“You’ve Got to Learn (Live)” by Nina Simone
A new, definitive live recording of Simone the activist.
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Welcome to a new edition of the Best Music of All Time newsletter!
Today’s music pick is an exceptional live recording that showcases Nina Simone at the height of her powers.
Genre: Jazz, Soul
Label: Verve
Release Date: July 21, 2023
Vibe: 🥲
Amid all the posthumous compilations and reissues that bear her name, You’ve Got to Learn (Live) still feels like a landmark in the Nina Simone canon. It’s the first-ever release of her famous 1966 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, a moment when her star was at its absolute height as both a musician and activist. The Civil Rights March in Selma had taken place a year earlier, and it would be another two years before Martin Luther King Jr. would be killed while standing on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis. This context gives you a window into the pain and urgency behind Simone’s performance. Her voice, famously weighty to begin with, is even grittier and, at times, heartbreakingly strained, matching the stripped-down, uncompromising arrangements that frame it. As the fight for black liberation was reaching a boiling point in the United States, here she sat, at one of the nation’s most prestigious jazz showcases, letting all her emotions hang out.
Well-known Simone staples are given a new sense of vitality in this collection of recordings. For example, “I Loves You, Porgy,” the standard that made her a star in the first place, sounds much sadder and bleaker than we’re used to hearing from her. Ditto for the opening title track, which swaps out the subdued string arrangements for a forlorn piano that adds depth to lyrics like, "Facing reality is often hard to do/When it seems happiness is gone.” But, without a doubt, the centerpiece here is the fiery version of “Mississippi Goddamn,” the song Simone wrote following horrifying incidents of racial violence in 1963, including the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Legend has it that it took her less than an hour to pen what would later become a rallying cry for civil rights advocates nationwide, and you can hear that anger and disgust in every syllable. By comparison, the 1964 recording of the same song at Carnegie Hall feels almost quaint, a tonal code-switch surely meant to appeal to a primarily white audience. This is the definitive version of “Goddamn,” and maybe of Simone as an incomparable singer/activist.
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