Gianni Del Savio – Nina. La storia musicale e politica di Nina Simone (Shake, 2023)

Eunice Waymon, born in 1933, seemed devoted to a career as a classical pianist since she was a child. She was not the first ever, as Gianni Del Savio underlines in “Nina. La storia musicale e politica di Nina Simone” (Shake Ed. Underground, 2023), but her future seemed to be bright. The young woman's career came to a halt due to the color of her skin and the fact that she was a woman, but the girl didn’t lose heart and so, after she moved to New York, she began a career as a soul singer and pianist.

Soul is a controversial music, made of sacred melodies and lyrics praising sex as well as the daily life of African Americans, and not everyone saw it favorably. To avoid running into problems with her family, the girl decided to change her name: she became Nina (a diminutive given to her by a Hispanic friend) Simone (from Simone Signoret, a French actress much loved overseas in the 1950s and 1960s). The rest is history: the success, that music made of jazz, quotes from Bach, Billie Holiday from which she took up both Strange Fruit and I Loves You, Porgy from the opera Porgy and Bess, the political commitment in the years of Malcolm X, more or less happy love stories.

Bigger than life – a black woman, a very well educated one, emotionally intense but also bipolar, Nina Simone was praised for her art as much as misunderstood, possibly, as a person. Amiri Baraka, as Del Savio recalls, spent words of comprehension even for her most troubled behaviors, while people like Bob Dylan and Nick Cave were really happy for the few time they spent together or the few words of appreciation by her.

Sick for a breast cancer in her last years, after she lost her family – the relationships with both father and mother were not easy at all, not to mention her connection with the daughter who tried a similar career – she was isolated almost completely for a period of time by the people she chose in order to take care of her, but in the end her exile in France was a choice not completely deepened in the book and maybe a more simpathetic writer would have give us more insights.

Gianni Del Savio to be honest have an interesting curriculum, beeing an historical collaborator for Musica e Dischi, Il Buscadero and Radio Popolare. In 2016 he published another book dedicated to Dr. Nina Simone, showing to the world an outsdanding appreciation for one of the most important Africa American perfomers, maybe the most intense after Billie Holiday. But this is only my opinion.

Interesting dissertation the one in this nice book anyway, also because many of her albums, above all the one recorded from the end of the 1970s, desappeared from the shelves of the record shops and as far as I can read there are hidden gems along with other stuff more trendy at least in the times they saw the light. The book is enriched and embellished by the lyrics of many Nina Simone successes, with a notable interest for the ones more politicized. But also the most intimate sometimes are reported, so that the Italian listeners more lazy can finally appreciate how a fine lyricst and selector - as far as the covers - Nina Simone was.

Strange as it can seem this brief article to an international audience, since the book have been at least for the moment issued only in Italy and in Italian, my hope is that someone would translate it in English and that Gianni Del Savio will be able to give life maybe to a new edition, with a more extended analysis of Nina Simone last years, and above all an examination of at least part of the artists who took seriously Simone's challenge to create revolutionary and spiritual art.