JAZZ
A Portrait of Nina Simone in Eleven Songs by Ale Díaz-Pizarro
T
he first time I listened, truly listened, to “I Put a Spell On You” (I Put A Spell on You, Nina Simone was also the second… and 1965) the third… and the fourth… and possibly “I Put a Spell On You” is a Nina Simone mainstay the twentieth. I just couldn’t stop. With every in popular culture, and for good reason. One track that played, it was as if a veil lifted, of her best-known tracks, it would be Simone’s revealing yet another facet, another feeling. I intonation that most later covers emulated, as was entranced. It is small wonder, considering opposed to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s deliberately Simone’s stature: a child prodigy, a classically- macabre original rendition (which, make trained pianist drawing no mistake, is just as as much from the fabulous). Later versions blues as from Bach, a by Creedence Clearwater gifted composer and Revival, Bryan Ferry, and arranger, a committed even the Disney movie civil rights activist, and Hocus Pocus cemented a supremely talented Simone’s status as a singer—which, even as household name across I write it, seems at least generations. Beyond a gross understatement. just its recognition, Rather than try to however, this track encapsulate the breadth showcases Simone’s dual and brilliance of Nina gifts for arranging and Simone in yet another interpreting: where the profile, this list is original veers toward the intended as a sort of theatrically demented topographical map of the (Hawkins famously many sides to her artistry. rose out of a coffin and The selected songs are wore a cape in one live not necessarily the bestperformance), Simone known nor the most elegantly channels its Nina Simone, 1965. Photo by Ron Kroon. critically-acclaimed ones Courtesy of the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands. same blues tropes of (although some are!), witchcraft and violent but rather samples of love in a more subdued— Simone’s reach and repertoire. No list like this but no less powerful—approach, trading the can ever aim to be comprehensive—but I will chugging saxophone of the original for a string be more than satisfied if it compels you to dive section. (The saxophone, however, is by no into her extraordinary work as if for the first means gone—the instrument’s protagonism time. in the bridge cannot be taken as anything other than an homage to Hawkins.) This is
OnAir · February 2024 21
