Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 18

Record label: Bethlehem

Producer: Unknown

Recorded: New York City; 1957

Released: 1958

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Nina Simone (v, p); Jimmy Bond (b); Albert Heath (d)

Track listing: Mood Indigo; Don’t Smoke In Bed; He Needs Me; Little Girl Blue; Love Me Or Leave Me; My Baby Just Cares For Me; Good Bait; Plain Gold Ring; You’ll Never Walk Alone; I Loves You Porgy (S); Central Park Blues

Running time: 45.73

Current CD: Charly CPCD8240-2 reissued as Lady Blue; adds concert album

Further listening: Anthology: The Colpix Years (1996), a double-CD that features late ’50s and ’60s tracks taken from the diva’s nine albums for the Colpix label

Further reading: I Put A Spell On You (Nina Simone with Stephen Cleary, 1991), an autobiography that, naturally enough, provides the Simone point of view; www.boscarol.com/nina/

Download: iTunes

According to Nina, this was her second album. ‘The first album I ever made was a pirate that I never got paid for and knew nothing about.’ But Jazz As Played In An Exclusive Side Street Club – or Little Girl Blue as it is also known – which turned up in countless guises (and continues to do so) is the release that immediately established her as a unique performer, one who refused to be categorised – though record companies have repeatedly attempted to place Nina in ‘file under’ situations according to whichever trend is under scrutiny at the time.

Signed to Bethlehem, a jazz label, the singer-pianist born Eunice Waymon found that her debut was initially sidelined into jazz racks. But a hit single, culled from the album I Loves You Porgy, timed to coincide with the release of the film musical Porgy And Bess, did provide her with a wider audience. Doubtless, those encountering the album for the first time experienced confusion. Certainly jazz pervaded several tracks, but Nina’s instrumental version of Dizzy Gillespie’s Good Bait proved as much Bach as bebop, while Duke Ellington might have faced difficulty recognising the intro to his Mood Indigo.

‘I came to despise popular songs and I never played them for my own amusement,’ Nina claimed at the time. ‘Why should I when I could be playing Bach, Czerny or Liszt?’ So things were hardly what they seemed on the track listing; even Little Girl Blue somehow mutated into Good King Wenceslas! But her late-night loner ballads – Don’t Smoke In Bed and He Needs Me – are always moving, and Central Park Blues proves that she could provide a straightforward, heads-down, swinging instrumental if it took her fancy. In all probability, her now famous version of My Baby Just Cares For Me, with its rum-ti-tum rhythm and final lick nicked from Eddie Heywood’s Begin The Beguine, was just Nina being perverse: ‘It was the last song we did and I spent the next three days playing Beethoven to get the recording session out of my system.’ Whatever she thought about it, it’s an album that still reveals hidden facets.