Nina Simone – You’ve Got to Learn (Verve, 2023)

Nina Simone was a pivotal and exceeding figures during the decades she lived in. A revolutionary activist, a classically trained pianist, a soul voice, a jazz arranger, sometimes she also touched the realms of ethnic music, a label that during those times didn’t existed yet. The recording we’re talking about in this brief note is a live recording of one of her concerts at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1966 and donated by promoter George Wein to the US Library of Congress, finally released by the label Verve.

The album is 32 minutes long, and features Miss Nina Simone at piano and voice, plus guitarist Rudy Stevenson, bassist Lisle Atkinson, and drummer Bobby Hamilton. The audio quality is good, except for the first seconds where Simone’s voice is not correctly amplified, but it’s one of those fails you can accept since the quality of music involved in the record. The opening track is Charles Aznavour’s You’ve Got To Learn, curiously also translated in Italian and a success in my country during the 1950s sung by Aznavour himself as “Devi Sapere”.

A nice, dramatic crescendo, the song is followed by a dramatic and almost perfect rendition of the classic I Loves You Porgy, from the classical Porgy and Bess. Recorded also by trumpeter Miles Davis, by the Modern Jazz Quartet and by the couple of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, Simone’s version is one of the most intimate and touching. Blues for Mama is the first recording of the song, co-written with singer (and drummer Max Roach’s wife) Abbey Lincoln, in chronological order. 

While Be My Husband, played only with voice and drums, is the most faithful to the studio recording, Mississippi Goddam is less amphetaminic and more swinging than the correspondent version from the classic album Nina Simone in Concert issued only two years before this rendition. The song is inspired by a sadly famous murder of four African-american little girls at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963.

A completely swinging version of the song, this new edition enlisted in this live album is nonetheless rich of pathos and drama. The closing of the album is the beautiful Music For Lovers by Bart Howard, another first recording as Blues for Mama previously in this record, embellished by Bach’s quotes interspersed during the execution here and there.

This is one of the most intriguing new reissues this year, along with the Coltrane&Dolphy album we’ll review later on, when able to listen to that album in its entirety – I broke my foot last month and I have to buy myself a copy of it yet. An intimate set, with Simone magnetic personalty able to bring the audience together and to give life to her uncompromising idea of music and art. Possibly an appetizer for those of you who are less familiar with ‘classical’ jazz vocals, even if Nina Simone is far from clichés of any of the many musical genres she touched thanks to her personality.