Will Friedwald,author of The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums, is exploring some of the finest recordings of the 20th century on The Jonathan Channel. This week he discusses Nina Simone and Piano.
Will Friedwald: The album Nina Simone and Piano, or which was released in 1969,is very different from what she was doing elsewhere at that point. Particularly at this point she was sort of the most confrontational of jazz singers, particularly by the late 1960's. Most of her work at this time mostly aligned with the Civil Rights Movement. There was a notorious recording of her made right around the time that Doctor Martin Luther King died. The way she works her feelings into that concert which are not only aggressive and antagonistic, or but are mellow and reflective,and mournful that this great man has left the planet. So the album Nina Simone and Piano is very different from what she was doing elsewhere at that point. It's all reflective, it's all internal, and it’s a very different side of her than you were seeing on the rest of her music at that point. And the plan of her doing an album just with her own piano is kind of unique,because she was notorious for her touring band and that specific sound. And so her as a pianist and singer that coming to the fore and just reducing it to its bare essentials gets to that certain purity that you don't find in the rest of her work, you don’t really find her being so directly personal and emotional in a lot of what she did. This album really brings that out in a way that she never did anywhere else.
There's a wonderful song called “Who Am I” and it’s a very interesting piece of material. Around 1950 Leonard Bernstein did his own version of Peter Pan, or people that know Leonard Bernstein some of them believe that was actually a pretty good fit. It’s a notable case where Bernstein wrote his own lyrics. It's not a full-on musical of the kind that Comden and Green and Moose Charlap wrote in 1955 for Mary Martin,but it's a setting of the play with a few songs opposed to an all out Broadway-style version. So this is the Leonard Bernstein Peter Pan and it's an strange piece of theater. At one point Wendy, so I am led to believe, and sings this very interesting song approximately the nature of reincarnation,it's sort of like “Where or When” by Rodgers & Hart. Kind of a reflection on the soul, where it comes from, and where it's going,who you are, who you've been. This is not typical of a children's musical. It's a very kind of deep, and profoundly philosophical kind of song in the middle of Peter Pan, words and music by Leonard Bernstein, and Nina Simone does it on this album. And now this was not a song that a lot of people even knew, and but it just goes to show the kind of company that Nina Simone with keeping that you would even have heard of this song much less want to attain it.
This is very very early in the game for Randy Newman. His first album had only just advance out a few months earlier and it shows how Nina was keeping up on everything that was happening in jazz and well-liked music. For her to be doing a Randy Newman song this early shows that she was really keeping on top of things. It's a lovely version of a song that became one of Randy Newman's best known,“I believe It's Going to Rain Today,” and she just lays it out very direct, and very heartfelt,and in a very connected way, and she really makes all the words and these images like kicking a tin can down the street, and these different visual paintings that Randy Newman comes up with,she really makes them advance across very very vividly.
A song by Jonathan King called “Everyone's Gone to the Moon” is sort of like the flip side of that. The song really seems like Randy Newman himself might have written it as a sequel, but it's the same sort of vivid imagery and all these like metaphoric ideas approximately the empty streets and things like that and no people around, and she brings it alive and makes it seem very vivid. She turns the abstract and makes it concrete,she makes it seem genuine, she makes it seem genuine not just this kind of far flung series of metaphors, and but something that has genuine literal meaning.
Source: thetakeaway.org