Review: Nina Simone - Little Girl Blue (1959)

Tracks: 1) Mood Indigo; 2) Don’t Smoke In Bed; 3) He Needs Me; 4) Little Girl Blue; 5) Love Me Or Leave Me; 6) My Baby Just Cares For Me; 7) Good Bait; 8) Plain Gold Ring; 9) You’ll Never Walk Alone; 10) I Loves You Porgy; 11) Central Park Blues; 12*) He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands; 13*) For All We Know; 14*) African Mailman.

REVIEW

It is certainly an ominous coincidence that Nina Simone’s first album was released in the very same year that Billie Holiday left us all for that great opium den they sometimes call Heaven. Strictly speaking, we cannot insist that her musical genius chose to relocate itself inside Ms. Eunice Waymon, given that Billie made her last recordings in March 1959, by which time Little Girl Blue had already been released (and before that, Nina had spent at least five years establishing her playing and singing style across Atlantic City and New York). Yet it would be hard to think of anybody else but Nina if we were to play the game of «passing the torch» — substantial and symbolic similarities between the two run much deeper than their covers of ‘Strange Fruit’ (which is usually the most obvious parallel mentioned in any comparisons between the two).

Some might find these parallels absurd, rightfully indicating that Billie was, first and foremost, an entertainer — in spite of all the intimacy and personal emotions which she so naturally injected into most of her performances, she had no qualms about her «diva» status and clearly enjoyed her commercial success — whereas Simone was a mentor, an uncompromising artist iron-bent on giving the people what (she thought) they need rather than what they want. But one must not forget that the very role of such a mentor in popular music did not even exist until the late Fifties, when people like Nina, profiting from the slowly accumulating changes in social mores, began sculpting it out. The important thing about Billie Holiday is not that she was a warrior — she most certainly wasn’t — but that she managed to sneak in a shade of something genuine and serious under the generic glitz of the entertainment world, in more or less the only way in which it was at all possible in the pre-WWII era. Nina Simone, following in her footsteps, was allowed by her own era to take it further and try to outright replace the generic glitz of the entertainment world with something genuine and serious. Like most people with similar ambitions, she failed — as far as popularity and commercial success are concerned — but hey, she did give us all a nice enough alternative to Diana Ross, didn’t she?

In some ways, it was quite a good thing that she was rejected from the Curtis Institute of Music in 1951 after applying there to study as a classical pianist. Had she been accepted, she might have spent all her life as a solid second-rate musician, known at best to a small handful of classical fans, with barely a chance to become notorious on the level of, say, a Martha Argerich (to name just one mega-famous female classical pianist from her generation) — Simone’s classical «inserts» into her performances, at least to my ears, do not expose her talent as a tremendous loss to the classical world. She herself has always insisted that her application was rejected because of you-know-what, a claim which many people understandably take for granted but which should probably be taken with a grain of salt, given that the Curtis Institute was known for at least occasionally accepting black students before Nina, and that she was apparently one of a whoppin’ 75 applications for 3 positions in 1951. But in any case, think about it this way: first, how many people today fondly remember Nina Simone and still listen to her records? and how many people today fondly remember the recently deceased Blanche Burton-Lyles, the first African-American woman pianist to graduate from Curtis (in 1954; she was already studying there at the time of Nina’s application) and to actually play at Carnegie Hall? For better or worse, Simone got the better deal of the two.

Second, I suppose what is more important is not whether or not Eunice Waymon was rejected because of racism, but the fact that she believed it for her entire life — there may or there may not have been an injustice, but it was a serious scar that probably kept on aching for ever and ever, and without that scar there would have been no ‘Strange Fruit’, no ‘Mississippi Goddam’, and not even a Little Girl Blue, an album on which that scar manifests itself in much more subtle ways, never really jumping out at first listen, but it is there all right if you just keep your ear down to the ground. Nina Simone was tough, stubborn, uncompromising, emotionally unstable and maniacally depressed for most of her earthly existence (it is quite possible, by the way, that it was precisely all those qualities, rather than her skin color, that led to the Curtis rejection: after all, regular classical training, like sports, presumes the importance of self-discipline and obedience above all else), and all these qualities could never have made her as much of a major figure in the classical world as they served her in her pop music career (well, we know that bipolar disorder worked wonders for Schumann, but in the late 20th century it is really more of a hassle than an advantage).

Anyway, let’s finally get to business. Little Girl Blue, Nina Simone’s first and last album for the small jazz indie label of Bethlehem Records, was, much like the Beatles’ Please Please Me, recorded over a one-day session in New York at the end of 1957, and for much the same reason: Simone had already glossed most of those songs over three years of continuous live gigs in the various bars & grills of New England. Her partners for the recording were Jimmy Bond on double bass and Albert "Tootie" Heath on drums, both of them professional jazzmen from Philadelphia who had already developed plenty of synergy with Nina — yet their presence here is exclusively as loyal henchmen; despite the standard jazz trio format, neither of the two ever takes a solo turn, not even on the instrumental numbers. (Cue the question of who is actually the bigger «diva», Billie or Nina? there are very few Billie Holiday recordings in existence on which none of the musicians surrounding her are allowed to shine in their own ways).

The actual setlist does not yet reflect Nina’s future expansive interest in the folk, R&B, or rock scenes — browsing through the titles as they are reveals nothing out of the ordinary for a typical vocal jazz album by somebody like Sarah Vaughan or Carmen McRae (Nina’s then-current competitor on Bethlehem Records). We have ourselves some Gershwin (‘I Loves You, Porgy’ was Nina’s second and only mildly «commercial» single, cracking the US top 20), some Rodgers and Hart (title track), some Rodgers and Hammerstein (‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’), some Duke (‘Mood Indigo’), some Peggy Lee (‘Don’t Smoke In Bed’), and two whole numbers from the Donaldson-Kahn soundtrack for 1928’s Whoopee! musical — compared to Simone’s future recordings, the album is almost remarkably devoid of anything contemporary; the lone exceptions are ‘Plain Gold Ring’, an Earl Burroughs composition that had originally appeared in a hauntingly stripped down, percussion-driven version by Kitty White in 1956 (the original is still well worth getting to know), and Nina’s own stab at composing, the stately mid-tempo instrumental ‘Central Park Blues’.

From listening to these songs, though, it is rarely clear if Simone actually had a fondness for them as they were, or if she merely treated them as inescapable vehicles to develop her own style and force-feed you her own personality. Already ‘Mood Indigo’, opening the record, takes more cues from the Thelonious Monk cover of the song than any of Ellington’s numerous versions, and although Nina’s piano playing is nowhere near as unpredictable and shocking as Monk’s (well, whose is?), it is still bold, dashing, and manages to already reflect her classical background in the very first minute. And once that voice comes in... well, all it takes is the opening "you ain’t never been blue, till you’ve had that mood indigo" to realize that you are not in the presence of an eager-to-please entertainer — this is the stern, unobjectionable voice of your teacher which tells you, in so many words, that it has been scientifically verified that you have, in fact, never been blue until you have been exposed to mood indigo, and that you will be most severely punished if you ever try to assert that mood indigo may not be an absolutely necessary condition to being blue.

This iron grip will forever remain the trademark sign of Nina’s vocals — even when she makes efforts to sound vulnerable and miserable, she will never allow herself to remain at the listener’s mercy. Yet the iron grip of the vocals does form a fascinating contrast with the anything-goes approach of her piano playing, which, on ‘Mood Indigo’, seems to go from pseudo-Monk to a bit of Gershwin and then, at the end, get closer to the bombastic boogie of late-Fifties Ray Charles, all played with such energy and confidence that you never, not for one second, get to doubt about whether this or that particular phrase actually belongs in this particular spot. If the High Priestess of Soul says it belongs, then it belongs. End of story. Next position, please.

For all the intimidating qualities of Nina’s voice, I hold the opinion that Little Girl Blue is still first and foremost the work of an inventive and imaginative pianist — we do know, after all, that she began to sing almost by accident (when the owner of the piano bar at which she worked demanded that she also sing for her supper), and there are as many as three fully instrumental numbers on the record as well; most importantly, I am not sure that some of her vocal performances on this record really add all that much to the original versions — for instance, ‘Don’t Smoke In Bed’ largely follows the same vocal and emotional patterns that had already been laid down in Peggy Lee’s seminal version from 1948, and the song in general is a more appropriate vehicle for Peggy’s smoky-melancholy femme-fatale style. Likewise, I cannot insist that Nina does a better vocal turn on ‘Plain Gold Ring’ than Kitty White — she does free the tune from excessive melodrama, but somehow Kitty’s exaggerated, over-the-top lilt of the line "I can’t stop these teardrops of mine" still comes across as more natural than Nina’s dark-ice delivery of the same line, as she is incapable of or, at least, unwilling to lower the emotional barriers in order to fully connect to the song’s desperate lyrics. Still, far be it from me to claim that such an interpretation has no right to exist — it is quite possible that in some emotional contexts, it will come across as the stronger-hitting one.

In any case, on the whole it would be futile to deny that the primary focus of Little Girl Blue is on the piano. ‘Love Me Or Leave Me’, in particular, is famous for its insertion of a lengthy solo based on Bach’s Inventions, probably the first such experiment within the context of a vocal standard — and one that works bloody well, considering how naturally the fugue merges with the general groove. ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’ (which would unexpectedly become a belated hit for Simone in 1987 in the UK after being used in a Chanel No. 5 commercial — capitalism always gets the last laugh, doesn’t it?) sort of continues with the Monk-inspired piano logic of ‘Mood Indigo’, starting out with a deceptively simple kiddie music hall riff and then, in the instrumental break, heading off to improvisational territory (more Bud Powell than Monk, probably, but still, the transition between the opening riff and the scale travels in the instrumental is quite impressive). And then there is her purely instrumental reading of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, which she luxuriously rearranges as a dreamy Rachmaninoff-style ballad, giving the left hand almost free rein on the bass chords in what is probably the closest she ever comes to a downright virtuoso performance.

The other two instrumentals are somewhat more restrained. Count Basie’s ‘Good Bait’, utterly unrecognizable in this slow, funky-bluesy version, actually comes across as a composition about, well, baiting — the first minute and a half is Nina setting the bait to the hook, then, when Bond and Heath come in with the support, begins the careful guiding of the fishing line across the water, then, at around 3:30, it bites, and after a brief, but tense struggle the poor fishie is triumphantly hauled to shore. Thus we actually get a five-and-a-half-minute long dynamic dramatization, and one can only hope that the whole "bait" thing is supposed to be symbolic, rather than some actual Proustian elevation of a mundane twist of events to transcendental status.

As for Nina’s own ‘Central Park Blues’, well, as somebody who has actually been blessed with enjoying many a happy stroll through Central Park on a nice hot summer day, I can certainly confirm that this particular instrumental... has nothing to do with happily strolling through Central Park whatsoever. Actually, given how the mood of the tune is squarely inverted from carefree-happy to wary-paranoid around the 1:40 mark, I would not be surprised to learn that this is Nina’s musical preview of something like Stevie Wonder’s ‘Living In The City’ — one minute, you’re happily enjoying the green lushness of your surroundings, the next one, you’re arrested by the nearby cop for suspicious loitering. Am I reading too much into this? Well, go ahead and stop me if you can.

Rounding it all up, it is interesting that Little Girl Blue generally remains one of the highest rated and most beloved records in Nina’s catalog — despite the fact that, this being her very first album, it is so heavily dependent on old standards and has almost no traces of her sociopolitical spirit. Personally, I have always thought that this was precisely the way it was supposed to be: every musician has a right to express his or her social and political stance in their output, but that right has to be earned — anybody who loves their politics more than they love their music is a political pundit first, musician second (here’s looking at you Riot grrrl, ho hum). With an album like Little Girl Blue under her belt, who could ever deny the immense musical talent and general artistic appeal of Nina Simone? These eleven tracks amply demonstrate that the lady had nothing to prove to anybody once she got involved with the Civil Rights movement — here is a firmly established, wilful, original musical personality, not afraid of going against the grain from within a relatively formulaic genre and, consequently, open for going against the grain in just about any other sphere of artistic and social existence.

It could, perhaps, be argued that on her subsequent albums she would gradually lean toward more and more theatricality, neglecting actual musical development in favor of more and more social provocation — even that something like ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’ is musically superior to the likes of ‘Mississippi Goddam’; would that, however, mean that everybody would be better off if she’d just continued to mine the territory of ‘My Baby’ for the rest of her life? Probably not. That said, I cannot deny that I, too, have a very special place in my heart reserved exclusively for Nina’s piano work (and some, not all, of Nina’s singing) on Little Girl Blue, and that I do not think she ever made an album richer and more inventive than this little collection with her faithful trio. It is probably wiser to compare it not to Please Please Me, but to Elvis’ Sun Sessions — another example of an early, fresh, inspired minimalistic triumph that was followed by others, but whose original spirit has never been properly replicated or «officially surpassed».

Technical note: although the album was very recently remastered and reissued on CD and vinyl, it makes sense to look for an earlier version which appends three bonus tracks from the same session — the gospel number ‘He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands’, the pop song ‘For All We Know’, and, most importantly, another of Nina’s early originals, the lively and ever so slightly «tribal-sounding» instrumental ‘African Mailman’, with Heath going wilder than usual on percussion and Nina going much wilder than usual on the ivories in her first straightforward ode to African roots. All three of these were originally released on Bethlehem Records in late 1959 together with a selection of outtakes by Carmen McRae and Chris Connor as Nina Simone And Her Friends, already after Nina and all her «friends» had left the label, presumably in a desperate last attempt to make an extra bit of money from their former stars (the label itself would be sold to King Records three years later — serves them right, as they essentially cheated Simone out of royalties for Little Girl Blue).