Why Nina Simone believed music transcended all other art forms: “It’s like God”
Nina Simone was undeniably one of the last true heroes who understood the holistic value of music. As a cultural tool, she saw it as a weapon for both unity and combat, something that spoke to the nature of the world, revealed all its flaws, and beckoned it to do better. As an art form, it crept into her soul like a kind of divinity, making her feel things she never even knew possible.
While anyone could say they think music transcends all other means to feel something, holding value that few (or no) other art forms do, Simone recognised the same things in things like jazz that Billie Holiday and countless others did, in that it was never really about adhering to a set of defining characteristics but creating something that felt real in the moment, something that made you feel.
Whenever she talked about her heroes, or those she claimed the ultimate “masters” of the craft, from Miles Davis to John Coltrane, it was always underscored by her belief in its power to enlighten beyond anything imaginable, like she’d stumbled upon all the answers one day and vowed to tell everybody about it, or anybody who’d listen, or even better – anybody who had suffered as much as she, and looked tirelessly for an outlet to experience something worthwhile again.
“I know what God is, but I do not believe in any denomination,” she once said, “Music is my God.” As the crux of everything we know and love about music, jazz initially attracted Simone because it offered a sense of freedom – a liberation from the perils of having to subscribe to something just because, or from the burden of having to be something that others deem successful, because jazz was never concerned about such vanity.
Nor was it about putting structure first. Yes, jazz introduced many structures we still very much encounter in today’s scene, but the rules were largely no rules, simply celebrating the act of letting music be. An almost transcendental state whenever a group got together to erupt into a jazz number that required a different dynamic, each switched on to the nth degree, though not so much that it made everything feel stiff and pre-conceived. It was a highly intellectual act of push and pull, a state of connection and improvisation, in a way that felt natural yet densely interlinked.
“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,” Simone explained, taking it a step further by describing music and jazz as something that made her experience something else, something almost indescribable by words, purely because it placed her in the kind of mindset she could never access elsewhere.
“Music is one of the ways by which you can know everything which is going on in the world,” she said, reflecting another statement she made about an artist’s duty reflecting “the times”. She continued, saying you can “feel” through music – the “vibrations of everybody in the world at any given moment”.
Through music, she added, “You can learn mathematics, touch, pacing…Oh my God! Ooh…Wow…You can see colours through music. Anything! Anything human can be felt through music, which means that there is no limit to the creating that can be done with music. You can take the same phrase from any song and cut it up so many different ways. It’s infinite.”
While most of us would recognise the passion behind her words, nodding along in agreement about how music is the art form that does indeed transcend all others, studying all those she placed in high regard (not just Coltrane and Davis, but Art Blakey, Duke Ellington, Dizzie Gillespie, and so on too) also reveals that she believed jazz wasn’t something you learnt but something you just had. Something you instinctively understood, because you, too, believed it held some otherworldly power that was either gifted upon you or it wasn’t.
