EQUAL PARTS SOUL, BLUES, JAZZ AND GENIUS
by Tom Moon
In the song-drama “Four Women,” one of several Nina Simone originals on this lavish four-disc-box set of the same name, the jazz singer and pianist – who died in April at age seventy – assumes the identities of four black female archetypes: the wise, long-suffering laborer, the whore, the militant and the confused child of an interracial couple. Each is chillingly rendered, a distinct individual stepping from the pages of a different period novel; between them, Simone patches together a story about womanhood, pride, identity, dignity.
As you can hear throughout this collection of seven albums recorded for Philips in the mid-Sixties, Simone gave everything that sense of dimension. She wasn’t one of those divas who would throw herself fully into extremes of “happy” or “sad” – hers was a complex music in the key of bittersweet, and she brought all the messy facets of life into her interpretations. Her love songs, such as her wrenching version of George and Ira Gershwin’s “I Loves You, Porgy,” which opens this box, have the weary, worn-down countenance of the soldier returning from violent battle; her protest songs (“Mississippi Goddamn” is the most famous) are delivered with a romantic’s blue-sky idealism. Simone’s most memorable material, such as the 1967 High Priestess of Soul album included here, is saturated with the core truths of blues and gospel yet is eager to stretch beyond those roots. As she evolves, she incorporates the assertive repetitions of Sixties soul, the raw hurt of Billie Holiday and, through her unconventional piano accompaniment, the ethereal explorations of the era’s progressive jazz instrumentalists.
Four Women contains austere masterpieces such as Nina Simone In Concert as well as goopy attempts at commercial success, like Broadway, Blues, Ballads, which were recorded with a studio orchestra. But every song on Four Women has in it a life’s worth of lust, disappointment and glory.