Intrigued with recent documentary about Nina Simone - who was fascinating personality, no matter from which side you look at her - I dived head on into this book and almost half way trough it already. Author Nadine Cohodas is an old friend, I read her books about recording company Chess and biography of Dinah Washington so I kind of had idea how she writes - she is very detailed, perhaps excessively so sometimes but has very interesting opinions and a gift for connecting the dots, in short her books & subjects are often fascinating. You can tell she have done her homework, its just that lists of dates and names occasionally makes the dry reading.
As I am still reading, I will note just a few things here:
Simone was nurtured into classical piano player from an early age. Other siblings have to stay away from piano and no one else was allowed to play because little Simone would get enraged. Sounds familiar? Contrary to her lifelong hatred of white people, Simone can actually thank to white patrons for helping her from the very start: it was white lady, Mrs.Miller who paid for music lessons with Mrs.Mazzanovich and dear "Mazzy" who taught her about right posture, how to enter the stage, present herself and impress the audience. Mazzy must have been impressed with her protégé because once Simone had returned home on a school break and held her own classical recital, teacher couldn't help but show off a little bit and played a few notes on piano, while asking Simone to identify them, with her back turned to the piano.
The book is also interesting because it double-checks Simone's own peculiar and selective memory: you can call it artistic point of view or simply her own narcissistic, self-delusional perspective but most of the time she would twist and turn the facts until they suited her stories and no doubts she would believe in them herself later. After all, who was there to challenge her? One of the facts is: she wanted to became first black female classical pianist and great tragedy of her life was that she was not admitted to music academy, in her opinion "because I was poor and black". Reality check: there were already quite a few black female pianists in United States already well known (Natalie Hinderas, for one). The teacher on that very same music academy claims: "Oh no, it had nothing to do with her colour or her background. She wasn’t accepted because there were others who were better, and that was the whole posture of the Curtis Institute. She wasn’t a genius, but she had talent." And from here you have roots of anger, frustration and hatred that Simone continuously felt towards what she perceived as white racism but what if she never played that darn piano, what destination and turn would her life otherwise have? In that case she would be just another angry, moody and frustrated woman with incredibly bad temper. It was because of her music talent that all of this was accepted, though I must say that reading about her constant outbursts towards audience - right now I am at the point where she left classical music and started performing in night clubs - gets a bit tiresome. You get a feeling she was a self-deluded prima donna who demanded respect and was quite adamant about it, without any charm or persuasion. As much as I liked her music, I believe that in real life I would not have any patience for her.
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