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#Best nina simone album ever free#
Her last heavyweight artistic statement began at a show near Fort Dix, New Jersey, for Jane Fonda’s anti-war Free the Army tour in November 1971. It is practically a seance: each mistreated woman is sketched in just a few short lines but she lives and breathes and cries out for justice.Īround this time, Maya Angelou called Simone “an extremist, extremely realised”. Simone’s own Four Women, a quadripartite study of black womanhood so unflinching in its pain and outrage that some black radio stations banned it, epitomises her talent for inhabiting characters with her voice. Likewise, it was Simone who showed David Bowie that Johnny Mathis’s Wild is the Wind could be a shattering tour de force. When Jeff Buckley covered the gloomy torch song Lilac Wine, he was really covering Simone’s version, which also happens to be one of Thom Yorke’s Desert Island Discs. Despite being largely pieced together from leftover sessions by producer Hal Mooney, Wild Is the Wind is the strongest illustration of her uncanny ability to find the song within a song, revealing the secret tunnels and caverns that previous singers didn’t know existed and future interpreters couldn’t ignore. Starting with I Put a Spell on You in 1965, you can’t go wrong with Simone’s final five albums for Philips Records. Simone is fully aware of the power she wields: “Betcha thought I was kidding, didn’t you?” The final standing ovation is an explosion of awe and relief. The laughter carries into her own Mississippi Goddam – written in a frenzy hours after the 1963 Alabama church bombing – until the show-tune irony is burned away by a mounting rage that consumes the hall and you can hear in real time the realisation that they are listening to a protest song like none they’ve ever heard, owing more to cabaret than folk, and more to Malcolm X than Martin Luther King. During Go Limp, a kind of protester’s sex comedy written by CND campaigner Alex “The Joy of Sex” Comfort, the spectators chortle at the jokes, join in the goofy chorus and keep Simone airborne when she forgets the lyrics. Summoning the vengeful ghost of Brecht and Weill’s Pirate Jenny into the age of Medgar Evers and George Wallace, she stuns the room into a silence punctuated only by nervous coughs. Unlike most live albums, In Concert leaves the audience in the mix throughout and illustrates how deftly Simone could snap between tension and release. It’s this nightcrawling version of Jack Hammer’s Plain Gold Ring that explains why Nick Cave later covered it, while Don’t Smoke in Bed is so stark that you can hear audience members shifting in their seats.
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She performs three songs from her jazzy 1959 debut Little Girl Blue with a newfound depth, drawn from painful personal experience and her recent political awakening at the hands of new friends in the civil rights movement, notably Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin. Dim the lights and dive into the top Nina Simone records and the greatest Nina Simone songs.That said, In Concert, recorded at three Carnegie Hall shows during March and April 1964, represents her great leap forward as both a performer and activist: her escape from the “nothing world” of pop. If you want to know the Best Nina Simone album of all time, you've come to the right place. This list of Nina Simone CDs has been voted on by jazz fans around the world, so the order isn't just one person's opinion. Make sure you don't just vote for critically acclaimed Nina Simone records if you have a favorite Nina Simone album, then vote it up, even if it's not necessarily the most popular. If you think the greatest Nina Simone album isn't high enough on the list, then be sure to vote for it so it receives the credit it deserves. To make it easy for you, we haven't included Nina Simone singles, EPs, or compilations, so everything you see here should only be studio albums. Perhaps her best known jazz standard is "My Baby Just Cares for Me." Though she's primarily remembered as a jazz singer, Simone was also adept at blues, classical, gospel, R&B, and pop.
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The Nina Simone discography is ranked from best to worst, so the top Nina Simone albums can be found at the top of the list. This is a crowd-ranked list of the best Nina Simone albums, including pictures of the album covers when available. Nina Simone was one of the best jazz artists of all time, a truly distinctive female jazz vocalist who was not afraid to say what was on her mind.