A Furious Assault on Injustice

Kevin Le Gendre

Long before the advent of social media, the private life of an artist was public property. The individual seen in concerts and heard on record exerted an irresistible fascination on an audience eager to know who they were as well as what they did.

Nina Simone drew the gaze of millions around the world, but her genius lay in the lessons she gave to listeners about themselves and the state of humankind. Like many significant commentators she held up a mirror to society to expose its truths and lies. One of her defining moments, Mississippi Goddam! is as much potent meta-theater as it is protest song. The curt, caustic irony of her spoken introduction to the 1964 anthem—“This is a show tune, but the show hasn’t been written for it yet”—was an imaginative way of saying that America, convulsed by racist murders and civil rights campaigns, had descended into a real horror show that she and everybody with a conscience had to stop. Putting an end to Simone’s career was uppermost in the minds of broadcasters in the Southern States that promptly banned the reality-check melody.

Defiance, however, was one of Simone’s signes particuliers. Between her debut in 1953 and her death in 2003, she established herself as an extraordinary musician and became one of the most prolific and unpredictable of figures, a woman as capable of volcanic turbulence as of gentle tenderness who touched millions through her artistry and integrity. Yet Nina Simone, the icon, was not meant to be. Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon, she dreamed of a life as a concert pianist when growing up in Tryon, North Carolina—an aspiration that was deemed unrealistic for the majority of African American girls at the time of “Jim Crow.” The abrupt demise of that dream, amid disputed allegations of racism, led to her reincarnation as a jazz and R&B singer who did not lower impressively high standards at the keyboard. Chart hits such as My Baby Just Cares for Me, with its bouncy rhythm and brief but engaging piano solo, made it clear that classical music’s loss was pop’s gain, and the vast discography Simone created over five decades cemented her singular status. She would become unique, “beyond category.”

Whether performing the music of majestic jazz composer Duke Ellington, the urbane singer-songwriter Randy Newman, or the jive-talkin’ blues man Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Simone always managed to put her own stamp on a composition, adding a range of nuance that revealed a great deal about her advanced musicianship and ability as an arranger. Her reading of Belgian poet Jacques Brel’s Ne me quitte pas is simply unforgettable for the way she weights every French word with a totally convincing sense of despair, as if she were reliving the trauma of a breakup in three minutes with nothing more than a few piano chords for comfort.

As much as she made the songs of others her own, Simone also wrote several emblematic original pieces that highlighted her ability to combine affecting music with thought-provoking words, very often daring to say what was not widely said. Four Women is a remarkable feminist tour de force that recognizes and celebrates the varied experience of African American “sisters” in a post-slave society, while To Be Young, Gifted and Black, featuring a lyric by Weldon Irvine, became a vital theme to people of color around the world who resolved to keep pushing for equality and self-fulfillment in the 1970s, the age of Black Power. The groundbreaking playwright Lorraine Hansberry was a source of inspiration for the song, and she may well have returned the compliment by penning a drama about Nina. After all, the singer had to overcome major financial exploitation and physical abuse at the hands of her husband, battle for artistic independence, uproot herself, and become a nomad, living in Barbados, Liberia, Netherlands, and France, once she had decided that it was simply impossible for her to stay in America, whose values she did not share.

Simone thus became an international, if not universal artist in the literal as well as figurative sense, and the presence of the great South African songstress and activist Miriam Makeba at her funeral was as meaningful as it was poignant. Both were great freedom fighters fired by a passion for equality that would not be easily extinguished.

One heartily applauds Claron McFadden and Fanny & Alexander for bringing Nina Simone to the stage as imaginatively as they have, but in many ways Simone never left. Her music, be it political or sentimental, is deeply embedded in contemporary culture by way of its appearance in small-screen commercials and big-screen movies, but it is the place she has in hearts and minds, the relevance of her songs to a world that still needs voices of dissent as well as words of solace, that makes the artist so timeless. The acclaimed writer Ntozake Shango said of Nina Simone: “No single female voice has so furiously assaulted injustice, ranging from racism to adultery, in my lifetime.” The thought of the singer irrepressibly tearing down the house of any oppressive ruler resonates more than ever at a time when those in power would build walls rather than bridges.

A Note from Claron McFadden

I knew Nina Simone’s name and was distinctly aware of her music during my childhood, but she was not directly connected to my musical landscape. It was only when I came to Europe that I started to hear more about her. I was immediately intrigued by her identity as an artist, a musician, a person of color, and an American woman. But it was her music that has always touched me, still at a distance.

A few years ago, I heard an interview in which she said she wanted to be the first Black American concert pianist. “I would have been happy,” she said. “I’m not happy now.” This touched me to the core of my being, and from that moment I could never hear or read anything she said in the same way. All I could hear was the sadness, the feeling that she would have been happy… And so it was a mixed reaction—part of me is glad that she sang and that her music is on earth, while another part finds it truly tragic because she could not fulfill her dreams.

I soon became more interested in who she was, what happened to her, how she managed to survive, her journey, how she left America, her bitterness, her anger, and her political side as well. When Luigi Noah De Angelis first told me about this project I thought, “This is the moment for me to get to know her, to really dive into her world.”

What is truly special about NINA is that we are not learning a script, not memorizing text, and not giving an interpretation of how we think she expressed herself. We are actually letting her speak through me. I find this really beautiful and fascinating—because it is impossible to be passive, but at the same time there is the idea of being as pure a vessel as possible, to truly study her words, her movements, how she expresses herself vocally, linguistically, and physically. The way she connected with the world was something I really wanted to get into, and I think it is important to be able to let her tell her story through this performance. Everything is there: the pain, the joy, the anger, the political injustice, her illnesses, her sorrow—but we are not adding anything to it. That is why I have been very excited about this project from the beginning, as a woman of color and a musician who left my country for similar reasons. They were nowhere as dramatic as hers, and I was lucky to realize my dreams with few obstacles, but I know what it means. 

It is beautiful to be able to have this opportunity to understand, to find out, to discover who Nina Simone was and is through her own words, her own actions, her own way of expressing her connection with the world.

—Claron McFadden