Le sublimi canzoni della grande Nina Simone ne fecero un'icona della musica americana. Era una pianista, una scrittrice e una compositrice. E nel tumulto del movimento dei diritti civili, anche lei diventò una voce di azione e di rabbia. La scrittrice Nadine Cohodas ha appena pubblicato una nuova biografia della cantante, dal titolo "Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone". In essa, si ripercorre la vita di un artista la cui musica è sempre stata una estensione - ed una risposta - al mondo intorno a lei. Secondo la Cohodas, Nina Simone provava una rabbia impenitente al trattamento dei neri in America. "Non ha mai avuto interesse ad attraversare il divario razziale: avrebbe voluto affrontarlo".
Simone, che morì nel 2003, diede la sua ultima esibizione a New York alla Carnegie Hall l'anno precedente. "Ci furono scorci di quello che Nina Simone era stata" dice la Cohodas. "Cantò per soli 45 minuti. Non fu un grande concerto, ma tutti erano così felici di vederla. Si era trasformata in una dea della cultura".
Sul sito della NPR è possibile leggere un corposo estratto di questo splendido ritratto della grande cantante.
It was more a path emerging than a promise fulfilled that put Nina Simone on a makeshift stage in Montgomery, Alabama, on a sodden March night in 1965. She wanted to sing for the bedraggled men and women who had trekked three days from Selma to present their case for black voting rights to a recalcitrant Governor George Wallace. Nina was following the lead of James Baldwin, her good friend, mentor, and sparring partner at dinner¬table debates, a role he shared with Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry. They were her circle of inspiration, writers who found their voice in the crackling word on the page—the deft phrase and the trenchant insight that described a world black Americans so often experienced as unforgiving.
Nina linked her voice to theirs, understanding from the time she was Eunice Waymon, a precocious little girl in Tryon, North Carolina, what it was to be young, gifted, and black, even if she couldn't find the words to express it. On that stage in Montgomery, long since transformed into Nina Simone, she sang "Mississippi Goddam," her litany of racial injustice and a signal that she, too, had found her spiritual assignment: to use her talent for the singular cause of freeing her people and not incidentally herself. She never suggested the task was easy, and anyone willing to listen, willing to heed her exhortations, could engage in the struggle at her side.
"I didn't get interested in music," Nina explained. "It was a gift from God." But when private demons besieged her, a rage of breathtaking dimension obscured that gift, blinding her to everyday realities even as the anger informed her creations and at the same time served to attract, provoke, and on occasion repel an audience. Yet through it all came the unmistakable pride of accomplishment. "When I'm on that stage, I assume honor. I assume compensation," she declared, "and I should."
Simone, che morì nel 2003, diede la sua ultima esibizione a New York alla Carnegie Hall l'anno precedente. "Ci furono scorci di quello che Nina Simone era stata" dice la Cohodas. "Cantò per soli 45 minuti. Non fu un grande concerto, ma tutti erano così felici di vederla. Si era trasformata in una dea della cultura".
Sul sito della NPR è possibile leggere un corposo estratto di questo splendido ritratto della grande cantante.
It was more a path emerging than a promise fulfilled that put Nina Simone on a makeshift stage in Montgomery, Alabama, on a sodden March night in 1965. She wanted to sing for the bedraggled men and women who had trekked three days from Selma to present their case for black voting rights to a recalcitrant Governor George Wallace. Nina was following the lead of James Baldwin, her good friend, mentor, and sparring partner at dinner¬table debates, a role he shared with Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry. They were her circle of inspiration, writers who found their voice in the crackling word on the page—the deft phrase and the trenchant insight that described a world black Americans so often experienced as unforgiving.
Nina linked her voice to theirs, understanding from the time she was Eunice Waymon, a precocious little girl in Tryon, North Carolina, what it was to be young, gifted, and black, even if she couldn't find the words to express it. On that stage in Montgomery, long since transformed into Nina Simone, she sang "Mississippi Goddam," her litany of racial injustice and a signal that she, too, had found her spiritual assignment: to use her talent for the singular cause of freeing her people and not incidentally herself. She never suggested the task was easy, and anyone willing to listen, willing to heed her exhortations, could engage in the struggle at her side.
"I didn't get interested in music," Nina explained. "It was a gift from God." But when private demons besieged her, a rage of breathtaking dimension obscured that gift, blinding her to everyday realities even as the anger informed her creations and at the same time served to attract, provoke, and on occasion repel an audience. Yet through it all came the unmistakable pride of accomplishment. "When I'm on that stage, I assume honor. I assume compensation," she declared, "and I should."
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