Review: Nina Simone - At Newport (1960)

Tracks: 1) Trouble In Mind; 2) Porgy; 3) Little Liza Jane; 4) You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To; 5) Flo Me La; 6) Nina’s Blues; 7) In The Evening By The Moonlight.

REVIEW

Except for two or three single A-sides, Nina made no studio recordings in 1960; however, the critical (if not commercial) success of At Town Hall opened Colpix’ eyes to Nina’s real strength, and for all of her remaining time on that label, she would have at least as many live albums as she would have studio ones — a tradition that, unfortunately, would later be throttled with her transition to Philips Records. Also, 1960 was the first year for Nina to be admitted to the Newport Jazz Festival — the exact same festival that yielded Muddy Waters’ epochal At Newport album, and ended in riots, scandals, and a temporary suspension of the Festival due to its becoming far more popular than it could allow itself to be (for more details, refer to my Muddy Waters reviews). Naturally, with most of the Festival having been professionally recorded, it made perfect sense to make use of the tapes — and it didn’t hurt, either, that by this time Nina had a whole new band under her command, and had assembled a completely new setlist that did not overlap at all with either At Town Hall or any of her first two studio albums.

The final product, on the whole, cannot properly compete with At Town Hall. The large open-air venue was much less suited to the technical limitations of recording equipment, especially when it came to artists like Nina, where subtlety and quiet were every bit as important as loudness and energy; there are times when her vocals barely come through the smoke­screen of the piano and the rhythm section, while the rhythm section muffles itself into a humming mess. There are also fewer songs, sacrificing some of Nina’s diversity for the sake of extended improvisation — this is, after all, a jazz festival, where you are implicitly obliged not to lose face before the likes of Dave Brubeck and Cannonball Adderley (both of whom performed on the same day with Nina — June 30, 1960). And in terms of unforgettable stand-alone tracks, At Newport, I think, really only has one, but we’ll get to that a little bit later.

From what I can tell with the aid of Web sources, the album reflects the original setlist and its sequencing quite faithfully, perhaps with one or two omissions due to the limitations of the LP format. The first three songs, taken together, form sort of a collective «legacy statement»: ‘Trouble In Mind’ is a classic Delta blues number, ‘Porgy’ (or ‘Blues For Porgy’) is an update on Gershwin’s opera by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields, and ‘Little Liza Jane’ is an old folk song that is some­times traced back to slavery-era African-American beginnings. (It’s possible that it might have come to Nina’s attention through the recent, and quite lively, Huey "Piano" Smith cover from 1956 — or Fats Domino’s from 1959). We thus get sort of a triple perspective on the «black spirit» — through mid-tempo blues, slow pensive soulful opera, and fast playful dancing; this is the part of the album which is the least «Nina-centered», even if she does try to waltz away into some distant and unpredictable piano direction in the middle of ‘Trouble In Mind’.

From a symbolic point of view, it’s all cool, but not necessarily «jaw-dropping». ‘Trouble In Mind’ is better suited for the likes of Big Bill Broonzy — it works best when it is sung in a nonchalant, careless voice; Nina’s is a little too agitated to properly use the contrast between the song’s «sunny» melody and bleak lyrics. ‘Porgy’ is emotional, but not emotional enough to justify yet another revival of Gershwin’s ubiquitous characters. ‘Little Liza Jane’ is fun, but the only striking thing about it is to hear (and see) such a somber and serious artist as Nina Simone give such a playful (but also quite somber and serious) rendition of such a lightweight trifle. (Perhaps it is supposed to show that Nina Simone has a sense of humor — she does not and never did — or perhaps it is supposed to remind us that slaves back in the 19th century had a sense of humor, which, even if they did, has since then been lost by the likes of Nina Simone, with all due respect and stuff).

Still, with the diverse atmospheres of all three tracks and Nina’s deeply involved delivery of them all, it is not likely that you shall get properly bored before we get to the real highlight — Nina’s interpretation of Cole Porter’s ‘You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To’, which really just takes the lyrics of the song and puts them in the context of something completely different, as far removed from the traditional light approach of Dinah Shore, Frank Sinatra, and / or Helen Merrill (to name just a few of the most popular versions) as possible. In fact, for the first three minutes of the song we barely get to under­stand what it is at all — a slow, moody, pensive shuffle, which Nina gradually develops into a Bach-like piano fugue, alternating between bass and treble runs and reaching full sonic awesomeness when Nina’s new guitarist, Al Schackman, joins in the fun with his own fugue that echoes Nina’s. By the time she finally begins to sing, a requiem-like mood has already congested upon the audience, and it is crystal clear that "you’d be so nice to come home to, you’d be so nice by the fire" can no longer refer to a living person — from a song of hopeful expectations it has been transformed into a chilling finale for a Gothic novel. Coming right after the giddiness of ‘Little Liza Jane’, this is like having a snowstorm in July — but an utterly mesmerizing snowstorm; the skill with which Nina and her band build up to a tempestuous crescendo is admirable for a mere four-piece unit.

The second side of the album never quite lives up to the gripping culmination at the end of the first one, but at least it does not break the mood. ‘Flo Me La’ and ‘Nina’s Blues’, both credited to Nina herself, are essentially instrumental numbers (the first one does have short moments of vocalize where Nina just chants the nonsensical title over and over) that continue the somber atmosphere. ‘Flo Me La’ subtly explores Nina’s «tribal» side, with her piano operating as a punchy percussive instrument along with Bobby Hamilton’s drums (in the middle of the song, Bobby takes an extended solo) — it’s basically just a seven minute-long vampy groove that invites you to get high and bob your head along with the rhythm, and it will be either dreadfully boring or irresistibly hypnotic, depending on your DNA arrangements for the day. I am generally more pleased with ‘Nina’s Blues’, which gives guitarist Al Schackman a second chance (after ‘You’d Be So Nice’) to show his talents — yet I could hardly insist that ‘Nina’s Blues’ would be enough to blow all the bluesmen and jazzmen on the Newport stage away. It’s just a decent six-minute «jazzy-blues» jam where everybody in the band gives their best in this genre, but, just like Ray Charles playing jazz, it’s not really the genre for Nina Simone.

Finally, lively excitement returns in the finale, with Nina really putting her foot on the gas for her rendition of ‘In The Evening By The Moonlight’, another old minstrel classic usually associated with James A. Bland and typically performed in a slow and solemn manner... which is also the way Nina starts it, before blowing out the brakes and launching into a fast, jubilant performance. It is telling how she injects a little change of her own into the lyrics of the song (which were already quite heavily expurgated from the antiquated 19th century lexicon over the previous fifty years of recording) — instead of "how the old folks they would enjoy it", she has "how my mother she would enjoy it", thus establishing a more direct and personal link to the song — which she then proceeds to «slay» with an all-out attack on the ivories; eventually, it’s the Bach-like fugue all over again, only played at thrice the speed of ‘You’d Be So Nice’. For all the overall inferiority of this album to Town Hall, it sure has a much more rousing finale.

The overall impression is that At Newport is much more of a social statement than At Town Hall; in the open air of Newport, the music is becoming increasingly «physical», as befits the traditional African-American way of doing things, as opposed to the more «lyrical» and sentimental mood of the enclosed urban concert space. We are still quite a long ways away from ‘Mississippi Goddam’, but the only performance on this entire album that cannot be directly tied in to the plight of the black man is ‘You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To’ — and that one, in its turn, is a bit of a mockery of the aristocratic suaveness of the white man, so it all ties in in the end. This is by no means the main reason why At Newport is not Nina at her finest — of all 20th century artists, she is truly the one who knows how to turn politics into art, and how to use art as politics — but I generally prefer her ways of turning happy musical numbers into chilling anthems of death and depression to her shaking the tambourine to childrens’ songs, and her jazzy fire-and-brimstone contemporary sermons to her relatively straightforward covers of old blues material. I’m pretty sure the performance worked wonders for all those young white kids on the green grass lawns of sunny Newport, though.

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