by Alan Light
When Lisa and her husband got to London, they tried to check into the hotel but found out that her mother had given specific instructions that she be put up in a different hotel, out in the country, and that she didn’t want Lisa to be in the theater while she was performing.
That afternoon, De Bruin received a panicked call from Clifton Henderson, saying that Nina didn’t want to go onstage because she was fighting with Lisa. De Bruin flew to London from Holland and went to Simone’s room. He asked her what was wrong, and she said that Lisa had insulted her, so she wouldn’t do the show.
“I went to the bar and had a glass of wine,” he said. “I went back to Nina, said, ‘Nina, I think the main problem for you is that Lisa and you are in the same concert building at the same time. Am I right?’ ‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘Okay, then it’s easy to solve—you come in the building after Lisa has left the building. Then you can play and still get paid for the concert.’ ”
De Bruin went to Lisa and told her that after her opening set she should take her name off of her dressing room door so that Nina wouldn’t see it, and then come with him to sit in the audience. Nina delivered a strong show and afterward proudly asked De Bruin if he had watched. Then she asked if Lisa had been there, and when he told her that she had been, she said, “Good.”
Another chance for some kind of redemption came when Lisa gave birth to her daughter, ReAnna, in 1999. “When my daughter was born, it was as if we were given a new lease on our relationship,” said Lisa. “She came three days after ReAnna was born and I dumped the baby in her arms, and she was looking at her, just examining her. And I knew that a lot of the mistakes and the pain that she had from our relationship…it was almost like, wow, here is another opportunity to get it right.”
That same year, rock’s postpunk “prince of darkness,” Nick Cave, hosted the Meltdown Festival in London and booked Simone as one of the artists. Her backstage rider reportedly asked for three things—champagne, sausages, and cocaine.
Although cocaine was not a drug anyone had previously associated with her, it reflected the new decadence Nina was reveling in. Cave recounted the scene when he was summoned backstage to meet Simone. “She was sitting in a wheelchair, huge, with gold kind of Cleopatra makeup on, and this horrific expression on her face. And sitting around the edge of this room were her flunkies, who were all kind of quaking in fear of this woman. And I asked her, ‘What do you want?’ And she said, ‘I want you to introduce me, I want you to get it right—I am Doctor Nina Simone.’ She was so terrifying and so belligerent; I’m like okay, fine.
“She sat down at the piano, took the gum she was chewing out of her mouth and stuck it onto the Steinway, and glared at the piano like it was her enemy. And just thundered into this song. As the songs progressed, they got more and more beautiful and she became inflated with the whole thing. It was just an absolutely chilling thing to see, and by the end of it, she’d been kind of transformed and redeemed in some way.”
—
In 2000, Simone moved one last time, to Carry-le-Rouet, about thirty kilometers from the house in Bouc-Bel-Air. She maintained a relatively steady tour schedule as the new century dawned. The first show that she played after her mother’s death would be her final appearance in Paris, a city that had seen some of her highest and lowest moments.
“The last concert in Paris, she was in very poor health,” said Nupie. “It was a very short concert, and I introduced her to the audience. I saw people crying from the moment she came onstage….There were many Japanese people—very young, sixteen or seventeen years old—who came for this concert. And they said, ‘It’s the most emotional thing we’ve ever seen,’ and they were crying. And it wasn’t a good concert, so it’s something magical, something strange.”
But other nights, right up to her final months, she demonstrated that she was still capable of riveting performances. Three weeks later, on June 28, she played her last concert at the venue that had meant so much to her early in her career, the site of her great initial triumph, Carnegie Hall. “That last time was absolutely fantastic,” said George Wein. “It was a memorable, beautiful time. Nina was now an icon, somebody that belonged to the ages. And everybody that had seen her over a period of forty years wanted to see her again. I don’t know who the manager was, but they asked for $80,000—it was a fortune, but it didn’t make any difference, we could have paid her twice that. We sold out every ticket and nobody complained about the prices or anything, so we didn’t lose money that day—which is not important, ’cause you weren’t doing it for the money, you were doing it to present Nina Simone.”
Simone came onstage fifteen minutes late, wearing a white dress and waving a feather duster back and forth. The crowd gave her a five-minute standing ovation. She sang two or three songs, walked around the stage waving the feathers and talking to the audience. After about fifty-five minutes, she said, “Good night—now go home.”
“She was happy that night because she knew that she wasn’t gonna sing very much,” said Wein. “Her voice was gone, so she just tried a few songs. And she just stood there and accepted that applause—and for five minutes they applauded and cheered, before she opened her mouth. I think she was happy at that moment. I think that she realized that she’d reached people in her life. And it was purely Memory Lane for the people in the audience, and they wanted to show her that she had reached them.
“Nobody complained. These people paid $100 a ticket, and nobody complained that the show was over at 9:15 and she sung four or five tunes. Everybody just laughed, they all knew about Nina’s craziness. She had been totally accepted for what she was. And they just walked out, and they were talking and laughing. It was Nina.”
—
Despite her enduring legacy as a civil rights icon, at the end of her life Simone had complicated feelings about her involvement in the movement. “She talked about Martin Luther King, that she marched with him, and that she knew his family and everything,” said Roger Nupie. “But apart from that, she never talked too much about the civil rights movement. Sometimes she said, ‘Well, it ruined my career’—even though she kept on singing all those songs up to the very last concert. So what she feels about classical music and how she didn’t become a classical pianist, and how it was still a trauma, it was the same thing with the civil rights movement. It was important, and at the same time she thought it might have ruined her career.”
Still, she took great pride in the visibility her iconic status had given her, and used it to speak out against racism for the benefit of music’s younger generation. One of those artists was of course Nina’s own daughter, who continued to pursue her singing career. Lisa Simone Kelly toured and recorded two albums with the acid jazz band Liquid Soul and shared in their Grammy nomination in 2000. She returned to Broadway in 2002 in the title role of the Disney musical Aida, and Nina came to see it soon after it opened.
Elton John called Lisa because he wanted Nina to appear at his annual rain forest benefit and she wasn’t taking his request seriously. Lisa called her mother and bargained with her, saying that if she did the benefit she could also come see Aida.
The cast was excited that Nina Simone was coming to watch them, and she held court backstage. During the performance, at one dramatic moment, Lisa could hear her mother’s voice talking back to the actors onstage.
“All of us just froze, we had to keep from laughing,” she said. “It must have been maybe ten or twelve seconds, and then we went back into the scene. The gentleman who played my father, that was really his only scene, so he was walking around all puffed up at the end of the night—‘Nina Simone commented on my scene!’ ”
They took pictures, with Lisa holding ReAnna—three generations of Simone women in front of a Broadway marquee. Nina was bald and wearing a wig with straightened hair; Lisa called her on it, saying, “Miss Revolutionary, where is your Afro?”
“She was in good spirits, abnormally good spirits,” said Lisa. “It was not lost upon me that
she was very peaceful. We didn’t have any arguments. I remember seeing her get into the limo in front of the Palace Theater, and having a really weird feeling as she got in and I said goodbye.” It was the last time she would see her mother.
Two months later, on June 29, 2002, Simone played her final concert in Sopot, Poland; if it was an unlikely location for such a historic moment, it only served to illustrate how far her music had spread around the world. She had a global tour planned, but those shows were canceled—not because of Nina’s antics, but because she was done. Though she still wasn’t aware that her condition was terminal, her cancer was too far advanced, her body no longer able to bear the strain of performing.
—
Attallah Shabazz continued to speak to Simone, perhaps the most tangible connection she still had to the civil rights movement. “When she would feel like a regular lady over there in France, feeling old and left alone, I would say, ‘People talk about you all the time.’ She said, ‘What do you mean they talk about me?’ I said to her, ‘You’re like an adjective—if someone is going through a rough time, they say, “Oh, I feel like singing a Nina Simone song,” or if you see a handsome guy somewhere you say, “Whoa, I need to conjure up a Nina Simone song.” ’ I’d say that and she started laughing.”
The last time Shabazz communicated with Simone was a few months before she died. “She kind of saw it coming, maybe two years prior, just sort of felt it. I don’t know how much of that was based on her health, or when you get to a certain age, you don’t know what your next mission is. She wasn’t always really good at taking care of herself. But I think if she were here, with those that loved her unconditionally, what she really yearned for was to be cared for, and that would have given value to the remainder of her time.”
Lisa was supposed to go visit Simone in May 2003. “She had cancer for a long time,” she said. “She was a strong woman, and there was no reason for me to think that she wasn’t gonna be here another ten years. I spoke to her and said, ‘Have you lost any weight?’ And she said, ‘Oh, yeah, I’ve lost a lot of weight.’ And that’s when my alarm bells went off. I knew my mother was dying.
“I got off the phone and I burst into tears, and I wrote a song called ‘Breakdown’ that talks about how I feel about her, and how much I love her, and how I never seemed to have time to really make time for us.”
Just days before her death, Nina was still actively protecting her work, planning a lawsuit against Skechers for using her performance in a TV commercial without her consent. She remained focused when it came to such matters, determined to always receive fair compensation, up until the very end.
At least one of Simone’s longtime issues reached an overdue resolution. Onstage in Philadelphia in 2001, Nina was still lamenting about her rejection, forty-five years earlier, by the Curtis Institute. Unbeknownst to her, Lisa went to Curtis to see if they would consider honoring her mother. They agreed to award Simone a diploma.
“My mother had had two or three strokes already,” said Lisa. “She was informed that the Curtis Institute was giving her a diploma, and she smiled. So at least when she passed away, that part of her heart had some closure. Poor Curtis Institute—they’re always going to be known as the place that rejected Nina Simone.”
On April 19, 2003, the Curtis Institute named Nina Simone an Honorary Doctor in Music and Humanities. Two days later, in Carry-le-Rouet, Simone passed away.
“She managed to die when she was seventy,” said De Bruin. “She’s been saying for a long time, ‘Oh, I’m gonna die when I’m seventy.’ And I laughed. I said, ‘Come on, Nina, when you’re sixty-nine, you’ll postpone it for another ten years.’ ‘No, Gerrit, I’ll die when I’m seventy’—and she did it. Easter Day, she was gone.”
On her last day, Simone had the chance to say goodbye to the musician she had worked with the closest and the longest. Al Schackman called Nina while she was resting in her French apartment’s garden; an aide brought the phone to Nina, holding it to her ear. Al recalled that their final conversation was short, but born of the deepest affection. “ ‘Nina, I love you.’ ‘I love you, too, forever.’ Those were her last words to me. And a few hours later she was gone.”
The funeral was held at the Lady of the Assumption Church, attended by five hundred mourners, including her longtime friend and sometime rival Miriam Makeba, who said, “She was a great artist, but she was also someone who fought for liberty.” Elton John sent a bouquet of yellow roses.
The service began with a recording of Jacques Brel’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” which Simone often performed onstage. Lisa Simone Kelly sang a gospel song, and several speakers praised her activism and her courage in speaking out. “Nina Simone was a part of history,” read a message from the South African government. “She fought for the liberation of black people. It is with much pain that we received the news of her death.”
Simone’s body was cremated later that day at a private service in Marseilles for immediate family. At her request, her ashes were scattered across several countries in her beloved Africa.
Shortly before her death, an interviewer asked Nina Simone, “Are you still as temperamental?”
“Not as temperamental,” she said, “if I get my way.”
Discography
“I made thirty-five albums, they bootlegged seventy,” said Nina Simone at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival. While she may have overstated her case, the fact remains that attempting a definitive Simone discography is tricky business. In addition to numerous releases on illegal or semilegal labels, even most of her authorized albums have slipped in and out of print at various times. Digital and streaming options have only made things more complicated.
With those caveats, this list encompasses the music Nina Simone released during her lifetime. Other collections, live albums, and DVDs have followed in more recent years; the best and most complete introduction to Simone’s work is To Be Free: The Nina Simone Story, a three-CD, one-DVD box set released by Sony Legacy in 2008, which serves as a comprehensive overview of her career.
1958 Little Girl Blue, Bethlehem Records
1959 Nina Simone and Her Friends, Bethlehem Records
1959 The Amazing Nina Simone, Colpix Records
1959 Nina Simone at Town Hall, Colpix Records
1960 Nina Simone at Newport, Colpix Records
1961 Forbidden Fruit, Colpix Records
1962 Nina at the Village Gate, Colpix Records
1962 Nina Simone Sings Ellington, Colpix Records
1963 Nina’s Choice, Colpix Records
1963 Nina Simone at Carnegie Hall, Colpix Records
1964 Folksy Nina, Colpix Records
1964 Nina Simone in Concert, Philips Records
1964 Broadway-Blues-Ballads, Philips Records
1965 I Put a Spell on You, Philips Records
1965 Pastel Blues, Philips Records
1966 Nina Simone with Strings, Colpix Records
1966 Let It All Out, Philips Records
1966 Wild Is the Wind, Philips Records
1967 High Priestess of Soul, Philips Records
1967 Nina Simone Sings the Blues, RCA
1967 Silk & Soul, RCA
1968 ’Nuff Said!, RCA
1969 Nina Simone and Piano!, RCA
1969 To Love Somebody, RCA
1969 A Very Rare Evening, PM Records
1970 Black Gold, RCA
1971 Here Comes the Sun, RCA
1971 Gifted & Black, Canyon Records
1972 Emergency Ward!, RCA
1972 Nina Simone Sings Billie Holiday, Stroud
1973 Live at Berkeley, Stroud
1973 Gospel According to Nina Simone, Stroud
1974 It Is Finished, RCA 1978 Baltimore, CTI Records
1980 The Rising Sun Collection, Enja
1982 Fodder on My Wings, Carrere
1985 Nina’s Back, VPI
1985 Live and Kickin’, VPI
1987 Let It Be Me, Verve
1987 Live at Ronnie Scott’
s, Hendring-Wadham
1993 A Single Woman, Elektra Records
Notes
INTRODUCTION
“Are you ready, black people?”: footage of Harlem Cultural Festival performance, New York, 1969, “Nina Simone—Harlem Festival—part 5,” YouTube video, 7:00, posted by Sergio Vásco, August 19, 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHXtB9ssnhw.
“As I look out”: Richard Morgan, “Black Woodstock,” Smithsonian.com, February 1, 2007, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/black-woodstock-146793268/?no-ist.
When she took the stage: “Nina Simone—Harlem Festival—part 5.”
“the only singer”: Nina Simone (NS), interview by Stephen Cleary, November 6, 1989.
“We had no leaders”: NS, interview by Stephen Cleary, May 30, 1990.
“Most of my love affairs”: NS, interview by Stephen Cleary, May 23, 1990.
“What I hear about Nina”: Gerrit De Bruin, interview by Liz Garbus, March 26, 2014.
Simone “was not at odds with the times”: Attallah Shabazz, interview by Liz Garbus, May 16, 2014.
“She is loved or feared”: Maya Angelou, “Nina Simone: High Priestess of Soul,” Redbook, November 1970, 134.
“I’ve only got four very famous songs”: NS, interview by Mary Anne Evans, 1984.
“In many ways”: Daphne Brooks, “Nina Simone’s Triple Play,” Callaloo 34, no. 1 (2011): 177.
“I heard her sing a song in French”: “100 Greatest Singers of All Time,” Rolling Stone, November 27, 2008.
“She was hip-hop”: David Was, “A Posthumous ‘Soul of Nina Simone,’ ” review of The Soul of Nina Simone (RCA, 2005, CD), Day to Day (radio program, NPR), November 10, 2005.
“I sing from intelligence”: NS, appearance on Tim Sebastian (host), Hard Talk (TV program, BBC), March 25, 1999.