The first time I heard Nina Simone was a late night at the Tower Records in Berkeley (while shelving some discs). The song was ‘Sinnerman’, and when I heard her voice I had to find out who it was singing. And as the song builds up, the piano playing becomes manic… frantic… and I had to figure out who was playing piano. And it was still Nina Simone! Then the clapping begins, some vocal utterances, and the piano puts a simple melody over the top of it. And then it brings the rest of the band back in. Nina sings out an ‘Oh yeah!’. Then everything picks up again. The energy in this performance is simply amazing.

I picked up a single greatest hits disc on Philips records that night that had ‘Sinnerman’ on it, and was amazed by the whole disc. From the vocal standard styling on ‘I Loves You Porgy’ to the driving and tight flute and drums of ‘See-Line Woman’. ‘Pirate Jenny’, ‘Four Women’ and ‘Mississippi Goddam’. The variety and breadth of her performances on this single disc stunned me.

The discs tonight are that ‘Best of’ disc and the ‘Four Women’ box set of her Philips releases. Where the ‘Best of’ collection contains mostly serious and dark songs, I was surprised to hear how much humor Nina Simone also had at times. In ‘Go Limp’ she leads the audience in what she calls a ‘hootenanny time’ sing-along… mostly a drunken waltz that sets women’s rights and the civil rights movement against the story of a mother telling her daughter how to snag a man. It is a drunken waltz that lets her vamp as she laughs at the song, and criticizes her audience for not singing along as loud as they should. The song is also filled with a number of pregnant pauses while she waits for the audience to get the jokes that are in the song’s lyrics.

‘Love Me Or Leave Me’ shows off her classical training (with some wonderful imitative playing in the middle of the song) and ‘Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out’ shows how bluesy she could get.

A couple years after Tamiko and I moved to Seattle, Nina Simone played a concert at the Seattle Symphony’s Benaroya Hall. She was making a rare appearance in the States (she had moved to Paris decades before after deciding that she couldn’t live in the U.S. anymore since she would always be treated as a second-class citizen because of the color of her skin), and I know I should have found some way to get tickets. They were well outside our graduate student budget but I should have realized that this was surely the last chance we would have to see her perform live. The reviews talked about how stunning the performance was. She passed away two years later. I regret not seeing James Brown before he died. I regret skipping on Elvin Jones thinking I’d catch him the next time around. But missing Nina Simone will probably be one of my biggest concert regrets for some time.

UPDATE: the backup is STILL running… guess this one isn’t going to get ripped until tomorrow.