Word: ninas
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...FESTIVAL (NET, 8-9 p.m.). "Nina Simone: The Sound of Soul" brings the special Simone sound to jazz, blues and folk music in her one-woman show...
Rank at the Top. Nina's hip style is not pure jazz, pure blues or pure anything. Rather, it is a swinging, soulful, infectious blend of every conceivable style that has come out of the "music of my people." Opening the Philadelphia program with The Times They Are AChangin, she made Bob Dylan's classic folk tune sound like a revivalist hymn; yet she never lost any of its satiric bite. At the Metropolitan, Langston Hughes' Backlash Blues had an angular, hard-rock quality that pointed up its bitter message: "Do you think that all colored people...
...Nina Simone is saying 'em louder and clearer than ever before. There was a time when her stance was an indifferent slump, her expression unsmiling, her attitude hostile. At best, she was called temperamental, at worst arrogant. She went through one distraught manager after another. But since her 1961 marriage to Andrew Stroud, who quit the New York City police force to become her manager, she has calmed down-and even found a measure of tranquility...
...Nina's singing and piano playing rank her with Aretha Franklin at the top of the female jazz, blues and soul camp. On piano, she can tinkle along simply like Count Basic or pile chord upon chord like Rubinstein playing Tchaikovsky. At times, her voice has the reedy wobble of a Dixieland clarinet, but it can also whisper, wail, or break in above the instrumental accompaniment like an Indian shehnai. As Ray Charles notes, nobody ever comes close to imitating her, or even trying, "probably because everybody knows she's the only...
...Nina was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in 1935 in Tryon, N.C., the sixth of eight children. Father was a handyman, Mother a Methodist minister. Both were musical, and Nina began taking classical piano lessons at seven. Bach soon became (and remains) her favorite: "There's always a place he's going and he gets there and he comes down gently. That's perfection." In 1953, after a year of study at Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music (paid for by friends back home), she landed a $90-a-week job playing piano...