Nina Simone’s ‘You’ve Got to Learn’

The lost recording of the legendary singer and pianist’s set at the 1966 Newport Jazz Festival is powerful and pristine

What does this lost live recording of Nina Simone from 1966 tell us about gender, race and all the litanies of inequality within? What does it tell us about love and suffering? Everything, all at once.

You’ve Got to Learn was recorded at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1966. Simone played on day two, between Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz, and an hour or two after John Coltrane, who died the following year. The backdrop was the US civil rights uprising, to which Simone had devoted herself as an activist and spokesperson from the moment of the Birmingham, Alabama church bombing of 1963, in which four Black girls were killed. As the ’60s wore on, she became increasingly militant — separatist, even — before temporarily quitting music to exile herself in the Caribbean, then Africa, escaping a violent, controlling husband in the process. Simone never lived in America again. In the 2015 documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?, archival footage shows her referring to the “United Snakes”, where structural racism was “a cancer”. She died in 2003 in France.

But in 1966 Simone was a central voice in the race movement, along with Curtis Mayfield, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Charles Mingus and Aretha Franklin. Her friend Malcolm X — who had called for Black separatism before leaving the Nation of Islam — had already been killed, shot 21 times. She had performed a politically charged set at the infamous Alabama protest marches led by Martin Luther King Jr. He was still alive, but not for long.

This was Black Lives Matter and “I Can’t Breathe”, but nearly 60 years ago, at a time when the United States had seen almost an entire decade of sustained riots and killings. The great jazz and blues singer/pianist was right at the core of things. Offstage, too, she was suffering at the hands of Andrew Stroud — her husband and manager, and a former New York policeman — and her bipolar disorder was as yet undiagnosed.

How wonderful, then, to hear her sing the Gershwin brothers’ fragile, helpless “I Loves You, Porgy”, from her 1959 debut record, performed from inside the fire, inside the febrile political climate of the ’60s. How powerful to hear her pause in the middle of the all-but a cappella “Be My Husband” (written by Stroud) to say “it’s nice out here in this wind”. As if the wind was the only hopeful thing in the world at that moment. She takes her pause and then continues the raw, tempestuous blues about being beaten and disrespected: “…please don’t treat me so doggone mean”.

The centrepiece of the set is a re-imagined version of “Mississippi Goddam”, perhaps Simone’s most vital plea for racial equality and her angriest, most incendiary song. Banned from broadcast in several Southern states, it was written in the immediate aftermath of the Birmingham bombings, and composed in a list format cataloguing the cities and states where discrimination and murder had occurred. Here, she changes it from a sort of show tune to a traditional blues, and in doing so somehow takes the intensity up several notches. It’s an incredible rendition of a very important song, and it seems here to be a ’60s blueprint for contemporary site-specific protests by African-American artists such as Public Enemy (“By the Time I Get To Arizona”) or Childish Gambino/Donald Glover (“This Is America”).

The recording is released by the jazz label Verve, in what would have been Simone’s 90th year, after being unearthed by a scholar at the US Library of Congress. The sound quality is flawless; the quartet of piano, guitar, double bass and drums sounds intimate, close and pristine. You can hear Simone muttering to the band and to the crowd, and you can hear feet tapping onstage. And you can hear Nina Simone breathing — in, out, in, out. Fingers on piano keys, double-bass strings vibrating. It’s short — only 33 minutes — but this was the length of a set back then. For something so brief, so seemingly small, You’ve Got to Learn holds multitudes.

Originally published at https://www.themonthly.com.au on August 18, 2023.