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In the early 1970s in Poughkeepsie I asked poet Nikki Giovanni if it was true that she was working on a biography of Nina Simone. They had found, said Giovanni, they were not able to work together. She did not explain.
Attempting to categorize or explain Nina Simone is at least as awesome a task as trying to "work with her." She has always gone her own way, labelled by some as a jazz singer but herself rejecting that categorization. She writes in her autobiography, I Put a Spell on You (written with Stephen Cleary. Pantheon Books, N.Y., 1991. $22 cloth, 181pp.):
Because of "(I Loves You,) Porgy" [her first hit song], people often compared me to Billie Holiday, which I hated. That was just one song, and anybody who saw me perform could see we were entirely different. What made me mad was that it meant people couldn't get past the fact we were both black: if I had happened to be white nobody would have made the connection. And I didn't like to be put in a box with other singers because my musicianship was totally different, and in its own way superior. It was a racist thing; "If she's black she must be a jazz singer,"
When one hears what Simone does with Rodgers and Hart's "Glad to be Unhappy" on the Tribute to Billie Holiday videotape, one is tempted to annoy her by calling her a jazz singer, the best jazz singer since Holiday. She fragments the melody and plays with the lyric as much as Betty Carter would. And though her piano playing has shown that her first choice in life was to be a classical pianist (witness her performance of Saint-Saens's "Mon Coeur s'Ouvre a ta voix" from Samson et Dalila), what does one call "Under the Lowest" and "Central Park Blues" if not jazz piano composition?
Of course if we can call her anything (beyond goddess; beyond genius) it is jazz/pop fusion artist of the highest order. Her creative flamboyance in performance has perhaps deterred some from acknowledging her musical greatness. She did a Central Park concert wearing only a long skirt and a feathered necklace; once she showed up in a hooded cape, sang two numbers...