Nina Simone In Concert
Nina Simone is my favorite singer of all time, and I’ll make up any excuse I can to talk about her music. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much I miss the track-by-tack format. The question then became, “Which Nina Simone album do I pick?”
Maybe one of her more iconic albums, like Pastel Blues or I Put a Spell On You, both of which contain some of her most famous songs. Or maybe something weirder and more off-brand, like Emergency Ward, the three (or four, depending on which version you have) track live/studio hybrid album consisting of mostly George Harrison covers, including a live mashup of George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” and “Today is a Killer,” a poem by Last Poets on/off member David Nelson. Or maybe something like Broadway-Blues-Ballads, one of her worst releases that also happens to feature two of her most famous songs. (“Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” and “See-Line Woman.” “Worst” is a relative term, of course.) Maybe a personal favorite of mine that never really got its due, like Nina Simone and Piano!, or one that did, like Wild is the Wind.
But in the end, I went with her 1964 live album In Concert. (There’s a bit of confusion about whether it’s called In Concert or Nina Simone in Concert. Some services have it as the former, some the latter. I’m going with the former because it’s slightly less time consuming to type.) In many ways, it’s the album most indicative of what made Nina Simone special. And not just for political reasons either, the clarification necessary due to some of the more famous content of this album. But for artistic and aesthetic reasons as well.
To put it even more simply, if you wanted to learn about Nina’s artistry, her talent, her aesthetic, the album that’s the most “Nina” so to speak, this is the album I’d give you.
It also doesn’t hurt that In Concert is a desert island top ten album for me, and has been ever since I first listened to it back in college. And it’s short. So let’s discuss!
1. I Loves You Porgy
In Concert is considered by many to be the crossing of a certain threshold in Nina’s career. Before this album, Nina was a fairly traditional jazz singer. An abnormally talented one who was a gifted enough piano player that she could’ve been a concert pianist if her life had gone a little differently and she lived in a less racist and misogynist country, but traditional nonetheless in terms of her output. Nothing she released up to this point would hint at the sudden political shift this album would take.
But for as much as this album would propel Nina’s career in a certain direction, and for as much of a reputation it has as a result, In Concert is quite reminiscent for her earlier, safer work. Of the seven songs on this album, three of them are updated versions of songs from her 1958 debut album, Little Girl Blue, including “I Loves You Porgy.”
This is the version of “I Loves You Porgy” from Little Girl Blue. The one that charted and played a huge hand in launching her career.
Look. Nina Simone is incredible, and she always was incredible. This is an amazing rendition of the song. But at this point in human existence, there’s a good chance that you were exposed to Nina’s later career before you were exposed to this version of the song, and if you think that something’s a little off with it, you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. There’s nothing “inept” or “bad” about this version. Not by any means. But I would argue that it’s not up to the standards we have for her now. Or at the very least, the standards I have for her.
Take, for example, her vocals. They’re still fantastic. Nina Simone is, after all, one of the greatest jazz singers of all time. But they don’t sell the longing as much as we know she can sell it. She sounds, compared to her later career, stilted. Like she’s recording her first album, and she isn’t as confident an artist yet.
It’s also important to keep in mind that this is a studio version, and a lot of Nina’s earlier studio work puts a greater emphasis on her piano playing than her vocals. Not that this is a complaint, as I could happily listen to Nina play piano all day. But it’s the reason why the emotional resonance of a lot of her early work is sold more in the arrangements than the vocals, including this version of “I Loves You Porgy.” There is a lot of piano on this song, from the fluttering intro to the solo in the middle that does a beautiful job elevating the romantic elements of the song over some of its darker moments. It’s something you’ll hear less and less in her more well-known recordings, when her vocals take a greater emphasis over her piano.
All of this is a long winded way of saying that I like the In Concert version of “I Loves You Porgy” a lot more than the one that debuted five and a half (thereabouts) years before.
Though this version doesn’t have solos, I think it’s more affective. It’s slower, giving the audience and the listener time to soak it all in. In Nina’s vocal delivery, she lingers on certain words and gives others a more distinct inflection. She adds a degree of vibrato when necessary, thus selling both the emotional longing for Porgy and the dread of being separated from him. In short, it sounds like she’s crying, but it’s not so overwhelming to become distracting.
“I Loves You Porgy” is a song ripe with lovesickness and melancholy. To properly sell it, you need to immerse your audience. Thus, the decision to slow it down makes sense. However, the flip side of lovesickness is that in order to be lovesick, you need to be in love. Nina’s vocals and the backing instrumentation do a great job in bringing out the more despondent elements of the song. But they also bring out the warmth as well. I think there’s a more heightened sense of intimacy in this version, and not just because she’s performing it live. Because she was an evolved enough artist at this point to know how to bring it out.
Also, I heard this version before the Little Girl Blue version. So there’s that too.
2. Plain Gold Ring
The In Concert version of “I Loves You Porgy” and the Little Girl Blue version are quite different from one another. But they’re not so different that you can’t see how the former naturally became the latter through experience and experimentation.
The same cannot be said for “Plain Gold Ring,” the second song on In Concert that debuted on Little Girl Blue. Though In Concert’s version of “I Loves You Porgy” is a refinement of what came before, its version of “Plain Gold Ring” is a radical departure.
The Little Girl Blue version of “Plain Gold Ring,” a song about pining for a married man, is one of the highlights of the album. For those of you who like a bit more subtlety in your jazz, as is usually the case for me, “Plain Gold Ring” might seem like a bit of weird dramatic off-shoot. But sometimes, you got to love something big, and “Plain Gold Ring” is one of the theatrical moments on the album.
Whereas “I Loves You Porgy,” to a certain extent, deemphasizes Nina’s vocals, on “Plain Gold Ring” they take center stage. After a rare (for this album) a cappella introduction, a dramatic military like snare kicks in, along with Nina’s marching piano drive. Nina then sings the song in a similar manner to the In Concert version of “I Loves You Porgy,” with lots of vibrato and lots elongation. We even hear some vocal wailing and loud piano flourishes before the song slowly fades out, ending in the same kind of silence from which the song began.
Though it’s an oddity on the album, it’s a fairly conventional song in the grand scheme of music at the time. There’s a driving melody that it rarely deviates from, and most of all, there’s a sense of structure that most popular songs rely on for maximum effectiveness.
The In Concert version of “Plain Gold Ring” has none of that shit.
Obviously, the instrumentation in this version is much different. Gone is the snare and in comes an unfamiliar style of drumming with more unfamiliar drums. Gone is the structure and in comes chaos. Though the (much welcome) backing bass and the piano keep the train on the tracks, the musical direction is in perpetual motion. Layers change. One minute, the piano’s the emphasis. Then the drums or the bass will take command. Unlike the original version, we never quite know where it’s going.
But as I listened to this album again for this article, what struck me this time were Nina’s vocals. Not only are they as unpredictable as the musical direction, but they strike an entirely different emotional note. In the original, though she sounds sad and heartbroken over this man she’ll never have, she also sounds in control. In this version, words are elongated without warning. There’s more wailing and scatting. The lines are sung with a different cadence, giving them a more improvised feeling that gives up the original version’s sense of restraint.
To put it simply, in Little Girl Blue, she makes the song sound sad. In this version, she makes it sound angry. Her vocals sound menacing, like the man’s wife she be scared, and maybe the man himself as well. The unpredictable nature of this rendition only makes the experience more tense.
Then like the original, it slowly fades out. But not literally like in Little Girl Blue. This time, the performance gets quieter and quieter and to much greater effect. Like the calm that comes after destroying your room in a fit of rage.
I don’t know which version is “better.” The answer probably depends on my mood. But to so radically change the song only proves the breadth of Nina’s artistic prowess. She can take a sad song, make it angry, and completely change the meaning in the process. It wouldn’t even occur to most that this could be done, let alone to try.
3. Pirate Jenny
Nina Simone’s version of “Pirate Jenny,” a song about a maid (or prostitute, depending on the context from which you’re hearing the song) fantasizing about facilitating a violent pirate raid on the hotel where she works, is one of my favorite recordings of music ever made. At the risk of sounding off my rocker, I might even go so far as to say that it’s one of my favorite works of art across all mediums ever made. How one would argue such a thing, I don’t know. But I feel it regardless.
There are an infinite number of reasons why this particular recording of this song is incredible and why it means so much to me. But I’ll stick with just two. The first is the context of its creation.
As many of you already know, “Pirate Jenny” is a song from The Threepenny Opera, an unorthodox antihero musical/capitalism critique about the criminal underbelly of Victorian London. As originally conceived, the song was sung by Polly Peachum, the new wife of infamous London criminal Macheath (he of “Mack the Knife” fame). Polly originally sang the song early on in the musical as an expression of her frustrations with her family, specifically her oppressive father Jonathan, the boss of the city’s beggars. Specifically, it’s a story song about a maid named Jenny who has the bloody pirate fantasy. When Polly sings it, it’s a song about the patriarchy that limits her ability to live her life as she sees fit. It’s a cry for freedom.
Like many aspects of the The Threepenny Opera, however, the details of the play have changed and evolved with time. Whereas Polly sings it in the original version, most adaptations you’ll read or see has Jenny, a prostitute who operates out of a shoddy hotel and Macheath’s former lover, sing the song. When Jenny sings it, it becomes a song about class. She’s expressing her desire for the deaths of the shitty men who run the hotel and abuse her services. In many ways, she’s also singing about her desire for vengeance against Macheath himself, as in many translations and productions, he’s also her abusive pimp. This fantasy of leading a raid and killing everyone she despises is the only real sense of freedom she has. Until she turns Macheath in for a bribe, that is.
When Nina performs it, Jenny’s a maid again. But she makes another small but hugely significant change. In most translations of the song, it begins with the singer, whoever it may be, describing her circumstances. She describes her subjugation and how she has to feign politeness to the people who treat her like dirt when they give her a tip. Usually, she describes the hotel. When I googled “Threepenny Opera PDF,” the first translation I clicked used the word “tatty.” Specifically, “When you see my tatty clothing and this tatty old hotel.” Most translations describe the hotel and her stature in similar terms.
In Nina’s version, the lyrics are, “Maybe once you tip me and it makes you feel swell/In this crummy Southern town/In this crummy old hotel.” Just by adding the word “Southern,” Nina makes this a song not just about misogyny and class, but race as well.
Now it’s a fantasy about pirates murdering Southern racists and flattening a southern racist town. This song was recorded in 1964. In America. Though this was recorded live in New York City in Carnegie Hall and not, say, Mobile, Alabama, it was still a rather bold move, and it still fucking rules.
However, this song also bears a great deal of personal significance, which brings me to point number two: This is the song that made me realize that when it comes to singing, effectiveness is more important than technical ability.
By the standards of most trained singers, Nina’s singing on this song seems rather strange. She sings it with lots of abrupt changes in volume and tempo and lots of shouting. Her vocals get unsettling ghoulish in the more violent portions of the song and unpredictable as the song goes on. However, this is some of the most affective singing I’ve ever heard, even if it defies the traditional conventions of singing. When she sings the song, her voice drips with rage and energy. Sometimes, she sounds like she’s trying to contain it. Sometimes, she lets all signs of restraint fall dead to the floor and lets whatever’s been building all out at once. (Yes, I know the joke I could’ve made there.)
It doesn’t sound pretty. But that’s far from the point.
This song, in essence, taught me what singing is. It taught me what’s important in a performance and it showed me how a singer should commit. For that, it’s an extremely important recording in my life, and for that, I love it dearly.
4. Old Jim Crow
In case “Pirate Jenny” was too subtle for certain people, or you’re the kind of person who doesn’t pay attention to lyrics, the next song on the album is called “Old Jim Crow.”
As we’ve already discussed, In Concert is, in many ways, the birth of Nina Simone as a civil rights icon. Though at this point, she already flexed that muscle a few times in live performances and in the inclusion of certain spirituals in her albums, most people didn’t get to see Nina live, and most never bothered to learn about the history of spirituals as coded protest music. If you wanted to engage with Nina’s music, your best bets were the radio or LPs, so for most, In Concert was her political debut.
There’s an argument to be made that “Pirate Jenny” is the precise moment this era of Nina’s activism begins on her records. However, “Pirate Jenny” was a song written a few decades ago by two German men. On “Old Jim Crow,” Nina has a writing credit.
Up until this point, Nina’s had the same kind of career as a lot of the more pop friendly jazz performers in the entertainment industry at the time. She performed covers, standards, and material written by others.
Nina did have writing credits, but for the most part, they were for fairly traditional songs. A few instrumental compositions like “Central Park Blues” on Little Girl Blue and “Nina’s Blues” from Nina Simone at Newport, a few less traditional compositions, like “Flo Me La,” also from Nina Simone at Newport, some reworkings of traditional gospel songs and spirituals, most notably “Children Go Where I Send You,” which made its first appearance on The Amazing Nina Simone, a love song called “If You Knew” from Nina Simone at Carnegie Hall, and various songs of this general nature.
All of this is fairly standard stuff, even if its bolstered substantially by Nina’s talents. (“Flo Me La,” in particular, is pretty damn great.) However, nothing in any of these songs, with the possible exception of “Children Go Where I Send You,” screams politics, subtextual or otherwise.
Writing credits are a weird thing to harp on. But going from traditional safe songwriting to writing a song about the destruction of Jim Crow is a rather substantial step in a certain direction. Nowadays, when an artist wants to change artistic directions, there’s usually some sort of roll-out. Something that prepares the fans for what’s to come. There’s something to appreciate about Nina jumping in with both feet, and you’ll understand if I want to call “Old Jim Crow” the true debut of Nina the activist.
Also, it’s a great song.
5. Don’t Smoke in Bed
“Don’t Smoke in Bed” is the last of the Little Girl Blue songs on In Concert. In a certain sense, it’s the version that’s the most like its original. Both versions of the song, about leaving your husband in the middle of the night, go for a sense of drama. Both are sparse recordings of just Nina and her piano. Both are fantastic.
The differences, however, are subtle. So subtle in fact that I struggle somewhat with what to say in this section and how to describe it with my limited music vocabulary. But try I shall.
“Don’t Smoke in Bed” is perhaps the most operatic moment on Little Girl Blue. Thanks to the crescendoing and occasionally loud-by-the-standards-of-this-album piano and Nina’s vocals, one gets the sense that this version of the song is meant to emphasize the drama of the moment. This is not meant to convey intimacy or privacy. We’re not meant to wallow in the heartbreak of the failure of this relationship. This is a “fuck you, I’m out” moment, and every element of this is designed for maximum melodrama. Not that I’m complaining, of course.
Still, what’s interesting about this version to me is the harmony between the piano and the vocals. On a lot of Little Girl Blue, I would argue that there’s a bit of competition going on over what gets more emphasis: Nina’s piano abilities or Nina’s singing. The piano wins on “I Loves You Porgy” but the vocals take the trophy on, say, “He Needs Me” and various other points on the album. “Don’t Smoke in Bed” is a moment where the two go hand in hand, where the piano accents Nina’s singing and the rhythm of her piano adds extra punctuation to the more dramatic vocal moments.
A lot of what was said about the version of “Don’t Smoke in Bed” on Little Girl Blue can also be said about the In Concert version of the song as well. Once again, there’s a sense of balance, as well as a certain sense of drama.
However, the primary difference between the two versions of the song is the emotional intent. Whereas the Little Girl Blue version is about the drama in the moment, the In Concert version is about the heartbreak. It’s everything the first version of the song wanted to ignore.
Once again, Nina holds on certain words longer, allowing them to breathe and sink in with the audience. Once again, she adds a bit of vibrato to certain words, transforming the narrator from confident dumper to shattered lover who’s finally decided she’s had enough.
There’s also a much different philosophy in how Nina plays her piano. This time, there’s long stretches where all we hear is her voice, particularly early on the song. However, there are also some rather big piano moments that not only show off her skill, but also emphasize the emotional turmoil of our narrator as she leaves her wedding ring on the dresser.
As I said, there is still a balance, but one of a different kind. For every moment of emotional yearning Nina conveys in her vocals, she responds with an equally fraught piano burst. As a result, there’s still a sense of drama, but it’s a more earned kind of drama. Whereas the first version is entertaining melodrama, this version is an actual drama.
Ultimately, it’s a more confident take on the song, and a more affective one as well. It communicates that maybe, just maybe, feeling the need to leave your husband in the middle of the night is a bad thing.
6. Go Limp
When you think about Nina Simone, what specifically do you think about?
Most people probably think of one of two things, though if we most box her into just two categories for the sake of a pointless thought exercise, I hope people pick both. The first is Nina Simone, civil rights icon. The woman who knowingly took a hit on her career to record more songs aimed for the advancement of civil rights. The political firebrand. The woman who told Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that she isn’t non-violent.
Maybe you think of Nina Simone, the jazz giant. One of the greatest singers of all time with one of the most unique voices in the history of music, as well as a piano prodigy and gifted song writer. The woman who gave us definitive versions of standards and has a track record of making covers better than the originals. (More on that in another article some day.) The High Priestess of Soul.
There are, of course, other ways of thinking about her as well. The cultural force. The woman who made the music your parents or grandparents liked. Unfortunately, based on information we know about her later years now, an example of the toll of untreated trauma and mental illness.
Here’s the thing: The way we contextualize artists and celebrities in our lives is a topic that bothers me more and more lately. We’re in an age where the emotional attachment we have with artists and their work is becoming increasingly unhealthy and destructive. Take one look at the behavior of, say, Joe Rogan fans on Twitter and it should become immediately clear what I mean. I think we need to take a step back and remember that all of these artists are, first and foremost, people, equally capable of creating wonderful art for the world to enjoy and toxic bullshit for the world to loathe.
True, I’m the one who contextualized this question in the confines of this article. And equally true, I’ve spent more than enough time in this article singing Nina’s praises. But I only did the former to demonstrate what I’m trying to avoid doing in my life and I’ll continue doing the latter while refusing to be an asshole about it. I think the healthy response to both of these elements is to remember that she was a human being, not a god walking the earth. And it’s because of this that “Go Limp” is one of my favorite moments on the album.
“Go Limp” is a very silly song. It’s a song about a woman who goes to march for civil rights, only to take the instructions she was given for police encounters (“go limp”) and apply them for when she meets a handsome fellow protester. It’s a big sex joke wrapped in a civil rights package.
Though the song itself is funny, the reason it stands out is the way she performs it. We listen to her interact and joke around with the audience. We listen to her laugh at the song itself. We listen to her admit that she forgot some of the lyrics and make up new ones on the spot.
It’s a very humanizing moment. One could say that it lessens the deification one (me) could have of her, but that’s probably a good thing. Again, she wasn’t a god. She was a person, capable of warmth, humor, and humanity. We know now that she did some horrible things later in her life. Of course, how you contend with this information is up to you. It bothers me quite a bit. But it also emphasized for me that it didn’t have to be this way. If only we lived in a society that treats its women of color with even a shred of decency, maybe things could’ve been better for her. Maybe she could’ve always been that person joking on the stage while singing beautiful songs. Despite the ugliness of where Nina’s from and where he life would take her, this song makes me smile.
It’s also a nice reprieve from some of the tonal darkness of some of the songs on this album. Of course, that reprieve won’t last long…
7. Mississippi Goddamn
I hope with all my heart that this article isn’t the first time you’ve ever heard this song.
If it is, let’s listen to it now.
Kind of speaks for itself, doesn’t it?
If you have heard of this song, then you already know why it’s incredible and why there have been several trillion articles and pieces written about it.
Honestly, what else needs to be said? Just listen to it, then read the news.
