“It’s as close to God as I know”: Nina Simone once named the eight masters of music
“I know what God is, but I do not believe in any denomination,” Nina Simone once said, “Music is my God.” To Dr Simone, as she liked to be known, talent was a divine gift. A great song was a gift from above as the closest thing to religion she’d ever found. So if music is godly, the artists she saw as the ultimate masters must be some kind of saints.
It could be argued that jazz is the origin of all music or is music in its purest form. While rock, pop or even folk music is invested in the idea of form and craft, with verses and choruses and a pattern of sounds, jazz is about simply letting the music happen. When a jazz band plays together, it’s an act of mind-reading as they improvise around each other and craft something out of nothing. More so than any other genre, jazz requires a collective experience where all the players, for a moment in time, exist in a unique and united space. They’re all keeping their minds open to letting ideas and sounds float in and take control of them, following not much more than pure instinct.
To Simone, the ability to do that and do that well is heavenly. “The structure, the cleanliness, the tone, the – nuances, the implications, the silences, the dynamics, the pianissimos, the fortissimos, all have to do with sound and music, and it’s, it’s as close to God as I know,” she said. It’s one thing to understand all those techniques and be able to do them skillfully, but to be able to do them with flair and “nuance” as she says, that’s where the divine seems to come in.
“Many many jazz masters knew what they were doing,” she added, picking out the best of the best. “[John] Coltrane, Dizzie Gillespie,” she mentions first. Coltrane was one of the leading figures in the world of bebop and helped pioneer the free jazz movement. Gillespie was right there, too, even helping to teach Miles Davis how to play trumpet, which was a major influence on the jazz crowd.
From student to master, Simone also grants Davis that title as she states, “Miles Davis is a master.” Buzzing around the same New York scene, she also says, “Duke Ellington was unquestionably one”. Ellington and Davis would have worked together if the latter hadn’t declined the invite. But that, too, feels like divine intervention, allowing Davis to pioneer his own path and join the ranks of his idols as a peer rather than in the shadows as one of their band members.
“Art Blakey is one,” she said of the jazz drummer. Blakey was another member of the distinctive New York jazz crowd that included Charlie Parker, Gillespie and more. It’s a scene that Simone dreamed of as she added, “I wished [to] god I could play with him.”
Next on her list, she picks out two powerful pianists. “We have, of course, Art Tatum,” she said of the player who dramatically helped expand the sound and style of jazz with his take on stride or ragtime music. Then she said, “One of the greatest pianists in the world is Oscar Peterson”, mentioning the Canadian musician who won eight Grammys for his efforts.
When it comes to the best musicians in history, she’s also willing to look beyond jazz to recognise seemingly god-given talent elsewhere. “The cleanliness of classical music – not all of it, some of it is too cold,” she admitted before saying, “But Bach was a master.”
“I only like masters,” Simone declared. There’s no arguing that the singer herself was amongst those ranks with a gift that seemed too incredible to be earthy. It surely must have been heaven-sent.
