Why Nina Simone initially regretted being a musician: “I got carried away”
Growing up, it was Nina Simone’s dream to be a classical musician.
“I wanted to be the world’s first Black concert pianist for 22 years,” she once said. “I certainly like the idea that I have the bearing of one because at least I can relate to that when I play these jazz songs that I have to play at my concerts all the time.”
Simone was trained in classical music from an early age, but, as with many of her peers, prejudice stopped her from getting the opportunities that her heart longed for. As her daughter, Lisa Celeste ‘Simone’ Stroud, would later say, Simone’s rejection wasn’t for lack of talent or trying – she put in hours of hard work every day for up to seven years. It was “because of how you look”.
However, from birth, Simone had been engraved with a desire to push and push when it came to what she believed in and what she felt was right. She put her foot down when she was set to perform at church if her parents weren’t allowed to sit up front, and only took on material she felt a connection to. Well into her career, she became a fighting name for all those who’d ever felt oppressed by racism and prejudice, allowing space for voices who’d never felt heard before.
Simone found in classical music everything that she didn’t struggle with in daily life – “cleanliness”. On the core principle of classical, she once said that it was the sole reason it was better than any other genre or discipline, for that matter. In her view, its varying dynamics are as “close to God as I know”, especially when it comes to tone and structure, and the interplay between volume and silence that casts nuances of emotional hues.
But Simone’s “misused talents”, as Nick Cave once called them, were never pieces of her artistry that sat docile because of one rejection from the Curtis Institute – Simone always played classical infused with other parts of other genres and musicians, but the setback made her feel she had taken a different path. That was until one day, she realised she had been living her dream all along, she’d just forgotten the right wording for it.
As she later reflected, she felt a lot of regret about the musical path she had taken, feeling as though she wasn’t the type of musician that she wanted to be. “It pushed me toward show business,” she admitted during The Katz Tapes. “I’ll be honest with you. Until about a year ago, I still regretted it. Then somebody here in Amsterdam gave me a recording, which I have on right now, of Africans playing classical music, with two violins, viola, cello, choir and drums. And then I didn’t look back anymore.”
She went on, “I realised that my music is black classical music too. That’s what I had been saying all along, but then I got carried away. And because the people in America always say that we play only jazz because we are black, I had stopped saying that what I play is black classical music until a week ago. Then it all of a sudden all made sense what I have been playing all these years. Even though I got turned down by Curtis, it’s still playing black classical music. It’s just infused with classical training, like the Africans I have on this tape.”
Considering Simone’s delayed realisation, all of the familiar markings of Simone’s music make a lot more sense. Again, as Cave put it, it was often her passion and rage that made her music so good. And a lot of this came from different pillars of existence, from growing up and knowing early on what it was like to be disadvantaged by racist systems, to experiencing them in more detrimental and literal ways in adulthood.
Still, despite the challenges, she pursued the path she’d always wanted, even if she didn’t always know it. As she once said, an artist’s duty is to reflect the times, and while she might not have had the label she desired from the off, she certainly earned it in the foundations of her expression, and in the ripple effect of being someone so powerful in spite of the world around them.
