue the commercial potential of pop, soul, and mainstream jazz, there is no doubting that her love for the works of Bach contributed to her unparalleled quality as a performer and songwriter.
Indeed, if you dig beneath the surface of her performances at Montreux or on Little Girl Blue, the imagination doesn’t need to stretch very far to see the fact that she was still able to incorporate her classical sensibilities within her work, despite the pop-centric demands of the music industry she found herself surrounded by.
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