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Learning from Nina Simone how to be a the musician above Good and Devil


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When you search for the greatest jazz singers/artists of the last century you usually find Nina Simone among them,



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..but as a professional musician is inevitable to not listen to her sometimes unpleasant tone, how “out of pitch she is in some moments”, or how her voice usually cracks between registers.





Impressively, her register is extremely limited (she keeps around one octave for melodies between the 3 and 4 octave), which makes her usually transpose her main songs in only four key signatures. (1)


She also stays in her chest voice, expressing her singing only through her “speaking tone”.


So, how is she defined as one of the best singers ever?



The reason is clear to me, and she explains in many interviews out there - All her energy is focused on transmitting emotions to the audience through her voice, but she doesn’t care about her singing tone itself.


In this interview, she explains even further. She defines her performances as “Intelligent delivery of emotions”







In the book ¨I Got Thunder: Black Women Songwriters on Their Craft¨ by LaShonda Barnett She says:


If I am singing a protest song, it is crucial that the audience feel the way I feel. They have to understand the injustice that I am trying to name, you see. If I am singing something intimate, I want utter silence and I want an audience that I can see, so I know whom I’m singing to. I am very concerned with the perfection of my piano playing and articulating the song’s message, but I don’t worry about my voice.21

Following on this, there are more interesting things about how intensely connected she is with the audience during her performance. If her audience refused her performance in any way, or showed some type of disrespect, she was known to shout and storm off stage, throw tantrums, or sit in silence until they obliged.


She definitely cared about the audience listening to her, and everything is connected to her final performance itself.


Check out this example if you think I am joking about it:





All these interesting facts point us to us that she is “that type of artist¨.


THAT TYPE OF ARTIST WHICH IS ABOVE GOOD AND EVIL

To be honest, I love her performances and recordings, I love it when she is a bit sour in her tone (I know, is not all the time, :P), and I love when her voice cracks, because how she can transmit with her piano playing, arrangements and singing goes beyond earth.


For me, she represents that kind of artist connected with the real ardour of music, who make us think, Is perfectionism relevant when we are working in the real artistry of emotions in music?




Even if her octaves on Singing Carrots (if I am not wrong is a machine that checks all songs published and analyse them automatically) are define at 3.5 when you check the songs itself you can see that they are usually between the octave 3-4 of range (lower octave of contraalto) adding some little notes or higher or lower. She keeps her key signatures as four in her main songs (of course, she has performed all her live and we will always find exceptions ) But the main ones are G, B, Bb, A-



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