Review: Nina Simone - The Amazing Nina Simone (1959)
Tracks: 1) Blue Prelude; 2) Children Go Where I Send You; 3) Tomorrow (We Will Meet Once More); 4) Stompin’ At The Savoy; 5) It Might As Well Be Spring; 6) You’ve Been Gone Too Long; 7) That’s Him Over There; 8) Chilly Winds Don’t Blow; 9) Theme From "Middle Of The Night"; 10) Can’t Get Out Of This Mood; 11) Willow Weep For Me; 12) Solitaire.
REVIEW
With an album title like that, you begin to realize just how deep the roots of cheapening and trivializing the word «amazing» go back in time. Granted, the practice was in its infancy back then (looking through my collection, I can only add The Amazing James Brown to this list of titles from the pre-British Invasion era, though I’m sure there must have been far more second- and third-rate artists to get slapped with the same moniker) — yet even so, it confirms the general rule that whenever you hear the word «amazing», you have to mentally prepare yourself for something decidedly mediocre.
Not that Nina Simone ain’t «amazing», of course — when she is at her best, few performers can match her triple punch of intensity, honesty, and professionalism, which is indeed a situation that we typically describe with superlative semantics. Unfortunately, precisely this second studio LP of hers, put out by Colpix just half a year after Little Girl Blue, hardly stands up to the original power of the word, before it began to apply to everything, from getting new shoelaces to the most recent album by Imagine Dragons. Apparently, Colpix (one of Columbia’s sub-labels) were so happy about getting their hands on Nina that they decided to market her as the greatest jazz vocalist of her generation or something, the one who might be able to pick up Billie Holiday’s crown (especially since Billie had just so conveniently died the same month that The Amazing Nina Simone was released). They even gave Nina creative control in the studio — not that they had much choice in the matter, since just one look at Nina’s face will tell you this gal was pathologically unable to take orders from anyone, not even back in 1959.
The problem is that Nina was relatively rarely interested in having full creative control in the studio; according to some sources, she usually treated her recording contracts as merely a means to make a living. The rule of thumb — which does know its exceptions, but is most certainly a real thing — is that if you want to hear Nina at her best, you have to search out her concert performances, where she exercised her power over the audience without any mediation. In the studio, the usual attitude was professionalism with, at best, a slight whiff of inspiration. Little Girl Blue was a bit different from the rest, since it had to serve as Simone’s visit card for the musical establishment; but on her subsequent studio LPs, the «amazing» Nina Simone had nothing left to prove to said establishment, and could easily allow herself not to stay on top of her game whenever she didn’t feel like it... which was quite often.
Take this sophomore effort, for instance. Unlike Little Girl Blue with its largely unpredictable selection of material, extended song durations (whenever necessary), piano improvisations, instrumental musings, and (every once in a while) the clear, tragic emergence of that repressed African-American spirit, The Amazing Nina Simone is largely restricted to relatively formulaic three-minute renditions of selections from the Songbook, seriously downplaying Nina’s skills as a pianist (in favor of fairly generic string arrangements) and featuring very, very few truly distinctive vocal passages that could leave you in awe of «Nina Simone’s enigma», chained to all the little subtleties of her intonation swings. It is not a bad record by any means, but much, if not most of it, is simply giving you Nina Simone as just another entry into the talent contest of contemporary vocal jazz ladies, from Sarah Vaughan to Blossom Dearie and the like — where the overall tendency is that if you like the voice, you’ll like the record, if you hate the voice, you’ll hate the record.
And it didn’t really have to be that way, not if you judge by the quality of the exceptionally outstanding opening number, the old standard ‘Blue Prelude’ — which already in 1959 you could hear performed by everybody from Bing Crosby to Peggy Lee, but I don’t really know of any version that could match the howl-at-the-moon intensity of Simone’s, not when she draws out each syllable of "let me sigh, let me cry, when I’m blue" in her deep, low, forworn voice. The nighttime jazz arrangement, all thundery bass and faraway echoey trumpets, complements the vocals perfectly, and the old lyrics really click with the vocal and instrumental mood: her "won’t be long ’fore my song will be through / ’cause I know I’m on my last go-round" will make you empathize so much that I wouldn’t advise listening to this song in headphones while walking past a local hobo with a thousand dollars in cash in your pocket.
There is hardly one number among the remaining eleven tunes, though, that would dare compete in intensity with this opening blast. It’s mainly a hodge-podge of rather random standards, most of which, as I already said, depend only on the amount of love for Nina’s voice — for instance, the Rodgers & Hammerstein number ‘It Might As Well Be Spring’, or Jerry Silverman’s ‘Tomorrow (We Will Meet Once More)’. The light orchestral arrangements are neither here nor there, and the vocal interpretation of the songs is predictably tender and melancholic, not really enough to begin thinking about these old chestnuts in any eye-opening brand new ways.
Some things are just weird, like the well-ridden warhorse of ‘Stompin’ At The Savoy’, which just begs the question why? Hearing such a song performed by Nina Simone, set to an upbeat tempo and decorated with a flashy, glitzy brass section, is comparable to the likes of Nick Drake trying to adapt himself to performing ‘Rock And Roll All Night’ with a full-scale rock band at his heels; at best, it’s a historical curiosity, at worst, a pointless embarrassment. Neither it nor the other fast-tempo songs on this album, e.g. ‘Can’t Get Out Of This Mood’, work well for Nina at all, and I get a feeling that she was probably just running a lottery at this point, pulling out random musical titles out of a hat to fill up the empty spaces. At least thank Heaven she did not pull out the likes of ‘Cheek To Cheek’ or something like that.
Even some of the songs that could have worked, such as ‘Willow Weep For Me’, end up spoiled by uninspired and overdone arrangements — here, the recording is so cluttered with brass, woodwinds, and vibes, that Nina’s piano ends up buried and shunned from sight, while the singing part feels at least a couple keys higher than would be appropriate for Nina to bring in a properly tragic flavor. In the end, it’s just another case of a piece of «nice work if you can get it», certainly not something I’m looking for if I want to astound my friends with a convincing slice of Nina’s personality.
In the end, there are only two tracks in addition to ‘Blue Prelude’ which I would find above-average-interesting. One is more for novelty reasons than anything else: ‘Chilly Winds Don’t Blow’, a song that takes a single line out of the traditional ‘Going Down The Road Feeling Bad’ and integrates it into a different tune (albeit with more or less the same basic melody), with a fast-paced, percussion-and-brass-heavy R&B arrangement that could be mistaken for a Little Richard romp for the first few bars. Judging by the credits, this was an experiment coming from Nina’s producer, Hecky Krasnow, and she adds quite a bit of «mooing power» to the overall energy level of the tune. Throw in a weirdly epic high-pitched string solo, echoed by pastoral recorders, and you get a bona fide theme for some epic Western here, How The West Was Won or something like that. It’s sort of a ridiculous experience, but at this point I’ll certainly take a ridiculous experience from Nina Simone than a flat-out boring one.
The other really nice inclusion is ‘Children Go Where I Send You’, arguably the only song here whose emphasis on the piano and overall «deceptive lightheadedness» could make it a worthy contender for Little Girl Blue. Nina does not do «gospel» too often, and whenever she does, you always sense that she means much more by it than just gospel, even if you can never prove it; at the very least, there is always a sense of irony and bitterness mixed with depth of feeling, and it is precisely what makes this little counting-out rhyme so attractive on this record. Her strained vocals somehow make it feel more like a covert protest song than a Christmas carol — an effect that, unfortunately, is unreachable for most of the standards she covers on the rest of the LP.
This underwhelming reaction, even if I am not implying that it should be counted as universal, is still a factor that one has to take into consideration when thinking about Simone’s notorious lack of chart success — something that could never be remedied by the word «amazing», either. While a part of it does have to do with Nina’s «anti-star» positioning and the discomfort experienced by too many people at the sight of a militant African-American female protester, an equally large part of it has to do with Nina simply not working enough for it — which is a statement of fact rather than an accusation, of course; but the fact remains that Nina never really expected her records to be bought, and invested about as much care into making them as any person with such lack of expectations could be supposed to invest. Which means, in turn, that you have to spend some time carefully scrutinizing this precious stone in order to properly discern its genius.