Nina Simone
Baltimore
The most artistically fertile period of Nina Simone's life had been over for years before the release of 1978's Baltimore. Simone had allegedly ended up divorced by accident, when her husband and manager interpreted a 1970 flight to Barbados as a signal to end their relationship, she found herself in danger of prosecution for unpaid taxes in the US, and in 1974, she released a perfunctory live album to little success to finish off her RCA Records contract. Baltimore, an album she recorded for the soon-to-be bankrupt CTI Records, wasn't even an album she cared much for, a fact she made clear multiple times before her death in 2003. She didn't like the cover art, she didn't care for the song selection, and she felt the musical arrangements were over the top.
To Simone's credit, there's some validity to all her complaints. The album art is an unflattering picture of a woman who--while never a standard beauty--deserved better than to look like some kind of mawkish clown. The song selection is weird, with tracks written by people like Pixar's Randy Newman, folk-icon Judy Collins and, most bizarrely of all, Hall. (Yes, as in Hall and Oates.) The arrangements--well, that's where Nina and I start to disagree--they aren't too bad, although there is a tendency for some of them to go a bit too far from the voice they're meant to support. But overall? Nina was wrong. Baltimore is an excellent album, from start to finish. It's a snapshot of a woman whose voice can at times seem capable of doing absolutely anything, a vocal style that's so wide-ranging that it seeks out any open crevice to coat the music surrounding it, a husky growl that adds texture to backing woodwinds that couldn't have otherwise been there, a personality that grabs ahold of one of Newman's standard "city" songs and brings it in a transcendent, personal direction that the lyrics barely make possible. Bernard Ighner's "Everything Must Change", the gospel pieces that close the album, all point to a woman more than willing, once again, and not for the last time, to leave an acutely personal sense of desperation/anguish to a style of music that she sacrificed so much to master. While Baltimore lives on the tail end of Simone's innovative take on jazz and it may remain a sort of asterisked work due to her disinterest in what it contained, it stood, like her, exceptional, haunting, and beautiful.
-Tucker Stone, 2009
Listen to "Baltimore" at Mog
Now we're talking!!! Nina Simone is a force of nature! I think this might be my favorite Factual feature ever!!!
Posted by: Kenny Cather | 2009.05.06 at 15:57
Oh yes, I found this at a stoop sale years ago. I was lucky enough to see her live my first year of college, oh holy shit was she good.
Incredible presence on stage; maternal, soothing, and so fucking righteous.
Posted by: seth hurley | 2009.05.06 at 18:26