Here She Comes Now by Jeff Gordinier

Author:Jeff Gordinier
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2015-06-26T20:01:44+00:00

Nina, Goddam!

Katell Keineg

Nina Simone doesn’t have the most beautiful of voices, but whenever I hear her magnificent contralto with its slight trill and its miracle of phrasing, I start to cry. This is sometimes inconvenient. I might be in a bar, attempting to carry on a conversation, as the flow of my speech becomes strange, or in a shop trying to pretend that all is well and that I have something huge in my eye. Sometimes, as when I first saw her play, in 1999, it’s okay. On that occasion, in Dublin, I arrived at the enormous venue with my friend Ashley, excited beyond belief. We sat down far at the back of the shed and settled ourselves in silence. Nina appeared, the first bars sounded, and out came the voice.

It’s a weird thing when you’ve spent years hearing someone whom you’ve never seen. You stare: that person is attached to that voice. (It happened later with Mercedes Sosa in London, when she was playing one of her last concerts. I was there with my brother and I couldn’t connect the body to the sound.)

I don’t remember what Nina Simone sang first in 1999, I just remember what happened. I started crying. Not a sob, just tears rolling and rolling without end. After several songs, I turned to Ashley and saw that her face was as red and wet as mine. She looked at me and before we knew it, we were laughing hysterically, silently heaving to the annoyance of those around us. Then we went back to crying. It was the beauty of it all, the fluidity, the agility, the depth.

I’m not a music critic; I don’t blog and I don’t tweet. I’ve never written prose beyond school essays and the odd paragraph for a newspaper at album release time. I never think about what I think about music. But why is it that the sound of Nina Simone shatters me like that? Creating a sort of trouncing—a peak experience.

When I heard her for the first time, it was around 1992 in Dublin and I was having my hair cut at someone’s house. A friend of my boyfriend at the time was snipping away and she put on a cassette, probably taped from vinyl. I had heard the Hothouse Flowers play “See­Line Woman” a few years before and someone had told me that it was a Nina Simone song but I had never sought out the original.

The music got rolling and I immediately thought, What is this? This is incredible! I heard the gospel double­time and the walking bass. The jagged, syncopated groove and the otherworldly piano. The men’s chorus in counterpoint, clapping, call-and-response, tambourine, filigree guitar winding over the rest. In the middle of it was her voice, laying waste to everything around her. I have a distinct memory of sitting in the chair with the scissors at my head. All had stopped.

Soon after, when I moved to New York, my own tapes came with me, copied from here, there, and everywhere.

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