The best 1940s piano player Nina Simone ever heard: “My very favourite”
To anyone who doesn’t really know or understand the genre, jazz is fairly difficult to define, but to those whose connection to the genre runs bone-deep, like Nina Simone, there’s nothing that comes close to being quite as musically liberating or emotionally profound.
To understand Simone’s deeper connection to jazz, you must first understand her love for classical music, which was, after all, her first love, something she believed to be her true calling ever since she first discovered the way it made her come alive. And had she not faced societal and systemic prejudice from the get-go, that’s no doubt where she would have ended up.
One of the first classical musicians to inspire Simone was JS Bach, who, for Simone, was the ultimate master of complex arrangements who set an entirely new standard for modern music. “Once I understood Bach’s music, I wanted to be a concert pianist,” she once said, “Bach made me dedicate my life to music, and it was that teacher who introduced me to his world.”
When fate pushed her in a different direction, Simone began singing jazz around clubs in New Jersey, releasing her debut album, Little Girl Blue, in 1959. She would eventually gravitate towards the soul and pop arenas, but her love for jazz and acknowledgement of its importance in the mainstream landscape never wavered.
In fact, she claimed that the big, great jazz players, both past and present, are “as great as Bach, Beethoven; all of them”. She also said that this seems to be some sort of secret that so few people know about or appreciate, and that only once jazz is “put on a pedestal as an art form”, much like classical music, people will respect it the way it should be.
While there are endless threads of discussion about why, exactly, jazz remains one of the most important genres of music, for Simone, it often came down to the simple act of feeling. It was the way a good jazz tune could make her think or feel things that she couldn’t in any other way that made it so powerful, which is also something she once tried to explain, saying, “It’s something else. It really gets you”.
Perhaps, then, the only thing that truly explains just how much it meant to her was her love for piano player Oscar Peterson. One of the all-time jazz greats, Peterson was labelled by his peers as “the man with four hands”, not only because of his technical proficiency but because of how he accomplished a fast-paced, fuller sound, embodying the true spirit and enduring appeal of modern-day jazz excellence.
Peterson also excelled in the one area that Simone also dedicated her life to: breaking down racial barriers and uniting all. As a Black Canadian artist from a working-class neighbourhood, Peterson was a living embodiment of breaking the glass ceiling, not only challenging the ongoing underbelly of industry racism but proving that those outside of America could also rub shoulders with the greats and become one themselves.
Songs like Peterson’s 1962’s ‘Hymn to Freedom’ were also claimed as an unofficial civil rights movement anthem, championing the power and significance of equality and coming together during times of struggle. No wonder, then, that Simone once called the jazz pioneer “my very favourite”.
