Nina Simone
Mon July 23, Benaroya Hall, $59.50/$69.50

While on vacation in rural Oregon several years ago, I visited a supermarket in the coastal town of Port Orford for fresh supplies (beer, crabs). It was Halloween weekend, so the store attendants were dressed like mermaids and pirates. Most of the customers also wore costumes, and like the cashiers, they selected unremarkable themes, except for a small group of teenage girls who were made up like streetwalkers. They wore sharp high heels, black fishnet stockings with rough-sex rips, miniskirts, and the sort of lace bustiers Madonna wore during her early whore/virgin period. The pleasures of wearing such costumes were certainly country pleasures, because in the imagination of rural folk the prostitute is the very symbol of sex in the city--lots of people, lots of lovers, lots of money. To don this fantasy of trashy threads was to play (or become) a city person.

The direct opposite of this form of play can be found in Billie Holiday's performance of "I Loves You, Porgy," which is a pastoral. Billie Holiday, the queen of concrete, pretends that she is a small-town girl, Bess, who is committed, like all small-town girls, to her one and only man, Porgy. When Billie sings this song it's all play, which is the correct thing to do because the song was composed by two cosmopolitans (the Gershwin brothers) who sourced the pastoral images and themes from our young nation's brief premodern period--the cemented order of the plantation. To perform "I Loves You, Porgy" in any other way is to violate the rules of the game, as Nina Simone did when she sang it on her 1958 debut album, Little Girl Blue.

Nina Simone's rendition of "I Loves You, Porgy" is not that of the worldly urbanite who derives pleasure from confining herself in and expressing her feelings through the limited reality of an imagined country person. No, with Nina Simone, Bess is suddenly real and dynamic. She removes all the fun and fantasy, and turns Bess into a flesh-and-blood woman who is in a desperate situation, torn by a wide range of difficult emotions. Unlike Lady Day's Bess, Nina offers the urban listener not an escape from complexity, but a return to, and immersion in, complexity.

A direct opposite of Nina Simone's radical revision of Ira and George Gershwin's pleasant pastoral figure would have her dressing up like a prostitute in some rural town, but without a hint of the fun, frivolity, or glamour of the Port Orford girls. Her prostitute is now in the cold world with bruises, diseases, an unscrupulous pimp, and very little cash, like the broken whore simply named Sweet Thing in her somber song "Four Women."

Nina Simone's portrayals are persistently honest--not the raw honesty of Bessie Smith, but an honesty arrived at through rigorous thought. Like Cecil Taylor and John Lewis, Nina Simone is an educated musician, and her art is the final product of long study and formal instruction. She learned Bach before she learned the blues, and so to say something like "the more I feel raw the more I listen to [Nina Simone]," as Cocteau Twins vocalist Elizabeth Fraser once said, is to misread Nina entirely. You listen to her not when you are raw, but when you are thoughtful.

Nina was born a Methodist and attended Juilliard, and the downward step she took from playing classical music in the conservatory to popular music in bars was so difficult, she changed her name from Eunice Waymon to Nina Simone (Nina meaning "girl" in Spanish, and Simone taken from the first name of the French actress Simone Signoret). During the rise and leveling of her fame in the '60s, she was closely associated with the black intelligentsia: James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and so on. This is why to this day she doesn't like to be compared with Billie Holiday (a crime I've committed in this article), whom she once called "a drug addict," but rather with those who are educated and recognized as serious artists.

The combination of her commitment to her art, her snobbery, and her strong political opinions has produced a durable American. Nina will never age, even if her body withers, because, like an ancient professor, her mind is of greater value than the condition of her flesh. This is why we still bother to watch her, as well as listen to her bitter but beautiful music.