Today is a very special day for me, my family and millions of fans of Dr. Nina Simone.

We celebrate what would have been Aunt Nina’s 79th Birthday. It is a bitter sweet day for me, I miss her, but rejoice in the knowledge that her music and teaching will live on forever within us all. If you really listen to Nina’s words, she wanted us to be kind to one another and love each other unconditionally.

When I was growing up, I was removed from most of the pressures of the artist, “Nina Simone,” to me she was simply Aunt Nina.
Besides the music, what I remember the most is the laughter and her infectious smile. Yes, we laughed a lot and had a great friendship that was built on trust and understanding. Aunt Nina taught me many life lessons that are still with me today.

As you celebrate today, play your favorite Nina Simone song and remember what she meant to you. Aunt Nina is smiling and knows that we love her.

Happy 79th Birthday Aunt Nina!

Joyce Stroud
Niece of Nina Simone

It takes me back to when I first heard Nina as an 11-
year-old child listening to her album, Little Girl Blue, in utter amazement. It takes me back to watching her perform on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1960 on a small black and white screen TV on a Sunday night at 8 o’clock. I remember that she was seated on the stage in a long gown with a train attached and looked so regal as she sat at the piano. I remember the pride that I felt in watching her as she played Love Me or Leave Me.

There were many close-ups of her hands, but when she got to the development section of the song, and broke out with nothing but counterpoint, it sounded like a Bach fugue. Her hands ran all over the keyboard and the cameras followed every stroke. She then went back into the vocals and ended the song with another round of counterpoint before ending the song with a series of chords that made you think that you were truly listening to a classical piece of music. Before she finished the final cadence of the song, the audience was applauding.

Nina did not miss a beat, for she went right into I Loves You Porgy with the aid of a few transition chords. Once again, she infused some counterpoint into this song and I felt like I was in a concert hall. Before she could finish the song, the audience was once again applauding, smiling, and commenting to each other as the camera fanned out across the crowd. Nina got up from the piano with a big smile on her face knowing that she had “done good”. I was beaming and so full of pride because I felt that she was representing me. It was rare to see someone of color on The Ed Sullivan Show and someone who had represented so well. So, today, on Nina’s 79th birthday, I salute her.

June I. King
Simone Family Friend

Our ears search tirelessly for a human vessel gifted with the ability to simultaneously channel the enormity of the universe and the depths of the soul. We want to be brought to tears, we want to be given the chills, and we want to feel connected to everything.  It seems our world has a fickle, transient memory; we were already in the presence of such an artist. We were already in the presence of Nina Simone.

Humanly flawed as she was…Nina was a gift from a place or a spirit none of us will ever be able to comprehend. At her prime she was the epitome of an artist and musician. It is not hyperbole to state that at Nina Simone’s peak her art, her music, her style, her contentiousness and her genius were all perfect. Her voice, immediately recognizable, was so uniquely overwhelming that we must consider her greatest disappointment to be our greatest blessing; Nina never intended nor wanted to use her voice. Her dream was to be a classical pianist and had that dream been fulfilled we would’ve been robbed of the gift of her voice and of a career that set the bar for generation after generation of future musicians.

My childhood was anything but easy, running the gamut from being subjected to abuse and bullying to escaping through drugs, partying and violence. Going into early adulthood feeling like a numb survivor, but a survivor nonetheless, Nina’s voice hit me so powerfully that she immediately caused me to do something I’d thought myself incapable of for so long that I’d forgotten all about it – Nina’s voice caused me to feel.

Perhaps because she never fully intended to use it so she didn’t focus too intently on training it as an instrument, Nina’s voice was nothing if not purely real. There was no pretense, no constriction, no tense effort. Nina opened her mouth and a voice seemingly fell out of her soul. She didn’t try to sing, she just opened her mouth. While not the most flowery, disciplined of voices she possessed something even greater: deep, raw, powerful, boundless emotion. All the superficially pretty voices in the world combined cannot match the brutal yet elegant sophistication of Nina’s voice. Her voice was like red wine and just like red wine it can be an acquired taste. Once acquired however, one will never settle for anything less and all other tastes seem just so very hollow.

Giving me the ability to feel again and experiencing the depths a voice as powerful as Nina’s can open up in each of us has left me sensing I owe a debt to her that, while it might never be repaid, increasingly motivates and frustrates me. To say Nina Simone was underappreciated isn’t justice enough for her. She was neglected, abused and exploited. Whether it be a product of her race, sex, civil activism or provocative personality it is inexcusable and a sad testament to a culture that values entertainment over integrity. I can only hope I live to see the day when the legacy of Nina Simone is exalted to the level she and her family deserve. I am gracious beyond words to her daughter, Simone, for allowing me the opportunity to continue repaying the debt we all owe her mother, Nina Simone.

Aaron Overfield
Website Content Manager of NinaSimone.com

to all who will hear and speaking soulfully for all who can understand. Her artistry, vocal and instrumental, is unique–subtle shadings of the divine in harmonic black and white. Her auditory canvases range the spectrum of human experience. That experience—at times, illuminating, private and beautiful, and at others times, damning, public and raw—apprehends the infinite possibility of human interaction filtered through a talent anguished by the hard realities of an imperfect world.

That the American Songbook has been enriched by Nina Simone goes without saying. So, too, have the lives of her many first-hand fans who knew her, who experienced her, who loved her. Having coursed her life, Nina now lives as memory, in the telling and re-telling of her powerful story by new generations of musicians and listening fans. She remains iconic, one of the rare stand-out figures, hard to categorize, her legacy broad-scoped, influential and powerful.

Some nearly eighty years after Nina’s birth, I find myself daily walking in her footsteps in a most literal way—tracing the patterns of her early life where I now live in Tryon, North Carolina, her birthplace, a yet small village on the first rise of the Blue Ridge Mountains. There, among other things, I coordinate the Nina Simone Project, a grassroots memorial effort containing three elements: a scholarship, a sculpture and a music festival. www.ninasimoneproject.org

My first introduction to Nina came from my father, a classically-trained musician who had little real appreciation for most popular music. He did however have great appreciation for musical excellence, and that is what he had perceived in Nina, I suspect.

As I was then, I am, to this day, filled with emotion when hearing Nina’s piano solo cover of You’ll Never Walk Alone from Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s popular 1945 musical Carousel. From that initial hearing, my interest in and appreciation for Nina Simone grew exponentially day by day, fueled certainly by her local connection to Tryon, but sustained by an impassioned search for understanding of how a small town North Carolina daughter came to achieve international recognition for her unique talent and her formidable contributions both to the musical arts and to civil rights activism.

Nina’s meteoric rise to fame can’t be separated from her unique personal history. Her career, though not the one she had anticipated, began during one of our nation’s most volatile periods of civil unrest. What emerged from her and from that time was change, slow in coming, but change nonetheless, moving us ever forward and ever closer to a better day and a better world.

Nina’s creative part in that shifting ideology was significant and can be read in most of her protest music. But there was in Nina, a parallel shift as well, more introspective, and perhaps universally familiar—one that also confronts each of us almost daily throughout the unrelenting progress of our own lives. It is a matter of profound, but simple recognition, that point when all things, great and small, begin finally to fall into the larger scope of human history.

For this reason, I find myself coming back time and time again to a tune some twenty years into Nina’s career, Everything Must Change from the 1978 album Baltimore. Here anger is diminished. What remains, beyond a consummate artistry, is left for the listener to decide. Painful recognition, and unnerving melancholy, yes, but there is something more, too. And in that interactive space we confront the mythic, unadulterated Nina, the legendary voice illuminating what it means to be fragile, to be impermanent, which is to say, what it means to be human.

Crys Armbrust, Ph.D.
Founder & Director of the Nina Simone Project

Sometimes when I am alone in my room, I can still smell her perfume. If I get scared or lonely sometimes I can feel her hugging me. My mom and Dad always tell me how much we have in common. Some small things like, how much I love spicy food, jewelry and chocolate! Some big things too, like how shy she really was and that helps me not to feel so shy myself. My mom always says that when God gives you so many big gifts, they come with responsibilities. I hadn’t really thought about it like that but I am starting to understand what that means.

Grandma was a classical pianist, singer, poet and so much more. I guess that’s why she was always so busy trying to help other people find their gifts. When my mom was on the road performing, she would carry me everywhere with her. She even brought me out on stage to sing with her, just like Grandma did with her. I wonder if she was as nervous as I was when that happened to her. I guess sometimes I forget how special it is to be the only grand daughter of what people call a legend. To be honest, it feels like normal to me.

The world knew her as Nina Simone: The Legend, but all I know is when I think about her, the first thing that comes to my mind is…Love. That is what she gave to me, and everyone else. If that is what a legend is, then that’s what I want to become. I don’t think it matters that much if you are famous or your family is famous. I think the love part is the most important because that what I remember more than anything. That’s what makes me smile when I think about her or sing along to some of her songs. That’s the part that makes me want to make her proud of me and that’s the part that makes me the most proud to be her grand daughter.

I love you Grandma Unique forever!

We appeal to the global community to help the Nina Simone Project complete payment on Zenos
Frudakis’s bronze sculpture of Nina Simone, located at Nina Simone Plaza in Tryon, NC. An
outstanding debt of $55,000 remains of the $106,000 costing. Donations are tax-deductible.

Checks should be made payable to Nina Simone Project and mailed to PO Box 182, Tryon NC
USA 28782. Thank you, in advance, for helping in this memorial effort. Every contribution will
bring us closer to the goal.

For more information on the Nina Simone Project, and its vision,
mission and goals, visit www.ninasimoneproject.org

.

(photo of Simone by Sequoia Emmanuelle. makeup by Ashley Joy Beck)

Wednesday, February 8,2012

Keeper of the flame

Simone — daughter of the legendary Nina Simone — honors her mother´s musical legacy

by Lawrence Cosentino
The magnificent jazz, pop and soul singer Nina Simone pumped so much blood and skill into a song that all other versions shriveled to pale little peas in your mind, even if the original artist was Bob Dylan or The Beatles.

Think what it felt like to Nina Simone’s daughter.

The powerful singer and Broadway star, who simply calls herself Simone, visits the Wharton Center next week for “Simone on Simone,” a program devoted to her mother’s music.

“I thought my mother had written every single song she ever sang,” Simone said, in a phone interview. “Of course she wrote ‘Just Like a Woman!’”

People with no filial relation felt the same way. Nina Simone recast the Dylan song as a fragile ballad, dusted with harp and strings, suspended over a gritty gospel groove. She sealed the steal by changing Dylan’s third-person “she” to “I” in the last verse. While the rest of us marveled at Nina Simone’s ability to take charge of a song, her daughter took it for granted. “I heard her sing ‘Here Comes the Sun’ first, and then when I heard the Beatles do it, I was like, ‘Ewww,’” Simone said, laughing.

Simone the younger, born Lisa Celeste Stroud in 1962, is ripe for a reckoning with her mother’s mighty legacy. She’s already conquered Broadway, having laid down a definitive Mimi in the 1996-98 national tour of “Rent” and nailed the title role of Disney’s “Aida” in 2002-2003, among other star turns on the boards.

Now she’s applying her powerful pipes to a touring show of freewheeling jazz quartet arrangements based on her big-band CD, “Simone on Simone.”

There was no agonizing over whether to do “Simone on Simone.”

“I knew I was going to do this sooner or later,” she said. “When I was culling the songs, it was a very simple, fast process. I’ve been living with these songs all my life. It’s just a matter of which ones I want to do first.”
But Simone’s polished, ebullient performances of her mother’s songs belie the grief she felt while working on the project.

“When I got in the studio, I realized that a lot of the songs I chose to put on the CD, I’d never performed alone,” she said. “I always sang along with my Mom.”

Nina Simone died in 2003.

“I can’t just call her on the phone anymore,” Simone said. “I’m it.”

More than anyone, Simone knew how her mother could give a song a transfusion of soul and authenticity, turning a song as cheesy as “Feelings” into a raw suicide note.

“Feeling Good,” a highlight of the younger Simone’s CD and live shows, is a case in point. Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricuss wrote the song for a 1965 Broadway show called “The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd,” but who remembers that now?

“Mommy took it and turned it into what is now a standard,” Simone said. Poor Anthony Newley. The Wikipedia entry on “Feeling Good” goes straight to bullet-point 1: “Nina Simone version,” followed by bullet-point 2, “samples” of same.

“From Michael Bublé to Oleta Adams, Jennifer Hudson and on and on, everybody does the song, and when they do it, they do it Mommy’s way,” Simone said.

(By the way, Nina Simone also recast Frank Sinatra’s chest-thumper “My Way” with swaying hips and rocking congas, and ran off with that one as well.)

Simone the younger is on firmest ground exuding the upbeat confidence of “Feeling Good,” but steers away from the politically charged songs her mother wrote, including “Mississippi Goddam,” a searing response to the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the 1963 bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Ala.

“I’m not singing protest songs,” Simone said. “I’m not singing about politics — at least, not right now I’m not. But my views about the social and political environment in which we’re living very much mirror my mother’s.”
For now, the lyrics of “Feeling Good” — “this old world is a new world and a bold world for me” — suit her well. The “Simone on Simone” CD and tour have sparked a surge of creativity, helped along by a deep immersion in yoga. She’s working on a new CD of original songs, to be released in 2012.

“When I imagine myself, it’s like a kid,” she said. “I literally imagine myself standing on the world, and the world has sunglasses on — not the people, the planet.”

She recently uncorked one of the new songs, “All is Well,” at a New Mexico gig, and liked the audience´s reaction.

“They were singing it back to me,” she said. “I got a glimpse into some of the joy that I will be able to bring to the world in due time, to add to the legacy my mother has already begun.”

Simone
7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 16
Wharton Center´s Pasant Theatre
$15-38 (800) WHARTON

Create a new, original work of visual art paying homage to Nina Simone and it can be featured in a gallery on NinaSimone.com in honor of Nina’s birthday and Black History Month. To make it relevant to the month at hand we challenge artists to give their Nina piece an African vibe. It’s no secret that Nina was passionate about Africa!

We at NinaSimone.com cannot wait to see what kind of art is being created in Nina’s honor!

Submit your artwork and learn more here: http://www.ninasimone.com/contest/

CONTEST RULES

Note: Submissions should be of a visual piece of artwork depicting or invoking Dr. Nina Simone, preferably African-inspired in honor of Black History Month.

Eligibility

• Contestants must be of legal age (18+)

• All submissions must be an entirely original work of art produced specifically for the contest at hand.

Due Date and Submission Protocol

• All entries are due by March 31, 2012 12PM EST.

• Entries may be submitted via the NinaSimone.com website contest entry form, through email to aaron[at]ninasimone.com or through Twitter to @NinaSimoneMusic.

• Contestant information must accompany submission including: First and last name, age, address, phone number and email address. Contestants whom submit through Twitter will be contacted to obtain this necessary information before their entry can be considered valid.

• Images should be in standard format such as .jpg, .png or .gif between 200 and 300 dpi. No size or dimension criteria are in place however NinaSimone.com retains the right to proportionally resize all submissions for appropriate display on the website.

Awards, Exhibits and Release of Liability

Selected works will be chosen for exhibition on NinaSimone.com and will be awarded with placement in the Fan Art gallery on the website. By submitting artwork contestants agree to allow NinaSimone.com to display their submission on NinaSimone.com for an undetermined amount of time. The Estate of Nina Simone will not be held liable for any misrepresented submittals and/or copyright infringements on behalf of the contestant.

Evaluation criteria

Entries will be judged by the Estate of Nina Simone based on creativity, innovation and execution.

In every era as well as in every area, great artists are born who speak to and for the people.

We would be brutes without the great artists who help us to civilize ourselves.  ~Maya Angelou

One of those great women was the unmistakable, Ms. Nina Simone.

I am eternally grateful to my teachers for this particular introduction.

When I first heard Nina Simone, her naked truth shocked me. Whenever she sang it felt like lightning bolts in my soul.

Every song was like a movie, a unique and very different vignette.

From the creation of the soundtrack of her peoples struggle, to songs of justice, innocence and lunacy to the limitless facets of love, she examined the total human condition. She was fearless and absolutely believable, because she sang her truth.

In addition to her piercing singing, she was also an impeccable musician.

The intimate way she accompanied herself, made her voice and herpiano inseparable.

Her arranging and compositional skill gave her songs immediate recognition.

I am also encouraged to hear that a biopic of her life is in theworks for the big screen. This will be a tremendous undertaking, for holding true to the spirit and legacy of Ms. Simone requires the utmost dedication and diligence to the intimate details of a very rich and diverse life. I applaud the creators of this forthcoming project.

Nina Simone is a musical genius and a rich and precious treasure, who paid a heavy price for her artistic freedom. A truthful and honest movie of her life will be a glowing tribute to the legacy she left for all of us, a legacy that will inspire generations to come. ~Dianne Reeves~