Nina Simone In Concert

First, take one painfully acquired knowledge and sensitized awareness of cruelty, injustice, and frustration. Add a sense of humor — slightly bitter — and mix carefully with a consuming need to experience and express love. Then, when vigorously stirred with a completely original and articulate talent, you’re going to get one hell of an explosion. Her name is Nina Simone.

A fierce integrity is reflected in the material Nina Simone chooses to sing and play, and hers is the constant search for songs that can express her deeply felt ideas and emotions. And her performances are characterized by a hypersensitive awareness of her audience. A minutely perceptible change in the mood “out there,” the slightest shift in attention, and Nina responds. She meets the challenge—sometimes with resentful defiance, sometimes with rage, sometimes with affectionate compliance.

Nina Simone’s program on this record, as varied as it is, is only a small indication of the breadth of her musical and dramatic range. It is hardly the whole story. But it will have to do until you see her ten or twenty or a hundred times, or until you listen to all the records that she has made thus far and is going to make in the future.

Source:The Official Home of Nina Simone