Nina Simone at Montreux: A wounded lion roars
Montreux Jazz Festival is set to get underway in the next few days, and with it comes a plethora of excellent musicians who are ready to take to the stage and dominate it. The festival has a deep-rooted history that spans back decades, creating a place where both rising stars and the biggest names in music can flaunt what they have. From David Bowie to Marvin Gaye, some of the biggest stars in the world have graced this stage.
Here, we will be looking at Nina Simone’s performance at Montreux in 1976. She played the festival on a few separate occasions, but her 1976 performance was truly something special, as it saw Nina Simone at her most vulnerable. The large personality and dominating voice that people were obsessed with was twisted and contorted so that she was a shell of herself, the footage, subsequently, is quite sad to watch.
It’s not that Nine Simone wasn’t afraid to be vulnerable; her songs embraced pain, discrimination and heartbreak in a more honest way than most other tracks at the time. Take her song ‘Four Women’ for instance, which remains one of the greatest protest songs about racial discrimination ever made. Simone provides no solution in the song; she merely highlights the struggle that she and other people have gone through, and is unrelenting in her honesty.
“I am emphatically against the injustices of black people, of third world people. ‘Four Women’ came to me after conversations I had with black women,” Simone explained, “It seemed we were all suffering from self-hatred. We hated our complexions, our hair, our bodies. I realised we had been brainwashed into feeling this way about ourselves by some black men and many white people. I tried to speak to this in the song. And do you know, some black radio stations wouldn’t play it? It is true what they say: the truth hurts.”
Despite Simone never being afraid to display vulnerability in her music, it usually didn’t come through in her performances. When she took to the stage, she owned every single inch of it, her voice resonating through speakers, her larger-than-life personality cutting through the silence in between songs. This didn’t happen in ’76, though, as Simone was shaking when she took to the stage, seemingly lacking the confidence that she was famed for.
So, what was different with Simone? It all boiled down to her personal life, which seemed to have stripped her of joy and confidence. She was in the process of leaving the US and subsequently leaving an abusive relationship with her husband at the time. Simone wouldn’t reveal her relationship was abusive until a quarter of a century later, when she wrote about it in her memoir, I Put a Spell On You. As such, she wasn’t only going through this separation, but she was bottling up the reasons as to why she was doing it.
While it was a positive that Simone was leaving the country and this relationship, she was also leaving behind some of her close friends, and all of these changes were coming at great expense. The Nina Simone who took to the stage in Montreux in 1976 was lost and broke; she managed to scrape her way through her set, but it came with great difficulty.
When you watch the footage back, you can see how much Simone struggles with articulating her pain in a way that leaves up some form of curtain between herself and the crowd. While her vulnerability was persistently present in her music, it has never been more prevalent during a live performance than in 1976: Montreux Jazz Festival, the stage where a wounded lion roared.
