Best nina simone lp album
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For subject matter like “Mississippi Goddam,” which was about a church bombing, she chooses light-heartedness, claiming that the song is a show tune, “but the show hasn’t been written for it.yet.” But the scowl on the cover of the album suggests her humor is in irony, and she’s not really joking, not really. The first half of this double-LP album (I know I’m kind of cheating again, but they were from very similar periods in her career), a show from New York City, where Simone’s live persona-brash, contradictory, moody, angry, breathy, tender, funny, emotional-really shines through. In Concert / I Put a Spell On You (1964/65)
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One of my favorites is “Break Down and Let it All Out,” where her emerging pop sensibilities shine a little bit. Here is the song Jeff Buckley later covered, “Lilac Wine,” as well as traditional folk songs reappropriated (“Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair”) and spirituals (“Take Me to the Water”) and original selections like the four-part song called “Four Women,” which highlights her gift for spinning unsentimental emotion out of political and racial animosity.
#Best nina simone lp album full
The albums are full of somewhat boisterous arrangements and characterize a number of styles, mostly due to the fact that it’s made up of six disparate recording sessions. I think this is a pretty good place to begin with Simone’s music, especially since you can buy it as a double-LP, both from 1966. Wild is the Wind / High Priestess of Soul (1967/67) Here, 5 albums that I most loved, though I’ve just begun. She released almost 60 albums in her lifetime and penned over 500 songs (she died in 2003). In some ways, it’s a blessing, because her resulting recordings, most of them covers from traditional spirituals to Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne,” are remarkable. In the end, she hated being categorized by anything, calling her music “black classical” (she was rejected from attending Juliard, purportedly because of her race). Musically, the album showcases Simone’s penchant for blues and soul singing, and the breadth of style in her recordings, from jazz to showtunes to gospel to r & b, all balanced atop accomplished, classical piano playing. Young, Gifted and Black, a phrase popularized by Aretha Franklin’s 1972 album, was originally a song by Simone. That quality, along with complex emotions and musical versatility, is what I’ve come to love in Nina Simone’s music as I’ve explored it this year. For today: Nina Simone, born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in 1935 in Tryon, North Carolina.įorever Young, Gifted and Black: Songs of Freedom and Spiritįorgive the overly-earnest album title: the songs within marry fiery anger and politics and tender emotion without a drop of sentiment. I hope that it’s still interesting to y'all. I want to do this twice, and once we reach 15, I’ll start with 2006 albums, because I can make a suitable list at that point. To justify this totally personal approach to the listmaking, my "Top 25" is going to be a bit different (just at first): I’ll talk about an album by an artist that actually was released in 2006 (as a kind of justification), but mostly as a platform to talk about 5 albums from that artist's history which I grew to obsess over and love as a result of hearing this release. I also simply spent a lot more time looking backwards, exploring older albums and especially individual artists. For one, 2006 didn’t have the extraordinary releases which 2005 had, although I'm not sure if that's true, or merely a function of my changing perspective. I decided early on that writing exclusively about albums that were released in 2006 wouldn’t do my year in music much justice.