Dr Nina Simone is not a woman to mess with. Her first love was classical piano, but she was forced into jazz and soul. Forty years on, her music is as potent a political weapon as ever. Michael Bracewell spoke to the diva
Back in 1987, when the regenerated town centres of boom-economy Britain could each boast a French-style brasserie, where young women served cassoulet and cappuccinos to the credit-wealthy customers of Next and Laura Ashley, a television commercial for Chanel perfume brought Nina Simone’s 1957 recording of Kahn and Donaldson’s My Baby Just Cares for Me to the number-seven spot in the British top 20.
From its jaunty piano introduction, descending the keyboard in eight nimble chords, to a friendly bass counterpoint, before rallying itself to the defiant ker- plunk which heralded the smokey-toned vocal, the song was a breathlessly catchy accompaniment to the fantasy of urban love and luxury living that dominated advertising images in the late Eighties.
With a pared-down style and laid-back elegance, and making a mini-drama out of the lover’s right to luxuriate in blissful self- congratulation, Simone’s rendition of My Baby Just Cares for Me seemed to speak for the woman who knows the irresistible strength of her own charm, personality and physique.
My Baby Just Cares for Me was the launch-pad for Simone’s ascent from cult to legend. As a re-release, it charted all over Europe and sold more than one million copies. Neither jazz nor pop, the song appeared to articulate every white person’s imagining of life and love in an east-coast dive bar, where the sound of ice-cubes dropping into tumblers of bourbon is mingled with the strictly black lullabies that are wafting from the smallest of stages.
Archive photographs of Simone showed a grave beauty, serious yet sexy, dignified and elegant. Her almond-shaped eyes looked back at the world with an expression posed between vulnerability and defiance. Her image spoke of a much-mythologised era of United States history: the late Fifties and early Sixties, when political strife was matched by the drift of jazz into pop and soul.
As London had swung to a new jazz fantasy throughout the middle years of the Eighties – with white groups as diverse as Everything But the Girl and Working Week tuning into black virtuosity – the rediscovery of Simone was a musical event that summed up the temper of the times.
Simone’s life as a musician had been shaped by the brutal history of racial tension. My Baby Just Cares for Me, borrowed (she would say stolen) to purvey an ambience of designer living, is a product of the complete reverse of that final destination.
Now 64, Nina Simone lives in a quiet French suburb halfway between Marseilles and Aix- en-Provence. The autumn stillness takes on a particular significance as one approaches Simone’s home in the dusty foothills of Marseilles.
Most journalists have recorded that Simone is difficult: at least one has written that she reserves the vintage of her bile for white, middle-class men who write for the broadsheets.
This disquieting legend, serving as her ambassador, is granted an additional potency by a clipping from The Daily Telegraph, August 24 1995, which announces in bold type: “Nina Simone fined for shooting.”
Its correspondent reported: “The incident was triggered by two teenagers playing in a swimming pool at a neighbouring villa. The American jazz musician claimed that she had twice asked the youths to be quieter. When they failed to co-operate, she fired rounds of buckshot across the hedge.”
Added to this was a report from 1988, in which it was stated that Simone had brought a business meeting to an abrupt end by pulling a knife. As far as the mythology goes, recounted in the shell-shocked prose of journalists who thought themselves lucky to escape with their lives, Simone is perceived as a dangerous diva.
Having rung the bell at her high, metal gate, nothing happens for several long minutes. The garden is slightly overgrown, and the modest villa offers no sign of life. Then a young black man of extraordinary beauty can be seen making his way down the garden path. His look is completely impersonal. “Welcome to Dr Simone’s residence,” he says. “If you would care to follow me, Dr Simone will receive you shortly.”
The tepid white sunshine gives way to a dark interior, with some glass-panelled doors opening into a sunny sitting room. Simone’s qualifications – honorary doctorates in humanities from the Malcolm X University in Chicago, and in music from the University of Massachusetts at Amhurst – are framed upon the wall. There is a signed photograph from Little Richard and a casual snap of Bob Dylan grinning into the family camera – as if he had just dropped by.
Then a deep voice bawls out in the hallway, its command halfway between imperial and exhausted. “Tell ’em to bring me some cigarettes …” Dr Simone has arrived.
“I am younger now than I used to be,” she remarks, leaning back on the low sofa. “Now I am 5 000 years old …” She allows the comment to settle, testing its reaction. Then, allowing her Kool cigarette to be lit, she gives a warm chuckle. She is dressed in scarlet, with white nail varnish and heavy, dark glasses. Her hair is braided back from her forehead.
She speaks in a clear, strong voice that is nearer to declamation than conversation. She remains a woman of formidable physical presence, whose forceful, unnerving personality is somehow amplified by the pointed silences that punctuate her conversation. In this much, she is like a sphinx without a smile, sitting immobile in one of the deep sofas that furnish a room resembling not so much a living room as a museum in the faculty of Simone studies.
Surrounded by mementos of her volatile and distinguished career, there is something of the political exile about her, hoarding the muniments of a personal propaganda campaign. A poster of Nelson Mandela faces the patio doors, while to one side an upright piano, its lid closed and locked, makes its own strong statement about her insecurity towards her gifts.
“I never play until I’m ready to perform,” she says. The simple facts of her biography, that she was born Eunice Waymon, the sixth of eight children, in Tyron, North Carolina, in 1933, are exploded, from the start, into deeply personal statements about faith, race and music – which are, arguably, the trinity of her genius.
“I was a child prodigy. My first experience of music was singing in my mother’s church. She was a Methodist minister. So I sang in her church, and then I graduated to learning classical music. My favourite composer was Bach, because he was a master at what he did, and he was a mathematician at what he did. I fell completely in love with him, and I was good at it too.
“I like to think of myself as a genius. I had a perfect pitch, and that’s a gift. I started studying classical music when I was five, and I studied it for 20 years in preparation for becoming the first black American concert pianist. And it didn’t work out because I was black: it was straight prejudice.”
Heard so baldly, as a list of facts, the destruction by racism of Simone’s formative years of training and ambition is nearly too shocking to comprehend. She states the situation as it was: the commonplace result of everyday bigotry in the American South. There is no drama: she writes off her entire education in a few sentences. It is as though, 40 years later, she is still refusing to give her oppressors the satisfaction of seeing her anger or sorrow.
“That was the South. Have you been there? Honey, the South is much worse than bad. The prejudice in the South is in every facet of American society: you feel it walking down the street; you feel it sitting in your car; you feel it when you are introduced to people; you feel it when you go shopping. You feel it all the time.
“Some white musicians have embraced black music; Paul Simon could bring black musicians from South Africa to do Graceland, but he had to get them to make the music. Other than that, the white side of town cannot shame the public into knowing what they’re all about. I can see how Elvis could do gospel: he was mixed-race, a hilly-billy down there in Tennessee where they go for pilgrimages now. He was brought up with black people and he was half-Indian. He stole most of it from Little Richard, anyway.”
Simone was brought up within a strongly Methodist family, and her sole concern was her musical technique. So when the apartheid of the southern US education system of the time forced her out of the conservatoire and into the Midtown bar at Atlantic City, playing popular music, the result was a sense of shame. But this feeling – which she compares with that of the girl in a Brecht/Weill song, The Black Freighter, who is forced to work in a brothel – would coincide with a sense of artistic liberation.
“When I was rejected from the Curtis Institute, I had to go out and make money for my family, and so I went into nightclubs. When I first went to a club, I was playing piano because that’s all I knew how to do. And the man says to me: ‘Do you sing? Because if you want to keep this job you’ve got to sing.’
“And so I started singing popular music. Porgy was the first, I think. Before that, I’d never thought of myself as a singer at all – I was a pianist. I sang to make money, so I could give half to my folks and keep a little for myself. You see, my family had moved to Philadelphia in order to be near me. I come from a very poor family.
“But the people loved my singing. I sang in piano bars, in supper clubs – for three summers in Atlantic City. My favourite singer, by the way, is Frank Sinatra, and I was influenced a lot by his singing, just like I was influenced by Bach. My music comes from the heart and from the fact that I have great technique. I used the technique I learned from classical training to infuse the popular songs. The piano introduction to Love Me Or Leave Me is like Bach.
“I don’t want you to get the idea that all of my music has stemmed from pain – it hasn’t. I had been studying classical music all of my life, but when I had to play popular music, I was able to invent new themes and create new ways of performing songs. Now you can’t do that with Bach or Chopin or Haydn – they have to be played straight, but when I came to popular music, it was like I’d been let out of a cage – it was so free.”
Simone was a great success as a jazz artist, performing at the Carnegie Hall in 1957 and scoring a huge US hit in 1959 with her record of I Loves You Porgy. But before she played at the Carnegie Hall, she wrote to her parents: “I’m at the Carnegie Hall, where you always wanted me to be, but I’m not playing Bach.”
There is a sense in which her forced decision to play popular jazz, however successful she might be, would always point up the racial issues that had denied her entry to the stage as a concert pianist.
Throughout the early Sixties, she was active in the civil-rights movement, writing To Be Young, Gifted and Black with Langston Hughes and Mississippi Goddam, the mere title of which is like a well-aimed punch to the kidneys. To her latest audience in the Nineties, Simone’s role as a black woman protest singer is of crucial importance, returning the smouldering power of her performances and recordings to its political and religious source in the crises of the deep South.
“My song Mississippi Goddam is more popular in Europe than in America, and that’s because they’re still burning down black churches in the South. My singing has marked me out as a political artist, but when you talk about politics, you’ve got to be specific. I do feel that music can affect political administration – I most certainly do, and much more than people think.
“It can sway the sympathies of an audience one way or another, depending on how great the artist is, and so it can be used in a political campaign – swaying the audience to the candidate you want to win. It’s called mass hypnosis, and we’ve been using it for years.
“But, I repeat, you have to be very specific when you’re talking about politics. For example, we wanted Dr Martin Luther King to win the presidency, and I worked with him at Miles College, Alabama, and went on the marches with him. He was a dear friend.
“After they killed Kennedy, and killed his brother, we wanted Dr King to be president. But then I had to run away from being killed, because so many people were being killed at that time. But I think that had I been able to stay, I might have been able to help him win the presidency. That’s how I feel about music and politics.
“You see, the FBI was keeping a file on me, and they still have it in Washington. And the CIA actually went down to my old music school and asked them if I was involved in what they called the ‘rebellious uprisings’ in the US. My teacher, who was Russian, told them that there was no proof of that! But I do not think that the new music, rap, is carrying on our ideals at all, my dear. Rap is ruining music – it’s just no good at all.”
By turning jazz and soul into a political weapon, Simone found her artistic home. On her In Concert record of 1964, she would lay into issues of race and equality with songs such as Old Jim Crow and her chilling adaptation of the Kurt Weill song Pirate Jenny. Added to those were her recordings of Four Women, Strange Fruit and I Hold No Grudge, not to mention her definitive version of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s I Put a Spell On You.
There was a quality to her performances and recordings that showed political struggle as personal struggle, with the volatility in her own personality bringing out the issues within her music. Hence her enduring reputation for concerts that can either crackle with emotional power, or else implode under the pressure of their own intensity.
She has been rumoured to take the stage and simply stalk in circles, screaming the words “Stupid bitch”; but against all odds, her concerts have been described as “electrifying” and “sublime”.
Performing at Ronnie Scott’s in London’s Soho in 1987, Simone kept a capacity crowd waiting until close to 1am before finally taking the stage. On this occasion, she seemed to dip and dive between heartfelt renditions of her best-known songs and a seemingly stream-of-consciousness monologue about her bad mood and her current problems with the music business.
The effect, however, was indeed compelling; one got the impression that one was not only hearing Simone the artist, but also getting a glimpse behind the scenes of her complicated psyche. My Baby Just Cares for Me was conspicuous by its absence, thus disappointing the cocktail-and-cappuccino brigade who had turned up to swing, but possibly pleasing the purists who respected Simone’s choice of more arcane material.
“People resent artists. They’re jealous of them – they want to be artists themselves – and the only way they can relate to their hatred is to put you down in any way they can. It might be in the papers, or by pirating your albums or to be at the stage door waiting to kill you. That’s why I travel with a bodyguard.
“People will do anything to be connected with an artist who becomes famous. And I think that this is at the heart of the race problems: a resentment that turns into hatred. Our best jazz musicians are black, but they have always identified us as jazz musicians because they can’t find another word for it, and it keeps us under a label. That’s at the heart of racism – that, and the fact that we laugh and enjoy life.
“You know, the world is killing itself: eating itself to death, with starving, famine, poverty and corruption everywhere. But I don’t blame Saddam Hussein for throwing out those United Nations observers; hell, no, I don’t. He has a right to make those weapons; America makes them! America has an attitude that it’s the police of the world and it’s got to stop. They didn’t beat him the first time and they won’t beat him this time! I’m on his side! And you can print that.”
By the middle of the Sixties, when Simone had married a former New York detective who was also her manager, the strain of her nerves was beginning to tell. Emotional and highly strung, she was forced to adjust her sensitivity as an artist to the demands of a frequently ruthless and unscrupulous music industry. The cauldron of prejudice, discontent and injustice that had bubbled in North Carolina with the fumes of bigotry, was now transferred to Simone’s struggle with her own career, and her sense of self in an industry that she still sees as dominated by white, middle-class men.
“It is awful! The music industry is awful! It is built on money, corruption and lies. But now I have a hot-shot lawyer, out in San Francisco, and he works 24 hours a day to make sure I get my money. But the pirate industry is bigger in 1997 than it ever was before,” she says.
“Do you know that there is a pirate record of To Be Young, Gifted and Black and it’s sung in Chinese! I ask you! And I’ll be lucky to see any money. Pirate record-makers are thieves, and there is no way to tell you how much they have stolen from me. There’s no way to even begin …”
It is impossible, now, to disentangle Simone’s heartfelt account of the darker episodes in her life from the mire of misfortune and injustice that her complexities as a person might have placed her in. Much of her genius as a singer, in the delivery of songs such as Don’t Smoke in Bed or Little Girl Blue, with their soul- wrenching tenderness and numbing articulation of despair, can be derived only from a sense of deep wounding in Simone’s personal life.
It is rather as if she had become addicted to pain, and the drama or melodrama of pain – hooked on the regular fixes of misery that were handed out by whites to blacks in North Carolina during the Fifties. Her militancy, which is the fuel of her artistic brilliance, is seldom far from her concerns.
“Brecht and Weill predicted that, one day, there would be a time when people would be arrested because they couldn’t pay their rent – they said that in 1932, I think. So then I sang their Black Freighter song – the one about a decent girl who is forced to labour in a flop-house. Do you think that men are any good at anything? It seems to me that men are ruining the world.”
For most of the Seventies, Simone lived in Liberia, north Africa, becoming engaged to a Liberian politician’s son who would be assassinated in the 1980 coup. After he had cheated on her, marrying another woman while she was away, she became involved with another Liberian, who assaulted her so badly she was hospitalised.
In March 1978, the British press had reports of her having taken a drug overdose in a London hotel. Later that year there were further reports that she was homeless and penniless, despite having sold out London’s Festival Hall. Speaking to The Daily Mail in July 1978, she said: “My personal life is a shambles. I’m black and I’ve been struggling for half of my life.” Eventually, in the Eighties, she made the move to Switzerland that saw the revival of her career.
“A lot of my music comes out of hurt, but only some of it. There is a lot of joy as well. I’ve been in the business for 40 years, and the pain is immense, but the joy is immense too. When I sang He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands, it’s an attitude which says that you must keep going whatever happens to you. He has got the whole world in his hands – meaning God.
“I love to be compared with Maria Callas: she’s my favourite diva. Musicians like Maria Callas and myself are in communion with God, I feel, because we’re deeply religious.
“Now I don’t mean to say that we particularly believe in one religion: I believe in all religions. I believe in Islam as much as I believe in Christianity and Hinduism and Buddhism. There is a statue of the blessed Buddha just over there, beneath the table. It is a blessing to be able to make a gift of a song to the audience; you are creating a different piece of music every time, and that’s a blessing not a pain.”
From the mid-Eighties, Simone lived in the US, and has now settled in southern France. The release of her A Single Woman album in 1993 coincided with her role in the film Point of No Return, thus marking that year as a fusion of her legend – what she has come to stand for – with her current work.
Her performances are rare, awaited with nervous anticipation by audience and promoters alike. She has been capable of transcending all expectations, and the world has come to expect a lot of this black woman from terrible poverty, who was refused admission to her vocation as a concert pianist, and whose music has been used to sell Chanel scents and mobile phones.
“Alice Walker, the woman who wrote The Colour Purple, says that I am one of the icons of the 20th century for women,” she concludes. “It surprises me. I am constantly surprised by how famous I am. I live a peaceful life, here in this villa. I am sure that you like it.”
On the wall of Simone’s living room, beside the doctorates from Chicago and Massachusetts, there is another framed certificate, recently received from the president of the Cte d’Ivoire. It proclaims that Simone will now enjoy diplomatic status within that country. She will now be known as Her Excellency.