By many estimations Nina Simone was the height of cool. She was also the height of narcissism, as well as paranoia and pride.
Simone, the classically trained pianist from Tryon, North Carolina who wanted to be a concert performer but instead became an jazz and blues icon, is the subject of Nadine Cohodas’ biography “Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone.”
A child prodigy born Eunice Waymon to enterprising parents in 1930s South, Simone caught her first musical break when she found the ear of a local white woman who agreed to sponsor the girl. Sent to another local white woman for piano lessons, Eunice progressed quickly. She regularly played her way through the heavyweights of classical composition as a child, demonstrating a keen affection for Bach.
From Tryon, Eunice made her way to Philadelphia, then a summer at the famed Julliard School in New York. Her goal was admission to the prestigious Curtis School of Music, where she intended to study classical piano, then go onto a career on the philharmonic stage.
What happened instead was a simple twist of fate. Cohodas provides a combination of speculation, hyperbole, and legend, retold by those who knew Simone best, to show the trajectory of her subsequent career. Rejected by Curtis, a now teenage Eunice Waymon earned money the only way she could, playing piano wherever she could.
Cohodas suggests the Curtis snub cut Eunice to the quick. “Over the ensuing half century that moment of despair would resurface, sometimes unexpectedly, with all the anguish of a fresh betrayal, and it would shape forever how she viewed her past.”
Over the next 50 years, navigating the civil rights movement, befriending literary luminaries such as Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry, Simone earned a reputation as a champion of black rights, but also as a diva who could subject her audiences to both scorn and diatribe. She rarely started a show on time, and never missed a chance to speak out on race.
“Princess Noire” plumbs these musical and social depths of one of America’s most compelling voices.
