NINA SIMONE: Most things about the great soul-jazz diva, composer and pianist Nina Simone, who has died aged 70, were explosive. In conversation she was brooding, restless, oscillating between dignified deflections of personal questions and arias of indignation about the prejudices, aesthetic deafness and philistinism of the music business. She was an act to be handled like hot coals or priceless china.
To her audiences, particularly in the later years, she emitted an aura of fearful expectation that made one uncertain that, as part of the audience, one simply might not be good enough for her.
The build-up before she came on stage was part of the process of reminding the public that it was in the presence of genius and it should watch its step. MCs would list her string of honorary academic titles. She might be briefly seen hovering in the wings, in conversation with anxious flunkeys. Then she would appear, to tumultuous applause, people crowding to the front to pay homage.
Sometimes she would warm up slowly, singing as if partially absent, sometimes with bands too routine to match her soaring talent. It was as if she were absorbing the feel of the audience, weighing up its suitability for the deeper truths she could unveil.
Then all hell would break loose, and the whiplash tones of her voice would sharpen, her piano-playing would intensify, her baleful stares and brooding presence even softening into something like contentment.
A night-club was the best setting to hear her in - when she was regularly at Ronnie Scott's London club during the 1980s, she rarely seemed so much at home - but the situation didn't square with her stature later on. At the Barbican in 1997, she confirmed that she had arrived on that pedestal where her essence had very nearly been refined to a mere presence in the building.
Like all the century's great American singers, Simone embodied a struggle between the optimism of a culture being born and the pessimism occasioned by its cost.
Frank Sinatra symbolised a collision between street-sharp machismo and the aftermath of broken dreams; Ella Fitzgerald a tension between a child's exhilaration and an adult's sense of past and future; Betty Carter a narrow bridge between sensuality and irony.
Simone's music was about love and respect - and their opposites, particularly in relation to race. She often seemed to be considering these matters afresh in the course of a performance, and to be confronting the pleasure and distress of life so close to the edge of a parapet that an audience hung on her every move, uncertain as to whether or not she would fall off.
Sometimes she did, but mostly she didn't, unleashing performances of reckless, blazing dignity that resembled those of no other singer-pianist in the business.
She was born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina. She had perfect pitch, learnt the piano quickly, and her mother wanted her to be the world's greatest classical pianist, the first black one. She often declared she would have preferred it, believing that the seriousness of her intent would have been better recognised, and her vulnerability to the machinations of the popular entertainment industry reduced.
Although she was closely identified with the civil rights movement in the 1960s, for such anthems as Mississippi Goddam (a Carolina radio station smashed the promotional copies and returned them when it was released) and Young, Gifted and Black, she resisted portrayal as a campaigning black artist only. She would declare that she felt as powerfully drawn to the oppositional elements of European culture, too, particularly to the prophetic works of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. There's No Returning, from Mahagonny, was one of the most spine-chilling features of Simone concerts in the 1970s and 1980s.
Asked, in 1970, how she became interested in music, she replied: "Music is a gift and a burden I've had since I can remember who I was. I was born into music. The decision was how to make the best use of it."
As a child, she played the piano and sang in church, but considered her singing to be secondary until obliged by night-club owners to sing or lose the gig. She had played blues and gospel from the age of three, but in the course of piano lessons she discovered Bach, whose sense of form and proportion she considered as significant an influence as the blues.
Simone went to the Juilliard School of Music in New York in 1950, but by 1954 had discovered how tough it would be for a black performer to make headway in the classical world, and begun working as a singer-pianist in the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City. Her first recording session for the Bethlehem label came three years later, as did her first marriage, which lasted a year.
Her career took off in 1959 and 1960. There were high-profile concerts, a hit with the Gershwins' I Loves You Porgy, appearances at the Newport festival, Rhode Island, and the Ed Sullivan Show.
Until then, Simone had been singing love songs, but she took on the racial issue as the civil rights movement swelled. She felt that black politics accounted for circumstances she had partially understood since childhood - the different worlds, for instance, when she had crossed the tracks to visit her white piano teacher.
She declared then that, while love songs had been her principal inspiration, there was a love that superseded it, the one that could bring her people together to secure their rights. Mississippi Goddam was an enraged reaction to the deaths of four children in the bombing of a Sunday school in Birmingham, Alabama, in September 1963.
Through the civil rights movement Simone grew increasingly absorbed with African-American history, and a long-standing interest in Africa began, culminating in a close association with Liberia in the 1970s and 1980s. In December 1961 she performed in Lagos with the pianist Randy Weston, and writers Langston Hughes and James Baldwin among others. She married again and had a daughter, Lisa Celeste Stroud, in September 1962.
In 1963 Simone began to play Carnegie Hall regularly and started to tour Europe, where she quickly became more popular than in her homeland. "I stopped singing love songs and started singing protest songs because protest songs were needed," she said. "You can be a complete politician through music. I have become more militant because the time is right."
But she continued to perform and record a wide range of material, sometimes drawn from jazz, particularly Duke Ellington. In 1965 the baleful I Put A Spell On You came out, a fearsome measure of how hypnotic Simone could be, and a string of albums for Philips and RCA followed.
The 1970s began with another divorce - from second husband Andy Stroud, who had also been her manager - and she became involved with Barbados politician (and later) prime minister Earl Barrow. Her version of the Beatles' Here Comes The Sun, and Young, Gifted & Black emerged, and a series of collisions with authorities began in 1978 with her arrest for withholding taxes. The great series of Ronnie Scott performances began in 1984.
In 1991 Simone's growing affection for France resulted in her moving to Bouc-Bel-Air, near Aix-en-Provence, and her autobiography, I Put A Spell On You, was published. Her emotional life, long a thing of fragility, seemed more turbulent, however, leading to concert cancellations in 1994. She was fined for leaving the scene of a car accident and in 1995 was given a suspended eight-month jail term for firing a scattergun in the direction of two noisy teenagers in the pool of the villa next to hers.
A psychological evaluation ordered by the court found that she had been "incapable of evaluating the consequences of her act"; her lawyer described her state of mind as "fragile and depressed". But Simone's battles with record companies continued, and in March, 1995 a San Francisco court granted her ownership of 52 original recordings, following an action against a New Jersey music group for non-payment of royalties.
Simone's public utterances became more unpredictable. She was quoted as disliking comparisons made between her and Billie Holiday because Holiday was a drug addict; comparison with Maria Callas would have been more appropriate.
She continued to perform extensively through 1997, however and in 1998 became involved in the Ivory Coast's Afromusiques project, receiving the honorary title of ambassador of the Ivory Coast.
Simone often behaved as if her muse and her music were hard-won prizes, not to be lightly given away, even to paying customers. But something in the course of a performance would usually awaken her.
Nina Simone (Eunice Waymon), singer, pianist and composer, born February 21st, 1933; died April 21st, 2003