Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Tue Jun 23, 2015 9:27 am 
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The passion, pain, and beauty of Nina Simone

Liz Garbus, who made a film about Marilyn Monroe and whose Bobby Fischer Against the World came out in 2011, has now produced a powerful, indispensable film about another deeply troubled genius, the titanic singer and pianist Nina Simone. I remember first hearing her on the radio when she was not yet famous. For a young person excited by jazz and all kinds of unusual music, it was impossible not to be impressed. It was immediately clear that here was someone special. I'd never even imagined a pianist -- jazz, soul, classical, all of those and more -- who sang and improvised as she played. Her voice was as unique and as strong as the playing, her rhythmic drive was powerful, the timbre of her voice, raucous and deep, instantly recognizable. The sureness of it grabbed you and held you. This film tells her story, and it's a moving one that brought tears to my eyes every time one of her performances came on screen, and that was often; and fortunately, Garbus lets the songs play through. ​I used to think certain songs were her anthems -- "I loves you, Porgy," "Mississippi Goddam," "To By Young, Gifted, and Black," "Love Me or Leave Me," "Take Me to the Water," "My Baby Just Cares for Me" (which became a famous ad for Chanel No. 5). But now I realize she made every song she sang an anthem -- without by any means ever making them sound alike. She was simply one of the great performers of our time. This is a powerful film about her, not the last word surely, but still not to be missed.

​​​​Unfortunately the only time I can remember hearing Nina Simone live, in the Seventies, she radiated so much anger toward the audience it was off-putting, even frightening. Here we learn how and why, and happily we find that after many vicissitudes, in her last years, she actually became joyous and smiling in performance. We learn many things here, but the beauty of Liz Garbus' film is that through it all Simone's spirit and the strength of her music emerge as the dominant notes.

It begins with Eunice Waymon, her real name, a little poor girl in North Carolina in the Jim Crow South, first transported by music, as so many African-American artists have been, through singing gospel in church, where her domestic servant mother was a minister. An early piano performance led two white women to raise funds to get her piano lessons, serious ones​, across the tracks​. They thought she could become a great classical pianist and she was now excited by Bach, whose music was to inform her improvisations throughout her career (she saw a unifying structure in Bach and the blues). She did a summer course at Julliard. But her dream of being the first black woman to give a classical piano recital in Carnegie Hall -- she always thought she'd have been happier if that had happened -- was thwarted when she was rejected after an audition there and at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, maybe because of her race; elsewhere she says it was lack of training. She said that even at that first piano performance when the white ladies adopted her, at first her parents were told they'd have to sit in the back and she refused to play unless they could sit in front. Her parents had moved to Philadelphia. Eventually she had to work to support them, and it began in a dive bar in Atlantic City, where she adopted the name of Nina Simone to save her family from embarrassment.

Nuances and details are missing from the story here. But as the film tells it, and perhaps Nina did too, all this great career was faute de mieux. Eventually fame found her, or she it, and she gave a featured performance in Carnegie Hall. But not of classical piano.

The wealth of archival footage helps Garbus avoid the impression of an excess of talking heads and there are no contemporary testimonials; feeling the adulation of every audience in live performance is testimonial enough. But there are some key and remarkably balanced interviews with Andrew ("Andy") Stroud, her husband; her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly; and her longtime guitar accompanist Al Shackman, with whom a musical symbiosis developed. Lisa is articulate, fair, and admiring, despite having been beaten by her mother. Andy was a NYC vice squad cop who quit his job when they married to be Simone's manager, which he did well, but also brutally. He pushed her harder than she wanted to be pushed, and when she didn't obey, he was physically abusive. Shackman describes the growing moodiness that turned to anger and unpredictable rages. Not till the Eighties was Simone's bi-polar disorder diagnosed. Screen shots of many pages from her diaries show her public anger was turned also against herself and became suicidality. She burned and suffered. The passion that made her public performances so galvanic tormented her all the time off stage, unfortunately. "My mother was Nina Simone 24/7," Lisa succinctly puts it: "That’s when it became a problem." She seems possessed not only of personal demons, but something like the Saeve indignatio of Jonathan Swift, a corruscating rage against the wrongs against the Negro, in her case, that didn't save her from distinctly personal pain.

The Black Power movement of the Sixties, the decade of Simone's rise to fame, provided a focus for her anger and led to her friendship with many of the influential African-American intellectual and political leaders of the time -- a subject indeed worthy of a separate documentary. Malcolm X daughter Attallah Shabbazz was a good friend and is interviewed. Simone took it upon herself to serve and inspire the movement through her music, and she could do it. Her music swept you away. Hence "Mississippi Goddamn," composed after Medgar Evers and the Birmingham church bombing -- the events she said pulled her into activism.

That activism gave a liberating focus to her anger, but also took her too far. The extremism of her songs and performances of that time, her advocating of violence, eventually alienated her from white producers and the recording industry. Her behavior became violent and unpredictable, and her breakup with Andy, who was apolitical, led to isolation and a downward spiral and years of silence from the late Sixties -- till 1976, the Montreux Festival, a comeback as George Wein's Newport Festival in 1960 had been her first springboard to wide fame and popularity. You see her in a later comeback performance too, when she gratefully notes that the audience still remembers her and loves her, as she loves it.

Finally an exile in Europe, first in Holland, then in Paris, Simone eventually got a diagnosis and mediation for her psychological problems, which, Shackman reports, caused physical impairment. Maybe it was later adjusted or she took breaks from it. Anyway, she was still to give brilliant performances where, we see in films, she smiled more than she did in the past.

​Garbus has managed a superbly complete picture of the life. The depression, the spousal abuse that she paid out on her own daughter, the periods of severe decline and poverty, are here. So is the genius and the instant power to shake you to the core. True, there is more depth to the life and to the art to be explored than is covered here. But this is a strong and unified portrait, essential viewing about ​an ​essential artist. ​​

The title is from a​​ Nov. 1970 Redbook article by Maya Angelou, "Nina Simone: High Priestess of Soul." This short piece gives many details of Simone's early career that, strangely, are omitted from Garbus' account.

What Happened, Miss Simone?, 100 mins., debuted at Sundance January 2015, also at the Berlinale; and has played at some other US fests including San Francisco in late April. It will open theatrically 24 June 2015 and also play on Netflix, which is releasing it.​ New York premiere June 1 at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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