Power Players: Farewell Party? Not This TimePartners go to new firms this time of year—and some do it very quietly. more Washington Read: February 2010
Princess Noire By Nadine Cohodas True callings often stir in the dust of jilted dreams. William Faulkner wanted to be a poet, George Bernard Shaw a painter, Martin Scorsese a priest. Eunice Waymon was dead set on becoming a classical pianist when Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music rejected her application in 1951. That washout, as Washington writer Nadine Cohodas writes in Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone, turned into a watershed for Waymon. In response, she started tickling the ivories at an Atlantic City nightclub. It turned out the pianist had both pipes and panache. She added ballads and show tunes to her repertoire of Bach and Debussy, learned to dress down boisterous onlookers, and, to avoid her Methodist mother’s rebuff at playing the devil’s melody, took the stage name Nina Simone. The career in jazz and soul music that followed was turbulent and seminal. Simone camped on the fringe of the pop-music charts yet gained iconic status by sticking to her songbook and crafting evocative, sometimes confrontational, live performances. Like Frank Sinatra’s, Simone’s voice—which in songs like “Sinnerman” and “Feeling Good” could both seduce and scald—became richer with age yet remained “the third layer,” as she called it, “complementing the other two layers, my right and left hands.” more |
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