Nina Simone: You've Got To Learn

The release of this magnificent album, recorded live at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1966, is headline news for fans of Nina Simone. None of the material, all of it high grade, has been made available before. Newport promoter George Wein donated the tapes of Simone's performance to the US Library of Congress, where they lay forgotten until, following Wein's passing in 2021, Simone historian Nadine Cohodas unearthed them. Simone is in peak form, accompanied by guitarist Rudy Stevenson, bassist Lisle Atkinson and drummer Bobby Hamilton, and audio quality is very good. The album is killer.

Simone continues to put a spell on the listener in 2023, her mojo undimmed by the passage of time. She projects both innocence and battle-hardened realism, and strength and vulnerability. Her artistry was inextricably linked to political engagement. Along with Max Roach, Charles Mingus and Abbey Lincoln, she was, in the early 1960s, one of the first jazz musicians to stick her head above the parapet and jeopardise her career prospects with plain-spoken, uncompromising demands for civil rights for Black Americans. Her composition "Mississippi Goddam" was written in 1964 in protest at the racially motivated murders of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers in Mississippi, and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four Black children. In this 1966 performance of the song, Simone's tweaked lyrics include a reference to the riots which had erupted in Watts, Los Angeles, the previous year. (Hear them on the video below).

The album opens with a slow, heartwrenchingly beautiful version of Charles Azvanour and Marcel Stellman's title tune. It is Simone's only known live recording of the song. She follows with an out-of-time reading of George and Ira Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy," her breakthrough hit in 1959. Next comes "Blues For Mama," music by Simone, lyrics by Abbey Lincoln, the first-ever recording of the song. In her introduction, Simone describes it as a "gutbucket blues," and it is gloriously so. The same tag could be applied to the next track, "Be My Husband," written by Simone's husband Andrew Stroud, and here performed by Simone and drummer Bobby Hamilton only in a skeletal arrangement which is reminiscent of the late Dr. John's voodoo-laced New Orleans r&b.

After an outstanding 06:50 version of "Mississippi Goddam"—which is the only recording of the song on which Simone employs a swinging, in-the-pocket motor rhythm—the album concludes with an encore, Bart Howard's "Music For Lovers," like the aforementioned "Blues For Mama" Simone's first recording of the piece. It ends the set on an infectiously upbeat note.

At times, as Simone bares her soul to the audience, one wants to weep, and yet You've Got To Learn is, ultimately, a profoundly fortifying and uplifting experience.

A shout-out goes to Kevin Reeves, who mastered the album at East Iris Studios, Nashville, TN. Reeves did a similarly fine job on another July 2023 blinder, John Coltrane's Evenings At The Village Gate (Impulse!) featuring Eric Dolphy (reviewed here).