Nina Simone's "It Is Finished": Review And Thoughts
I’ve been thinking of Nina Simone for a while. Maybe since the first time I heard her, exposed to ‘Sinnerman’ in high school or college and quickly convinced song could do no more than what it did. But for the present purpose, I’ve been thinking of her for the last year and a half or two, since I bought It Is Finished, the last album of her prime performing years. I’ve been thinking about her because I like the album, its music sticks with you. Because so little is written about it on the web or in her biographies, because it is pleasing and curious and a little challenging. And because in reading about her, studying her, I found more to think about with less to conclude. Nina has become relevant to me. I am wondering what that should mean.North Carolina And Philadelphia Goddam
Nina Simone grew up in a small town in North Carolina. She showed an early talent for piano, and soon started to take lessons. She was a black girl and a preacher’s daughter, and her piano teacher was a British woman, old and apparently kind and white. She would cross over to the other side of town for her lessons. One anecdote is that when she performed a concert at the age of eleven, she refused to play until her parents were allowed to remain in their seats in the front, rather than be moved to the back.
Her dream was to become a
classical pianist, but she failed to get into the classical piano school in
Philadelphia that she dreamed of attending, a disappointment that hurt her for
the rest of her life. She gave piano lessons and started performing on the side
in Atlantic City, taking on the name Nina Simone rather than her birth name,
Eunice Waymon. She performed jazz and blues, and liked it well enough. A career
was born.
According to AllMusic, she would
release more than 40 proper albums over the course of her life, running from
the age of 24 to 60. It is Finished
is 34th, coming out when she was 41. It marked the end of her pace
of releasing two albums a year – her next one would come out four years later.
I would say it sounds like nothing else in her discography, but I don’t know
that discography sufficiently to say. Based on the discs I know, It Is Finished sounds different in some
ways, but is still of a piece with her work. I’ll come back to that in a
moment.
Source: AllMusic
On the front cover, Nina sits in a
pink and red floral-patterned dress on what looks like a pile of squash husks.
Her yellow straw hat with a flower pinned to it rests to her right, maybe just
touching her dress. She looks at the photographer emptily, devoid of the energy
to do anything but look. Maybe it’s too hot, or maybe she’s sick of this. In
the left corner of the cover, the title is written in whiteout, along with her
name and the year.
The photo on the back cover
captures Nina in a more regal moment. She is standing with the straw hat on,
looking down at the photographer with just a hint of disdain, not quite
haughty. ‘I can do this without compromising,’ her look says, or maybe just,
‘here you go, now leave me alone.’ Her arms are crossed, her left hand resting
on her right shoulder. Behind her a thicket of trees, with a sandy path fading behind
her dress.
Source: Juno Records
It’s not just the photo that stands
out. There are no details about the songs – who wrote them, where they were
recorded. Her longtime guitarist Al Schackman is called Avram here, the only
time he is listed that way in his career, per AllMusic. The other listed
musicians are Nadi Qamar on a variety of African instruments like the Guinee
Kuna, and her brother Sam singing on ‘Let It Be Me’, the one song Nina does not
get sole producing credit on. All of this may not be all that remarkable, but
the information reveals little. The other Nina Simone albums I have feature
liner notes, songwriting credits, fuller information on the band, and generally
illuminate the listening experience. It
Is Finished’s cover obscures it. Incidentally, none of the other albums
feature two full-sized photos of Nina on them either.
My exploration of Nina Simone’s
work since discovering ‘Sinnerman’ has been gradual and irregular. In a pre
Youtube and Spotify world, I didn’t seek her out explicitly. I was a Sinnerman
fan, happy to find that and put it on for 10 minutes while I showered and
shaved, and that was that. I was aware that there was more out there, songs I
recognized like ‘I Put A Spell On You’ and ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,’ and
on planes I would listen to her greatest hits when the plane’s audio library
had them. But it wasn’t like with the other artists, where I bought CD after CD
to acquire all of their vital discography. I went step by step through Dylan
and the Beatles and Hendrix’s albums, I jumped straight to London Calling, and I more or less stopped at Horses. But I didn’t have Nina in that category, the ‘must-have’
file.
Why? It was probably just that, a
category error. It could have been my own – she was in ‘jazz’, a black woman
who I had not thought of as an auteur, as a creative force that I had to understand. It could have been
the broader rock/indie blog culture of the time, grafting the established rock
canon onto the internet, the same culture I was trying to absorb on my own, to
catch up after a childhood of Russian music and classical, of album-oriented
hard rock from my brother, of grunge and 90s punk and then emo from my friends.
I was forging my own path in a way, but it was easier to tread where others had
trodden before. Or I don’t know, maybe I just didn’t think about Nina enough.
Children Go Where I Send You and The Connoisseur Chase
In my late 20s I fully plunged
into LP buying. I had bought a few discs in college – I think, before it was a thing again – and had a record player at
my dad’s. But when we lived in Luxembourg, there was a built-in speaker system,
very old, which came with a broken record player. My wife bought me a new player
for my birthday. The apartment came with a row of records, including winners
like a Juliet Greco double album of greatest hits and two ‘Mysteries of the
Bulgarian Voice’ albums (we took those with us when we left, for Bulgaria of
all places). So I started collecting more aggressively.
I bought my first Nina LP when
visiting my dad in Massachusetts. At The
Village Gate. I remember that the record cost in the $20s, and the CD was
only five bucks. It’s a pleasant album from the first five years of her
recording career. It has a version of ‘House of the Rising Sun’ on the first
side, a version that is fairly unremarkable when set against the Animals’ one
we all know. The second side features ‘Children Go Where I send You,’ which
hints at some of the life Nina could bring to her music. This was a live
recording, though it’s unclear whether it’s one show or several combined. Of
final relevance to our subject, Al Schackman (listed under that name) is her
guitarist, and ‘Zungo’ is performed both here and on the extra tracks of It Is Finished.
Sometime after buying It Is Finished – which I also bought at
the shrunk down Newbury Comics in the Burlington Mall – I bought Emergency Ward in Spain. Nina recorded
Side 1 at Fort Dix, and the 18-minute song may have been the whole performance.
She melds George Harrison’s ‘My Sweet Lord’ with a poem, ‘Today is a Killer’.
The album cover is filled with news clippings about Vietnam. I don’t think it
is hyperbole to say this is ‘Sinnerman’ updated for Nina’s modern world, and
also it is the promise of a work like ‘Sinnerman’ delivered. Nina always
aspired to a classical career, and this song is symphonic in its progression,
backed by a church choir to add a gospel grounding. The other side is fine, two
songs, ‘Poppies’ which is a mid-tempo song that I like listening to and don’t
particularly remember, and ‘Isn’t It A
Pity’, another George Harrison song that she plays as a bluesy solo lament, a
showcase for the smoother side of her vocal range.
Just last month I bought Pastel Blues while visiting my brother
in Nashville. My dad was there too and had no real interest in the city, and
the weather was bad. Record shopping was as good as it got. Pastel Blues has ‘Sinnerman’ as its last track, but it sticks out
from the rest of the record. ‘Be My Husband’, written by Nina’s husband Andy
Stroud – I’ll come back to him shortly – is a tough, funky tune to lead the
record, and ‘Strange Fruit’ is the famous Billie Holiday tune, but the rest of
the record has not stuck with me yet. I’ll just add that Al Schackman played on
this, though not, apparently, on Emergency
Ward.
That’s a sporadic survey of Nina’s
production, and it’s anachronistic to my experience with It Is Finished. But I wanted to give some context to why it’s this record that has been on my mind.
There’s also the biographical
context for Nina. The album was mostly recorded in 1973, it seems – per Nadine
Cohodas, one of her biographers, a concert from that year provides all but
three tracks, and those come from a 1971 recording session – and released in
1974. Nina’s marriage to Stroud was largely broken by this point. He was her
manager but had abused her over the years, they fought throughout their
marriage (though they also swung to very affectionate terms at times). Nina was
beginning to have tax issues, in part related to the divorce with
Stroud and the fact that he wasn’t managing her money anymore. She had a
difficult relationship with her daughter Lisa, abusing her even as she brought
her around the world, on tour to Japan and Australia and in exile to Barbados –
where Nina had an affair with the Prime Minister – and Liberia. In one famous
anecdote, she started dancing in a Monrovia nightclub after having a few drinks
and ended up naked and the talk of the town.
Source: UNC Press
I’m saying all this because this
is a period where Nina’s life seems to come unstuck. She is frustrated that she
hasn’t had the acclaim she deserves – she attributes it to her passion for
protest music, something both Cohodas and the documentary, What Happened, Nina Simone? (which has an accompanying biography of
Nina with the same title) support to a degree. She is not happy being single,
and wants to be taken care of and loved. A few years later she’ll move to Switzerland
and then Paris, she will resort to playing dives and to living in tiny
apartments. The rest of her life will be uneasy, she will draw on support from
old friends only to lash out at them, she will see one of her first recordings
featured in a Chanel campaign and will write a memoir, her health will
vacillate, she will be diagnosed with multi-personality disorder and move from
city to country and back. She will experience luxury that most of us will not
know, but contentment will be fleeting, if I read her biography correctly.
The unhappy artist is hardly a
novelty. You could argue it’s an expectation, that anyone who achieves great
success for specializing in performance of some sort, who achieves fame, will
face great pressure from thereon. That a grounded, happy existence is the
exception. But that doesn’t make it less saddening to consider.
Horizontal Support and Certain Privileges
I want to be careful about
flattening her. The music will come in to give full depth and
roundness to Nina. But before I get there, I want to make a couple comparisons.
I saw Cat Power play a show in Greensboro, summer of 2006. The Greatest had come out that year, and it was a resurgence. She
performed most of her concerts either prior to this show or in the year or so
afterward with a Memphis backing band, a soul and R&B sound. She was a
notoriously shy performer, one of those who might break off a show at any
point. The tour with the band was supposed to have been her coming out, her
leaving that shakiness behind. Her press at the time was about how she was now
sober, and so more in her right mind to perform. She would have been 34 then,
the age I am as I write this. Perhaps she was realizing what did and didn’t
matter, or perhaps she just wanted to do a better job.
She played that night alone. The
Flying Anvil, now closed, had a bar to the left as you walked in and an open
performance room to the right. I remember it fitting maybe 125 people, though the article linked above said capacity was 850. Cat Power played alone
both for her act and so far as no one opened for her. There was a piano on
stage and she played guitar some too. The audience mostly sat on the floor, I
think I stood at the edge of the room, near the door. I remember a few things
about the performance. The impression that every song had the same
rhythm, whether on guitar or piano. On the guitar, pluck with thumb and then
strum with the rest of her hand, on the piano play a note with the left hand
and then a chord with the right. 1-2, 1-2. The trouble with the
monitor. Monitor trouble is the perennial plague of the struggling performer,
and even though Cat was playing alone and the crowd was hushed and respectful,
she couldn’t get the speaker to her satisfaction. She would stop songs and try
again, she walked off at one point to give up on either the piano or the guitar
and try the other (maybe she did that on each instrument), and eventually,
after a more or less full set but without a conclusion, she gave up,
stopped playing, asked for a light, lit a cigarette, and took questions for
about 10 minutes. Which ties to the last thing I remember, which was that the
audience knew her reputation and was devoted to her and to help her finish the
show. I can’t remember if she had ties to the region or not, but there was that
‘horizontal support’ that Leonard Cohen talks about on the Isle of Wight
concert recording.
More directly, when thinking about
Nina Simone I think about Bob Dylan. I think about his famous turn away from
folk music and protest music, about his 1965-66 music that burned the bridge to
his past. I think it’s the greatest music made in the modern West, and I’ve
always sided in my mind with Dylan in his devotion to his art, at his choice
not to be subservient to political aims, even if noble ones.
But then I think of Nina, of her
crossing to the white side of town for lessons and waiting until her parents
were sit in their appropriate seats of honor. Of how her music grew into being
political, of how ‘Mississippi Goddam’ knifed its protest. Nina was not an
observer, or even a supporter, she was a victim and participant in the
struggle. You can argue – I would
argue – that as a Jew Dylan had and has responsibility to take part in the
struggle for rights wherever it takes place, but in the context of 60s/70s
America, he could turn his back and even be right to do so. Nina did not have
that luxury. We call that white privilege now.
Slave To Your Mind, Slave To Your Race
It Is Finished begins with applause, though the first track is from
the studio per Cohodas. ‘The Pusher’ is a Steppenwolf song from their first
album. It is on the Easy Rider soundtrack,
though I don’t remember it from the movie and Nina’s version is the first I
heard it. She growls through the initial verses, pounds the piano through the
up and down riff. It’s a funky song, and it sounds like it could be her own.
Schackman’s guitar jangles on the fills and the bass walks with a languid tone
behind her voice. The language is anti-hard drugs, contrasting the drudge of
heroin with the sweet dreams of the dealer’s pot. It sounds like the 60s, but
the song itself could drop today. It’s all one verse repeating through and then
a breakdown at the end where Nina lets looser.
From there the album goes to a
classic Nina repeating piano figure. One-handed and descending, backed only by
a hi-hat, it anchors the tune and opens up to the band before Nina sings. The AllMusic
credit calls this a traditional, and it sounds like a church confessional,
addressed to the Lord and with Nina’s less guarded voice. The piano sparkles in
our ears, and it’s a dancing tune really. After Schackman takes a guitar lead
in the break, Nina incites the crowd and picks up the momentum. What I love
about ‘Sinnerman’ is its elemental drive, which Nina’s piano playing and
singing amplify and layer, so that it builds from verse to verse to infinity.
‘Com’ By H’Yere – Good Lord’ doesn’t quite go that high, but is in this line.
‘Funkier Than A Mosquito’s
Tweeter’ is a great title, and Nina plays and sings to its level. The
instrumentation sounds vaguely African – the hand drums galloping alongside,
the scoop of steel drums or xylophone-type instruments – and we’re back in the
studio for this. This is a fun song, an uptempo analogue to The Pusher. Ike
&Tina Turner sang it first, but their version feels overproduced and lacks
the drive of Nina’s.
I’m falling into the trap of
narrating the album instead of explaining it, though. And that might leave me
overselling it, too. I love this album, but it’s just a good album. Those three
songs capture Nina being able to hit high and low, the holy and the profane.
The rest of the album just has her on point. She plays ‘Mr. Bojangles’ and ‘I Want
A Little Sugar In My Bowl’ and plays with the crowd, teases the songs. It’s not
an epiphany, but it’s just good. Her brother Sam sings with her on the Everly
Brothers’ song ‘Let It Be Me’, and that song sticks less than all the others,
but it’s still well executed as a torch ballad.
I will allow myself to dwell on
the other two songs on the album, along with the bonus tracks on Spotify.
‘Dambala’ and ‘Obeah Woman’ both appear to be songs from Exuma, a Bahamian
musician. The first is a warning to slavers, and my god, I would fear a warning
from no one more than Nina. Thumb pianos pluck and a sitar twangs behind her,
and the slavers ‘will know, what it’s like to be a slave. Slave to your mind,
slave to your race.’ ‘Obeah Woman’ is groovier, peppier, Nina at her brightest
as she talks with the crowd (including Exuma himself), laughs with them or at
them, or preaches, or raps. She stays off the piano on this song, working the
crowd into a clapping backbeat and hollers, and she gets into the verse. Obeah
is a Caribbean/African religion in the area of Voodoo or Santeria, and one can
imagine Nina as its high priestess, as the leader we will follow to the
sunlight or directly of a cliff.
The three bonus tracks – ‘Nina’,
‘Zungo’, and ‘Thandewye’ – all extend this African/Caribbean theme. The first
is a four-minute chant, either wordless or in another language. The version of
Zungo races, a cry from the open fields, ushered by minor key sitar playing and
jingling percussion. The last returns to classic instrumentation save for a
little of the thumb piano or similar in the mix. This is halfway between
‘Dambala’ and ‘Com’ By H’Yere,’ a spiritual but perhaps back to the Christian
Lord, with the uncertainty that her Afro Caribbean work is wrapped in.
What Was Left On The Table, What Was Finished Or Unfinished
This is a good record, as I’ve
said, and I love listening to it. Not much is written about it. If that was all
there was, I could write a review and be done with it.
But those last songs I mentioned
seem to me a path unexplored, a world untaken. This record came out in 1974,
two years before Dylan’s Desire, with
its cartoonish and sort of offensive depiction of Africa (‘Mozambique’) and its
mild flourishes of Latin American inspiration (‘Durango’). It’s 12 years before
Paul Simon’s Graceland, it’s eight
years before Orchestra Baobab’s Pirate’s
Choice and it’s contemporaneous with Fela Kuti’s rise. Nina once went as
the High Priestess of Soul, but this record shows how she could have been the
High Priestess of the World. She in a way no one else from the US could.
That’s my projection of a desire
though, and categorically unimportant. I only say it to say just as Nina’s life
was coming unstuck, there were so many opportunities in front of her. With her
voice, her interests, her piano playing and her skill of interpretation, she
could do anything. Except for mental health challenges and people hurting her
and taking advantage of her, except that she had a child and obligations,
except for the money issues, and maybe most of all except she had been
performing all her life and maybe she was tired of it all.
The point isn’t what she should
have or could have done, specifically. The point is that she was never granted
her second act, never able to reinvent herself and find a renewal. Or she never
took that second act. What is less American than that denial, that failure? I
can’t point a finger and say who was responsible, whether the people in her
life, the world, US society, or Nina herself. But after watching the
documentary and then reading biographies, I cannot escape that sense of
deprivation. Dylan was famous for reinventing himself again and again, and one
also gets the sense that he never really lost who he was. David Bowie, who met
Nina around the time of this album and struck up a friendship with her and even
counseled her, was famous for this reinvention. That sense is why I root for Cat
Power, because when you read the stories about her there’s a persistence, a
fall and then rise arc around each new album, and a hint of defensiveness, as
if she knows how easy it is to fall again. And I just want her to find that
calm, that satisfaction. Maybe it comes back to my mother, who died from 53 and
never got to enjoy her reinvention.
It Is Finished is from the new testament, John 19:30, Jesus giving
up the ghost. Nina echoes it at the end of ‘Obeah Woman’, ‘Let’s finish it,’
she says, ending the record. Sometime in college, before my mother died I
think, there was a viral campaign on campus. People hung signs and fliers from
dorm room windows and in hallways throughout, asking ‘Is It Finished?’ I went
to Duke, in the south even if inflected with the northeast, and had not met
evangelical Christianity before college. I didn’t know what this was. But at a
point a few days later, the signs were replaced with ‘It Is Finished,’ and
everybody in the student group behind this, hundreds of students, wore orange
t-shirts on which the phrase was written. A friend of mine from my freshman
dorm was in this group. He and I shared a love for music, for the
punk/pop-punk/emo world, and I was surprised to see him in this group. I didn’t
know anything, I didn’t ask, but the overall display annoyed me. And I remember
teasing him on AOL instant messenger, sending him a message that said,
‘Remember, nothing is ever really finished.’
But like most college kids, I was
wrong. The point of all this is that things do finish. Time runs out. Maybe
that’s what you learn at 34, or at 41, or maybe you never learn it until you’re
on your deathbed and time has finally come. When I think about Nina, and I have
been for a while, that’s what I end up thinking about. This record, and how
things did or didn’t finish for her.
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