Review: Nina Simone - At Town Hall (1959)

Tracks: 1) Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Hair; 2) Exactly Like You; 3) The Other Woman; 4) Under The Lowest; 5) You Can Have Him; 6) Summertime (Instrumental); 7) Summertime (Vocal); 8) Cotton Eyed Joe; 9) Return Home; 10) Wild Is The Wind; 11) Fine And Mellow.

REVIEW

Now this is more like it. The first in a long string of Simone’s live albums, At Town Hall achieved everything that The Amazing Nina Simone failed to achieve, and more. Recorded in New York on September 12, 1959 (although it is said that several of the tracks were later re-recorded live in the studio), the album features Nina firmly planted at the piano, supported only by the small rhythm section of Jimmy Bond on bass and Tootie Heath on drums — the same guys who stuck behind her throughout Little Girl Blue. Thus, we are back to the most natural and comfortable setting for Nina, and in more ways than one, this, rather than her sophomore effort, is the true sequel and «expansion pack» for the spirit, form, and technique of Simone’s debut.

Even the proportions are just about right — there’s plenty of vocal standards, but interspersed with a little dark folk (‘Black Is The Color...’), a little urban blues (‘Fine And Mellow’), and a couple of jazz instrumentals to unleash the Demon of Piano Improvisation. Besides, in this setting she is the master of those vocal standards, bending them to her own rules and whims, rather than having to compromise with the laws of orchestration; under these conditions, even some of the cutesy old standards may occasionally come out as quite disturbing, darker than the darkest folk when she really puts her heart and mind to it. Some of the performances may be more memorable than others, but there isn’t a truly weak spot anywhere on the album; it all makes perfect sense — of rebellious appropriation, that is.

If Web sources can be trusted, the track that opens the album was not the first one in the actual setlist, but its positioning here immediately gives the record a sense of grandioseness — Nina’s rendition of ‘Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Hair’ turns it into a grim, suicidally romantic extravaganza, with more of those quasi-Rachmaninoff piano stylizations and dark — let’s actually say black, not necessarily in the racial sense of the word — vocals that strongly bring on the idea of death rather than just unfortunate separation of two lovers kept apart by fate, as the ballad’s lyrics suggest. Even more important is how she makes the song, which is supposed to be relatively «static» like most folk ballads, into a veritable tempest of emotions, contrasting the highly expressive, dynamic, romantic, powerhouse piano playing with a remarkably icy, cold, strictly controlled vocal — that intro feels like an onslaught of ocean waves, racing each other towards a sandy beach... and breaking up on the ironclad iceberg of the opening vocal line. No matter where that vocal goes, up or down, no matter how much it stretches, bends, or wobbles, the icy chill is always there. No humanity, just chill. If you still have not accustomed yourself to the idea that Nina Simone has agreed to carry all our suffering for us in exchange for a ticket to the Town Hall, you’d better start accustoming yourself now.

Then, just as you have finally found yourself a comfy position inside that coffin, wham, the mood shifts abruptly to... joyful? It would be natural, but boring to call the mood of ‘Exactly Like You’ joyful, because Nina Simone is unable to convey, let’s say, conventional joy even if she wanted to. She can be a caretaker, or she can be a prosecutor, but she cannot be Tony Bennett. On ‘Exactly Like You’, she’s being as possessive as always — even that insistent bassline from Jimmy sounds like the impatient ringing of a bell, with Nina’s piano soon joining in as an impatient knocking on the door, because she’s been waiting each day for someone exactly like you and she just can’t take it anymore. Listen to how her voice trembles from overworked impatience on the "now I know why my mama / she taught me to be true" bit, or to how she completely smashes that piano solo while humming along to each note like a jazz paragon of Glenn Gould’s. This is not so much a romantic performance as a psychotic one, even if, formally, she never allows herself to go hystrionic — the wildness and violence in the voice and in the piano playing is subtle, bottled up and implied rather than obvious. It is this combination of hinted-at-emotionality and total self-control that really gets me every time.

To better understand the depth that Nina brings to Jessie Mae Robinson’s ‘The Other Woman’, it would make sense to compare Nina’s version with the previously released original interpretation by Sarah Vaughan. Vaughan’s version, with its light orchestration and fluttery vocal vibratos, is almost cheerful, a sly and largely self-complacent rumination on the long-term ruinous effects of adultery. Simone turns the whole thing to mutual tragedy, a situation that has already emotionally destroyed the protagonist and will soon enough catch up with her "rival" as well. Had Billie Holiday ever sung the song, she would have shrouded it in her «feather-light ironic sadness» atmosphere; Simone’s sadness goes much deeper and hardly has any humor or irony to it, but never once feels theatrically exaggerated.

The same theme continues with ‘You Can Have Him’, that one Irving Berlin song that seems like it has been specifically written with Nina in mind — or, rather, with the idea that Nina would eventually come along and transform it from a gay, casual assertion of female independence in Doris Day’s or Ella Fitzgerald’s versions into a Lieder of epic proportions. Put this song on an orchestrated album like The Amazing Nina Simone and you probably miss the boat; but with her piano, Nina manages to amplify the emotionality of the tune to just the right — occasionally gargantuan — proportions. Watch out for the classic Rachmaninoff «swell» toward the end of the final verse ("then I’d go out and buy the papers..."); beyond the point that it’s technically impressive how she can play that constantly changing and evolving melody and sing at the same time, it is also one more fine example of putting all the emotional outburst baggage on the ivories, while remaining reserved and defiantly aloof on the vocals.

Most of these thoughts and impressions apply in equal proportions to the second side of the album, so I’ll be brief about it: this is where you first meet Nina’s interpretations of ‘Summertime’ (everything said about ‘You Can Have Him’ more or less works for this one, too) and ‘Wild Is The Wind’, which most people for the past half-century have probably associated with David Bowie’s cover version — yet Bowie’s version was in itself a loyal tribute to Simone, whereas Nina actually remade the song from the 1957 movie in her own image. The difference is, when Johnny Mathis sings "don’t you know you’re life itself", this is more or less what he means. When Nina sings the same lines, it is rather clear that you’re... that’s right, death, you guessed it. This is her own Liebestod, and this is why Bowie, a great admirer of this vibe no matter if it came from Simone or Brel, latched on to it so tightly. She sensed the eerie, otherworldly potential of the song and was the first to realize it.

Next to all these vocal highlights, one might dismiss the two lengthy instrumental pieces, ‘Under The Lowest’ and ‘Return Home’, as passable filler — but I beg to differ. She may not have been a virtuoso player along the lines of Art Tatum, or a mind-blowing rule-breaker like Thelonious Monk, but she did take her inspiration from both of those and more, and hearing Nina jam on the piano for five minutes is nearly always interesting, at the very least, in almost the same manner as it is interesting to hear a great psychedelic rock jam from Cream, for instance. ‘Under The Lowest’ is Nina’s exercise in the blues — think of it as a jazzified rendition of something like ‘Further On Up The Road’ — and it’s five minutes of a slow, but constant musical crescendo, during which she eventually turns the piano into a battleground, while the trusty rhythm section is churning those bass and drum generators for her. ‘Return Home’ is even better, with Jimmy and Tootie setting up a danceable, tempestuous rhumba rhythm while Nina is throwing out fast-and-furious piano ideas left and right and getting so wound up in the process that her humming eventually turns to scatting, and the «dance» aura of the performance eventually evolves into «primal religious ritual». There’s an almost childish delight in how she buzzes her way through the piece, slamming it close at the end with a satisfied exclamation of "that’s it!!" Who knows, maybe she even smiled at the end. It’s the only moment on the album I could associate with a proper smile, anyway.

I suppose the only thing that prevents At Town Hall from the status of the definitive live Nina Simone experience is the near-total lack of political content — 1959 was just a little too early for her to begin writing stuff like ‘Mississippi Goddam’ — but while her live shows did eventually become even more intense and even less predictable with her evolving abilities to convert social protest into musical expression, I’m not sure that there is anything in her later catalog that would properly surpass the depth and soulfulness of that expression as it is already conveyed in here. And, subtle as it is, there is actually a lot of social protest embedded in the words, sounds, and atmosphere of this performance — from the feminist overtones of ‘You Can Have Him’ and ‘The Other Woman’, to the probably non-incidental fact that the very first word sung (and drawn out) on the album is ‘black’, to, well, the general expression of near-complete artistic freedom for a black female musician, on levels quite unprecedented for the late 1950s. It is certainly a unique record for 1959, and echoes of its uniqueness are still easily felt today if you only give it the proper attention it deserves.

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