FILM REVIEW: What happened Miss Simone?
A new documentary film, What happened Miss Simone?, on the life of Nina Simone, is currently showing on Netflix. What Happened Miss Simone? is a worthy though incomplete film portrait of the celebrated career and personal life of the American musician, singer songwriter and Civil rights activist. The first feature-length film treatment of the life of Nina Simone since the early 90’s, this latest film draws heavily upon previously unseen film and interviews with Nina’s former husband/manager,daughter and colleagues.
Born into a segregated U.S.A. in 1933, Eunice Waymon – she changed her name to Nina Simone at the beginning of the career to keep piano bar gigs concealed from her strictly pious mother – showed musical promise at a very early age. Of a poor family, the young pianist’s tuition was ensured only through church and community funding. Becoming an outstanding student of a Classical, not Jazz, reportoire and after an unsuccessful bid to study at a prestigious Philadelphia music school, the career of Nina Simone, pianist and singer was soon born playing popular Jazz tunes in an east coast Bar and Grill.
Following her 1960 debut at the prestigious Newport Jazz Festival, numerous albums, both in the studio and live recordings and frequent T.V. and media appearances ensured ever an increasing international popularity and success, in a career managed by her husband. The films shows that combined stresses of a heavy work schedule, the increasingly divergent artistic aims between her and a frequently violent husband/manager, along with a changing political environment dominated by strident Civil rights marches, Black militancy and the anti-Vietnam War movement took a toll on the mental health of this fiercely uncompromising creative spirit.
Leaving her family and career in the U.S around 1970 living in Liberia, Africa and Switzerland her career was disrupted by mental health and money issues before a new manager set her on course for the mature phase of her career,Nina Simone continued to perform and record for appreciative European and British audiences up to her death in France in 2003.
Writing here reminds me of the time, in 1991 when, at a Hammersmith London concert, and living up to a reputation for unpredictability, Nina abruptly walked off stage, mid-concert, only to return about 20 minutes later to resume proceedings as if nothing occurred.;all rather strange!
Nina Simone live Festival concert performance.
Whilst providing new fodder for fans and students of Jazz or Afro American culture, this new film will also serve to inform a younger generation of this gifted artist, both as an evolving musical artist challenged to respond authentically as a black woman and artist to the racist society into which she was born, a tale currently repeating itself amongst U.S. Black musical artists today.
To coincide with the release of What Happened Miss Simone? comes an RCA album, “Nina REVISITED…a tribute to Nina Simone “, featuring about a dozen young Hip Hop artists singing songs best known and written by Nina Simone.