In November 1969 singer Nina Simone arrived Rome for a scheduled performance at the Teatro Sistina. She had recently released the album Black Gold, recorded live at New York’s Philharmonic Hall, filled with sublime vocal expressiveness and militant stance against the discriminatory and violent policies implemented by the U.S. government, with police endorsement, against the African-American community.
The song To be Young, Gifted and Black, featured on the live album, inspired by the play centered on the life of her friend Lorraine Hansberry, the first African-American author to stage a play on Broadway and to win the prestigious New York Drama Critics’ Circle award at only 29 years old, had quickly become the revolutionary anthem of the civil rights movement and, by extension, of the entire black community in the United States.
Nina Simone’s dream of pursuing a career as a classical concert pianist had shattered several years earlier precisely against those discriminatory barriers entrenched in the American social system.
Little Eunice, before adopting the stage name “Nina Simone,” despite the poverty-stricken condition in which her family was living, devoted herself to classical studies on the scores of Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Liszt, under the guidance of the British-born teacher, Muriel Mazzanovich.
Convinced of Eunice’s talents, corroborated by her total and passionate dedication, the teacher works to establish a fund, supported by wealthy white families residing in the area where she lives, to give her student access to the best educational facilities.
It sounds like a story that cannot go without a happy ending; but when teenager Eunice faces a selection process to enter the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, everything vanishes in a matter of hours: the verdict is implacable, not admitted!
The all-white committee cannot allow that young student to become the first black pianist in the history of the prestigious music university.
In Eunice’s eyes, the inescapable reality becomes increasingly clear and difficult to accept, so much so that it drives her to continue applying herself to the study of classical music with the obsessive idea of one day passing that entrance exam.
It will never happen, but the future Nina Simone will bring to her Black Music, made up of traditional songs, blues, jazz, soul, rhythm and blues and pop standards, the compendium of classical literature, expressed with vital pride through a masterful piano technique and a voice as deep as disillusionment with a system that has mercilessly deprived her of her dreams.
In the African American singer’s future recording works, the various phases of music history merge into a single form, without any cultural, ethnic, or racial distinctions; an unappealing artistic claim that in the years to follow will be as successful among white audiences as among black audiences.
Throughout the decade of the 1960s, the American musician’s political and social and, by extension, artistic stance became increasingly radical and combative.
It cannot be otherwise; it lives and breathes a climate of continuous urban tension exacerbated, to the point of no return, by events disruptive in their tragic nature: the 1955 kidnapping and subsequent lynching in Mississippi of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy; the murder a few years later of civil rights activist Medgar Evers; the terrorist attack by the white supremacist group on the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in September 1963, with the death of four girls and the wounding of numerous people.
During that turn of time, the maturation of a political consciousness more akin to the armed wing of activist Stokely Carmichael’s Black Panthers and the philosophy of Malcolm X than to the nonviolent, integrative philosophy of the Reverend Martin Luther King, prompts Nina Simone to convey her anger and commitment to a relentless struggle against the white system in such hit songs as Mississippi Goddam, I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free, Stange Fruit, Backlash Blues, Revolution (Part I and Part II), and Ain’t Got No I Got Life.
By the time, however, the African American singer, in the latter part of the 1960s, arrives in the Capital, a sense of disappointment with that black power struggle movement to which she had devoted so much of her time and psychic-physical energies is becoming overpowering in her.
The dreaded African-American revolution is weakened by the arrests and disappearance of such important figures as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, assassinated one after the other within a few years, and by now surrendered figures remain to lead the movement and in some cases become part of the system they themselves had fought.
Nina Simone is a woman and artist tried by the experiences she has lived through on her own skin, disappointed but despite this, or perhaps because of this, even more determined to make her voice heard by making no concessions to anyone; she proves this once again when she enters the stage at the Sistina and finds herself in front of a half-empty theater. He is stunned, a puzzlement turned into anger and disappointment within minutes.
In thanking the few people present, the singer indulges in an outburst in which she emphasizes the fact that until that moment she had not been aware of the Roman public’s treatment of the artists. An icy silence falls in the theater broken only by a voice equally full of outrage and bitterness, that of actress Anna Magnani.
She too, like Nina Simone, is an artist with a strong character, both resolute and fragile at the same time, never prone to complacency toward the public and critics. As she raised her fist, the Italian actress addressed the singer with these words, “You are right Nina… shame, shame, shame!”
The ensuing applause from the few in attendance seems to multiply until it fills the seats left incomprehensibly empty in the theater. Nina Simone does not spare herself during the concert, giving her aficionados moments of pure expressive beauty sprung from the restless and lonely meanderings of the soul.
A few months later, she decided to move away from the gilded world of the music show business by taking refuge in Barbados; from then on, the African American pianist and singer’s human and artistic existence would never be the same.
Paolo Marra
