ROLLING STONE (No. 923) 5/2003
	NINA SIMONE - THE JAZZ SINGER AND COMPOSER BLAZED THE WAY FOR ALICIA KEYS AND NORAH JONES by Tom Moon
			Whether affirming the worth of a child or shouting down racial injustice, Nina Simone – the pianist, singer and composer who died on April 21st at age seventy – made sure she was understood. The woman known as the High Priestess of Soul sang love songs like she was still tending the wounds. She sang “Mississippi Goddamn,” inspired by the murder of civil-rights leader Medgar Evers, with a poised but pronounced rage. No matter her subject, Simone let her own sense of drama and justice seep into her interpretations, transforming even the most ordinary material into deeply felt, highly personal music.      “I always loved the passion in her voice, but when I heard she would perform these amazing classical pieces, too, I just flipped,” says Alicia Keys of Simone, who sex an example of artistic individuality that inspired Erykah Badu, Norah Jones, Keys and many others. “I was like, ‘You mean she’s not just an amazing singer and compser and arranger and thinker – she does that, too?’”      Simone, born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, began her career interpreting jazz standards; her 1958 version of “My Baby Just Cares For Me” was the soundtrack for a ubiquitous perfume ad in the 1980s. But she was a restless spirit, and by the mid-Sixties she was writing music that knit together gospel, jazz and blues in profoundly new ways. She also began radically reworking rock-era hits: Singing with an understatement that could be seductively coy or chillingly blunt, she infused the Animals’ “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” with a life-or-death urgency and transformed the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody” into an expression of endless unrelieved ache.      Despite writing one of the more uplifting songs associated with the civil-rights movement, “To Be Young Gifted and Black,” the obstreperous Simone – who chastised audiences for talking while she was performing and insisted on being called “Doctor” after receiving honorary degrees – was bitter about race relations in America and spent much of the last thirty years living in Barbados, Liberia and the south of France, where she died. She toured the US only rarely. Though her contribution wasn’t fully acknowledged in the late Sixties and early Seventies, her music did elevate the discourse on race in America. “She was talking about these very sticky topics, in what was a very turbulent time,” says Keys, “and singing like she was driving a knife through your chest, saying what had to be said. Thank God she said it.”