Tuesday 13 December 2011

I rarely venture outside of Western “classical” music. But one of the other paths I enjoy is gypsy music, and the other is selective American folk / country music. Listening this evening to Nina Simone was a very great pleasure. She was a singer who sang from the heart and mixed black, country, jazz and classical streams. I first came across her in the late 1950s singing “Love me and leave me” with a very Bach-like fugal accompaniment; she was a pianist who trained at the Juilliard school. I even went to one of her concerts in London in the early 1980s. She was one of a kind, an abrasive individual with an immediately identifiable persona (a bit like Edith Piaf, Elvis Presley or Leonard Cohen). She died a couple of years ago in southern France where she lived in voluntary exile from America where she was born and where she grew up. Her voice lives on and I have many recordings of her, much cherished.

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