Feeling Nina Then and Now

Many days I curse myself and YouTube for the unholy alliance and waste of time the two of us have squandered away more often than I’d wish to reveal. Then I come across something like this post that was up for a few weeks about a year ago and then not available again until recently.

One of the things I feel blessed for in this life is having seen Nina Simone live three different times. Twice I felt cheated for her overpriced, obscenely short, indifferent performance. Exasperated, I asked myself: How could I have worshiped this woman who just put on the most trite performance I've ever seen? Then once it was a near religious experience. In many ways the same show, but something was just slightly different. Was she mad at the audience, America, life, herself, racism, the lack of progress in social change, the cruel joke of life, the fact that it was so short?

In this clip, she takes a song that many have called one of the worst pop tunes ever written, makes a stab at it, trashes it, deconstructs it, reconstructs it, and then rises with phoenix-like bombast to make you uncertain of the trip you’ve been on and where she is taking you is hard to describe. How she manages to hammer out so much from something so slight over the course of ten and a half minutes restores my faith in her and life. About five minutes into the clip, her vocal reaches its apex, when you go from laughing at the lyric to thinking, just for a second, that its truth and simplicity are so brilliant that no one to date had the insight she has to dive in and bring out the writer’s truth. In the few seconds there where the camera zooms in, she lets out the words "...feelings like I never had you..." you are experiencing a performance that is nearly equal to the summary of the entire career of Bette Davis or Meryl Streep. So much condensed, real emotion transported onto a shaky little lyric, reminding us that the words really don't matter as much as what you feel when you sense them through such an artist. Then she launches into a Keith Jarrett-worthy passage of keyboard invention before ending our journey, not quite sure where we’ve been but certain we’ll never be quite the same again.

Uh, I guess you might guess that I've forgiven Nina for those two bad concerts I saw. Were they really bad after all?

Special thanks to Lauren of Mindful Things whose own posts of other Nina tunes inspired me to search this clip out again and making me grateful in a deeper way to be alive and having been in the same room with Nina when she walked this earth.

UPDATE: Kusala's comment questioning whether this was really from the DVD 0f her 1976 Montreux concert or from the film the film Supreme Sorceress motivated me to seek out the two DVDs. I found the former, from which this clip actually originates, but not the latter which I'd also love to find. Having it on the bigger screen and superior sound sytem is a vast improvement but also saddens me that I'll never see Nina live again. Yet, I find myself singing out to the void and hoping that she know that I have "fellings like I never lost you..." Oh, I can't even say the rest since she makes me feel it for real in my heart.