In the opening moments of the new documentary, “What Happened, Miss Simone?” late singer Nina Simone steps onstage at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976. She seems a little shaky. She scans the crowd as though she’s personally sizing up and challenging each of them. You feel a little scared for her…and the audience. You’re not exactly sure what’s going to happen. The moment seems crackling with urgency and possibility. Both good and bad. She seems enraged. Imposing. Unhinged.
Ninety minutes later, when we come back to this very same performance at the end of the film, we know Nina Simone much better than we did. Now we know we were right to be scared.
During the jazz festival, she plays a song called “Stars.”
No.
She doesn’t play it. She channels it. She turns the song inside out and exposes its rawest, deepest emotions. As I watched, I became convinced that no one wrote the song, that the words were flowing extemporaneously via a direct line from her heart and soul to our ears. (I was wrong. Janis Ian wrote it.)
No.
She doesn’t play it. She channels it. She turns the song inside out and exposes its rawest, deepest emotions. As I watched, I became convinced that no one wrote the song, that the words were flowing extemporaneously via a direct line from her heart and soul to our ears. (I was wrong. Janis Ian wrote it.)
I’m by no means a music expert, but I can’t think of an artist who lays her soul more bare than Nina Simone does in this performance.
The entire documentary is just as unflinchingly honest. So much so, that at times it’s hard to watch. Especially when we read about Nina’s darkest moments in her own handwriting.
The title for the film “What Happened, Miss Simone?” comes from an essay written by Dr. Maya Angelou after she first met Nina Simone. Angelou’s question is what this soulful, well-made film attempts to answer.
Documentarian Liz Garbus takes us back through Nina’s entire life, from small-town piano prodigy in Jim Crow North Carolina through her superstar moments and turbulent years as a civil rights activist, into her frustrating, later years. In her life’s arc, we see the genius, the victim of violence, the violent aggressor, the frustrated artist, the imperfect parent, the entire, messy, contradictory and complex human being.
I first heard Nina Simone’s unmistakable voice in my mid-twenties. I don’t remember where. Probably on some Cleveland public radio station. I heard the song, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” and it shook something loose inside my chest cavity. What did I know about being young, gifted and black? Nothing. What did I know about this style of music? Nothing. All I knew was that this husky-voiced lady was speaking to me directly. I drove to a record store (remember those?) and bought The Very Best of Nina Simone-Sugar In My Bowl so I could spend the day with her. For someone who has owned a total of 25 CDs and records in her life, buying it was kind of a big deal. It was a commitment I didn't normally make.
I took that CD and Nina’s voice with me through the next decade of new homes, towns, and relationships. On one track Nina sings a Judy Collins song called “My Father.” It starts “My father always promised me that we would live in France.” Nina Simone gets a few lines into the song and she stops, mid-performance. She just stops and says, “I don’t want to sing this song. It’s not for me. [pause] My father always promised me that we would be free but he did not promise me that we would live in France.” WHAT??? WHO DOES THAT??? WHO WAS THIS WOMAN???? Who stops performing a song because it doesn’t feel authentic? Isn’t artifice the essence of show business???
Not to Nina Simone.
I took that CD and Nina’s voice with me through the next decade of new homes, towns, and relationships. On one track Nina sings a Judy Collins song called “My Father.” It starts “My father always promised me that we would live in France.” Nina Simone gets a few lines into the song and she stops, mid-performance. She just stops and says, “I don’t want to sing this song. It’s not for me. [pause] My father always promised me that we would be free but he did not promise me that we would live in France.” WHAT??? WHO DOES THAT??? WHO WAS THIS WOMAN???? Who stops performing a song because it doesn’t feel authentic? Isn’t artifice the essence of show business???
Not to Nina Simone.
It dawned on me several times that I was watching the premier of this Netflix original documentary on the very same day that President Obama spoke at Clementa Pickney’s funeral in Charleston, South Carolina. The seemingly endless string of recent race-based tragedies make Nina’s civil rights outrage feel not just timely but necessary.
As is stated several times in the film, Nina was a woman of her time and ahead of it. She was an avant garde musician whose experiments blew the mind of even Miles Davis. She was also a feminist badass who introduced herself to an already-famous Dr. Martin Luther King by walking up to him, getting right in his face and declaring, “I am not nonviolent.”
Always restless in her musical career, always dissatisfied Nina kept reaching for something more – even when audiences adored her. She seemed to be working on some other plane, using a measure of excellence unknown to the rest of us.
In one of her most famous songs she sang, “Oh god, please don’t let me be misunderstood.” But misunderstood is exactly what she was – during her life and in the decade that has followed. This film sheds new light on that misunderstood soul and introduced me to the woman behind the music, a woman I suspect very few knew.
In one of her most famous songs she sang, “Oh god, please don’t let me be misunderstood.” But misunderstood is exactly what she was – during her life and in the decade that has followed. This film sheds new light on that misunderstood soul and introduced me to the woman behind the music, a woman I suspect very few knew.
“What Happened, Miss Simone?” is now streaming on Netflix.
