Nina simone last photo
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An analysis of the musical interpretations of Nina Simone
AN ANALYSIS OF THE MUSICAL INTERPRETATIONS OF NINA SIMONE by JESSIE L. FREYERMUTH B.M., Kansas State University, 2008 A THESIS submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree MASTER OF MUSIC Department of Music College of Arts and Sciences KANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY Manhattan, Kansas 2010 Approved by: Major Professor Dale Ganz Copyright JESSIE L. FREYERMUTH 2010 Abstract Nina Simone was a prominent jazz musician of the late 1950s and 60s. Beyond her fame as a jazz musician, Nina Simone reached even greater status as a civil rights activist. Her music spoke to the hearts of hundreds of thousands in the black community who were struggling to rise above their status as a second-class citizen. Simone’s powerful anthems were a reminder that change was going to come. Nina Simone’s musical interpretation and approach was very unique because of her background as a classical pianist. Nina’s untrained vocal chops were a perfect blend of rough growl and smooth straight-tone, which provided an unquestionable feeling
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Nina Simone: Singer, Songwriter, Civil Rights Campaigner
Born to a Christian family on February 21st, 1933; Nina was the sixth child to a North Carolina preacher, Mary Kate Waymon and Handyman, John Divine Waymon.
Early aspirations for the Civil Rights campaigner would be to become a concert pianist, which would lead her to audition at Curtis Institiute of Music in Philadelphia, but was sadly rejected; a decision she felt was based on her Race.
Taking up studies in Music at Juilliard School of Music in New York would be expensive and Nina took a job playing as a pianist at Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City. However, despite the knoweldge that her studies could not be funded by her parents, she also knew that her parents would not approve of playing ‘the Devils music’, and thus adopted the name Nina Simone in 1951.
Inspired by the names of “Nina” (from niña, meaning ‘little girl’ in Spanish), and “Simone” -taken from the French actress Simone Signoret, whom she had seen in the movie Casque d’or, Nina Simon
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Nina Simone
A biographer’s fantasy
About a dozen years ago, when I began research for a book about Nina Simone, most of what there was to read were biographies. At least six had been published in English since her death in 2003, plus a couple more in French, all in addition to her own account, I Put a Spell on You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone, published in 1991. The biographies proved to be favorable and often honest about the complexities of their subject, yet I stumbled again and again across the limitations of the genre. Biographies traffic in facts, things that can be consciously, explicitly, socially known—which is also to say, shared. But, for the person living a life, it is not, or not only, empirical facts so much as more subjective thoughts and feelings that accumulate into that life. Looking for somewhere else to establish a rapport between what is documented and what is felt, I turned to fantasy.
Fantasy matters because the lives we live, as Adam Phillips once observed, are animated by the lives we don’t. The power of this elegant observation
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