courtesy of New York Daily News
An astonishing new documentary on the singer Nina Simone opens with a scene of the star staring into space.
She’s onstage, at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976, about to begin a pivotal comeback performance. The thunderous applause that greeted her when she walked on stage has died down.
And then… nothing. The singer looks around judgmentally, fidgets and broods, letting an uncomfortably long silence linger before announcing that she’ll never play a jazz festival again, vowing to move “to a higher plane.”
It’s a squirm-inducing moment, which makes you wonder: Who is this difficult and intense woman?
Over the next 110 minutes of Liz Garbus’ film, “What Happened, Miss Simone?,” we discover a lot about who Nina Simone was — a troubled, angry, scary soul who also happened to be one of the greatest musicians and singers of the last century.
“What Happened,” which opens in theaters Wednesday, then hits Netflix Friday, draws on archival interviews with the star, her family and colleagues, along with priceless performance footage of the singer, who died in 2003 at age 70. Together, it tells a tale that’s at once rousing and disturbing.
Born Eunice Waymon in the segregated North Carolina of 1933, the woman who became Nina Simone was a child prodigy pianist. At 12, she performed her first recital. Two white women were in attendance — Nina’s mom served as their maid — and they took an interest. The women had the youngster practicing eight hours a day, with the goal of making her the first black woman to play Carnegie Hall.
Yet she was rejected by the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, due to her race, she believed. To make money, she wound up playing pop, jazz and R&B in a dive bar in Atlantic City under the name Nina Simone so her family wouldn’t feel, and share, her shame.
The owner of the bar insisted she both sing and style herself as a soul star, though classical music was her passion. However selfish the club owner’s motives, he inadvertently gave the world an incredible gift.
Simone became one of the most distinct, engaged and ruthless singers of all time. With her deep pitch and formidable character, she had a masculine energy, shielding a great vulnerability. Her rich vibrato resonated with equal parts righteousness and hurt.
A crushing version she cut of “I Loves You Porgy” became a Top 20 hit but she had trouble sustaining her popularity, for both internal and external reasons. She had a defiance that put people off.
If that quality hurt her career, it could result in righteous art. One of her first self-penned numbers, “Mississippi Goddam” reacted with unflinching bravery to the violent racism of the South in the ’60s. As the decade heated up, however, Simone’s politics became more violent. “Are you ready to smash white things,” she asks an audience in the late ’60s. “Are you ready to kill?”
Both her extremism, and her inner turmoil, gave her performances an alarming honesty. She was uncommonly present in her shows, relating the lyrics like an expert actress. More, her classical background allowed her to arrange her cover versions in ways so rare, many deserved a co-writing credit.
Simone’s take on Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” uses a pin-prick piano line to make every line shine. Her “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” offered an unfiltered sense of guilt. No one has created a sexier “Feeling Good,” and her run at Sandy Denny’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” carries both the pain of mortality and the enigma of eternity.
The end of Garbus’ movie brings us back that odd performance in Montreux, when, after yelling at an audience member, Simone performs Janis Ian’s “Stars.” It’s a song about the wages of fame and the way it splits the public and private selves. Simone means the song to explain her tortured inner life. We can never know the depth of that, but, in the moment, her performance makes us feel every facet of it.
