#american youth orchestra

[mimi-0007]

Edna Mae Harris (September 29, 1914 – September 15, 1997), sometimes credited as Edna May Harris was an American actress and singer. Harris was one of the first African–American film actress of the late 1930s and early 1940s, appearing in films featuring mostly African–American casts.

Born in Harlem, Harris parents were Sam, a boxer and customs inspector; Her mother Mary Harris (née Walker) worked as a maid. Harris' family is noted as one of the first families to have migrated to Harlem. Settling near the Lafayette Theater, Harris was convinced into pursuing a career in show business by Ethel Waters and Maud Russell who were frequent visitors to her family home. After being coached on her singing and dancing by Waters and Russell, Harris began performing in the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA). An African-American vaudeville circuit, Harris performed with TOBA from 1929 until 1933.

Harris attended Wadleigh High School (later known as Wadleigh High School for Girls) in Manhattan. During the summer after her sophomore year of high school, Harris worked at the Alhambra Theater doing dramatic sketches with a stock company. During this period, Harris received excellent training in diction and stage delivery through her association with veteran performers. Harris was also an excellent swimmer in high school, and in 1928 she entered the New York Daily News' Swimming Meet and won a championship.

Harris first real Hollywood break came when she landed a part in The Green Pastures (1936), portraying Zeba, starring with Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson. Harris was a leading lady in Spirit of Youth (1938), the story of the rise of boxer Joe Thomas, which paralleled the life of Joe Louis. Harris also had leading roles in Oscar Micheaux films, Lying Lips (1939), and The Notorious Elinor Lee (1940). Her film credits also include such Hollywood films as Bullets or Ballots (1936), Private Number (1936), and Garden of Allah (1936), and the independent film Paradise in Harlem in 1939. Between picture commitments she toured with Noble Sissle's Orchestra as a featured vocalist along with Lena Horne and Billy Banks. In 1942, she played fourteen weeks at the old Elks' Rendezvous as the mistress of ceremonies and announced a weekly radio show over station WMCA in New York City. She also did character dialect parts on many broadcasts for the Columbia Workshop Program. Edna Mae Harris got to tell her story in her later years in the documentary, Midnight Ramble (1994), about independently produced black films.

Harris was married twice and had no children. Her first marriage was to Edward Randolph from 1933 until 1938, then to Harlem nightclub owner Walter Anderson from 1951 until his death in 1983. Harris dated boxer Joe Louis sometime during 1939 and 1940. Harris dated Robert Paquin, who co-starred with her in the Lying Lips from 1941 until 1942. Harris died of a heart attack on September 15, 1997 at the age of 82.

[sweetly-yours-and-mine]

Bordeaux

Pairing: Marc Spector x f!Reader

Word Count: 1.9k

Summary: She's not exactly sure why she's invited Marc to Bordeaux.

Warnings: mentions of the death of a loved one, written in two hours, poorly edited (author has BDE)

A/N: Couldn't get this idea out of my head ever since I watched Un Beau Matin. Any dialogue I used from the movie is bolded down below. English translations will be given at the end of the fic. French is not my native language, so please excuse any mistakes.

I don't own photos, dividers or characters.

Élodie had invited her, once again, to the villa in Bordeaux. Had tempted her really, with the promise of sunshine and a warm, swimmable, ocean. Two things that were a rarity to come by in London, and a luxury spilled in abundance in the South of France. 

There was also room that would be left empty, Élodie had said, a friend of a friend had cancelled last minute (so much the better for everyone else, if you asked her sister), and if she wanted to, she could bring a friend. 

Friend, being a word heavily insinuated and laden with worries unsaid. 

A word that she bravely took at face value and approached Marc with the offer. 

Though it was easy to play oblivious to her sister’s intentions, it was less possible to ignore her own motivations. 

Why Marc?

At face value, it was because there was a loneliness in him that she felt was reflected in herself. Because he was the only person she dared call a ‘friend’, ever since moving to England and isolating herself on the little island. 

She liked to believe Marc was a friend. They went out for lunch almost every week and usually, Friday evenings, she’d come over and get a little tipsy on wine, tipsy enough that her words would slur and her well-practised English would slip and fall into her mother tongue. Once or twice a month they go and see a play or movie, or to the orchestra, with drinks before and dinner after. 

Those nights, the formal nights, Marc is partial to an all-black getup, a black dress shirt that he leaves unbuttoned, a black suit. It’s an image that alights a squiggly feeling inside of her, one a clumsy child’s hands would make with a broken blue crayon on paper. 

Other than that, sometimes Marc comes over for brunch on Sunday mornings, a concept he’d introduced her to and one that she’s come to grudgingly see the appeal in. He sips coffee with her and eats buttered toast and makes her laugh with crude little pequin peppers of jokes. 

But never, from either side of the conversation, has there been any hint towards inviting more people into their bubble. 

Her excuse is simple, she doesn’t know anyone else to invite. Everyone she knows is on the other side of the Channel. 

Marc’s excuse is not so obvious to her. She squints through the parchment papers of them, and can’t come up with a satisfactory answer. 

She wonders that maybe the reason why she hasn’t bothered herself to find more people she’d be able to call friends was because she was happy with Marc’s quiet companionship. His not-so-smiling-smiles, the way his eyes crinkle when he gives her a belly-laugh like a giant Ferroro Rocher ball, wrapped up in golden paper. 

She’s moved to England for almost a year now, and she’d only been lonely the first two months, before she ran into Marc in a coffee shop, tears in her eyes and ready to call this new chapter over before it was written. 

Sometimes, she tries to reason that it’s because he’s an American, a foreigner in a new continent. That his move was more intense than hers, and together, they found each other in the margins and happily decided to set up camp. 

His Americanness is also a blessing in disguise. The dreaded oral exams of her youth were always in a quite generic, American accent. When moving to London, she’d had a false sense of security that there would be a very short adaptation time to the English accents, since she could understand the unobstructed audio of the woman saying I like bananas very much. What is your favourite fruit? in her BAC listening exams. 

Coming home from work, her head is pounding from the struggle of trying to sort through the various inflections, tones, speeds of the seemingly infinite variations of a single accent. She feels betrayed by the French public education system. Nobody had prepared or warned her about this. 

When she talks to Marc, however, it’s easy to understand him. It relaxes the joints of her brain, soothes it over. It’s the reassurance that she’s not in fact stupid and incompetent, things her coworkers must surely think of her after she’s asked them for the fourth time to repeat themselves. 

She could also argue and say that she had already pushed away many of her own friends, heaping handfuls of time before her move. That the very reason why she changed countries was to start fresh, and that inviting her old university friends to the vacation would be awkward and heavily-charged with betrayal, a step back. 

Despite all this, she hasn’t been able to ignore the true reasons underneath her choice of Marc. 

Quite simply, she could have just said she had no one to invite over. 

It would have resulted in a decently heated exchange or two, about wasting her life, about using her youth to find someone to settle down with before she was too old for it. 

Not a pleasant experience for what should have been easy vacation, to kick back and destress. 

But at least she would have had an easy mind about her own choice.

Yet, looking at Marc now, playing with her niece, she’s not sure she regrets it; even if her mind has been plagued with the why of it ever since they arrived.

He’s letting her niece play with his cheeks, letting her hands push around an imaginary bubble of air in his mouth.

The two of them had been able to surpass the language barrier quite easily it seems. Though little Anaïs, at only five, had been sure to show him that she was quite well-versed in English by rattling off the alphabet and counting to twenty-five for him, the difficulties only starting from seventeen. 

Relaxed and sunkissed is a nice look on him. 

Laughter comes easier to him now, even if their jokes and stories are poorly translated and lose a lot of their mirth in English. The smile lines are deeper than the frowns, the delicate folds around his eyes like embroidery almost always present. 

In London, Marc combs back his hair meticulously. She’s seen him do it, grumbling and swearing under his breath when it doesn’t fall the way he likes it to. 

In Bordeaux, he lets it loose, free from the obligations of work and life and the fresh air and the saltwater bringing out the best of it. His short curls move as if they have a mind of their own. 

She longs to thread her fingers between them, to sink her teeth into the exposed, caramel-like freckled skin of his chest as if it were cotton candy and salt-water taffy. 

She had meant to be reading. 

The sight in front of her, the view of the ocean just a stone’s throw behind the two, was much more appealing at the moment. 

The glassed door opens and there’s the gentle swish of Élodie’s sandals, the faint thud of a tray of lemonade and wine hitting the table beside her. 

“T’as soif?” 

She shakes her head, murmurs her thanks. She’s the type of sleepy that comes from too much rest and sunshine. 

The hinges of the chair squeak as her sister sits down beside her. 

The moment before it happens, she knows it’s coming. They’ve barely had any time alone together since her arrival, and Marc’s presence had already raised quite a lot of eyebrows, undeterred by the fact that they had separate rooms. 

It’s the perfect moment for some older sister grilling. Everyone’s retreated to their own rooms, or to town to stock up on some groceries and alcohol. 

Marc doesn’t understand French, Anaïs too little, and too preoccupied, to understand what they’re truly saying. 

She tsks and sets down her book a tad too harshly on the table, “Putain, Élodie-”

“J’ai rien dit!” she holds her hands up in defence. 

At the sudden sound of an argument in the making, Marc looks at the two of them, a crease forming in his eyebrows that fades as soon as she smiles back at him. 

The momentary distraction gives Anaïs the executive power to decide that a change in pace would be nice, and she pounces on him from behind. 

Marc’s taken aback but then he laughs out, turning behind him, “You’re a bit of a monkey aren’t you!” They tumble together onto the ground, the girl’s excited giggles swirling up into the ocean air. 

The sight warms her heart in ways that his all-black look does, and she knows better than to dive into those emotions. 

“Il est beau, ce Marc, non?” Though the question is teasing, though she’s heard it multiple times from the people in the villa, there’s an undercurrent of sisterly concern and worry. Despite all the troubles Élodie gives her, it’s a sound that pricks tears from her eyes, reminds her just how homesick she’s been this past year. 

She takes an exasperated breath and picks up her book again, “J’en sais rien.”

There’s a heavy pause, almost as if it exists outside of Marc’s happy world. She’s never heard him giggle like that before, it twists at her stomach in unignorable ways. 

“Tu l’aimes?” 

She turns an unread page and hopes the thundering of her heart isn’t too loud. 

Her sister’s eyes soften, out of the corner of her eye she sees her head tilt towards her direction, “C’est son souvenir qui t’empêche?”

“Non,” she concedes and picks at her thumb, then thumbs the corner of her books, letting the pages run under her finger. 

“Alors, c’est quoi ton problème? Chérie, ça fait presque cinq ans depuis sa mort et t’es encore jeune,” she rolls her eyes at this, it’s the same excuse every time. “T’as le droit d’aimer, d’être aimée.”

When it’s clear that she won’t respond, Élodie continues, slyly, “Alors, tu t’en fous que Marie l’aime bien?”

It stings like a bee, her words. The images that arise in her mind against her will are like poison, homebrewed alcohol. 

She stings back, “Élodie, t'es pire que maman. Laisse-moi tranquille.”

That manages to shut off the conversation, though there’s a sour taste in her mouth that also hangs in the air between her and her sister. 

With a squeal, Anaïs runs towards her mother, a grin pressed into her cheeks, “Maman!”

Élodie takes her daughter in her arms, kisses her cheeks, “Bonjour mon ange, tu t'amusais bien?” The girl nods, hugging her back. “T’as soif, alors?”

Marc gets up from the ground, and brushes off the dirt from his shorts. There’s a groan as he tries to stand up, and he rubs his back soothingly to combat against it. 

She treasures the sound he made, the gentle frown in his face and the soft way it faded away with the pain in his back. “Are you thirsty, Marc?” she calls out to him. He comes to stand in front of her, and he nods, an open smile hanging around his face like morning dew. “Wine? Or lemonade?”

As she pours him some wine, her niece some lemonade, Steven looks at her from the wine bottle with a dumbfounded expression, his eyes dark and serious with grief. 

A glance at him makes Marc wonder what kinda stick his alter’s got up his ass now. 

But the wine is refreshing, and it brushes away any thoughts of Steven and of the heated words the sisters had exchanged as he was playing on the ground. 

Thanks for reading, if you liked it, please consider leaving some feedback! I don't usually respond to, but I obsess and re-read reblogs and comments constantly. (Part 2 to this is looking enticing lemme tell you)

Masterlist here, requests here.

Translations:

T'as soif? - Are you thirsty?

Putain, Élodie - Fuck, Elodie

J'ai rien dit! - I didn't say anything!

Il est beau, ce Marc, non? - He's pretty, this Marc, isn't he?

J'en sais rien - I don't know what you're talking about.

Tu l'aimes? - Do you love him?

C’est son souvenir qui t’empêche? - Is it his memory that's stopping you?

Alors, c’est quoi ton problème? Chérie, ça fait presque cinq ans depuis sa mort et t’es encore jeune - So what's your problem? Sweetheart, it's been almost five years since his death, and you're still young,

T’as le droit d’aimer, d’être aimée - You have the right to love, to be loved.

Alors, tu t’en fous que Marie l’aime bien? - So, you don't care that Marie likes him?

Élodie, t'es pire que maman. Laisse-moi tranquille. - Elodie, you're worse than Mom. Leave me alone.

Bonjour mon ange, tu t'amusais bien? - Hello, my angel, were you having fun?

[astrangetorpedo]

Julien Baker: Accomplish the Most with the Least

by Zachary Gresham | Photos by Nolan Knight

Julien Baker is more visible than ever. After her low-budget debut, Sprained Ankle, made nearly every best-of 2015 list, the 21-year-old Baker signed with Matador Records and went home to Memphis to record her next record at the legendary Ardent Studios. Turn Out the Lights was released in October of 2017 to massive acclaim from critics, and was met with extreme devotion from audiences. It is the rare record that one can wholeheartedly describe as both monastically spare and cinematically epic, putting her in the heady company of Tori Amos, Nina Simone, and Jeff Buckley. We caught up with Julien shortly after her return to Tennessee from a quick tour of Japan to talk about guitars, Ardent, Craig Silvey, reverb, and doing more with less.

Turn Out the Lights is really beautiful.

Oh, thank you!

I find it difficult to disconnect from it emotionally for a while after I've turned it off, which is the sign of a quality record.

That means a lot to hear. Thank you.

You made it at Ardent in Memphis, but you did your previous album, Sprained Ankle, at a studio in Virginia, right?

Yeah. Spacebomb Studios. Most of the songs on Sprained Ankle were recorded at Spacebomb, but there are two on there (two with percussion, "Vessels" and "Brittle Boned") that were recorded at Cody Landers' house. He's an incredible engineer.

Were you recording yourself before that?

When I was in high school, the band I was in [The Star Killers, later known as Forrister] put out a full-length [American Blues] album that we recorded entirely in Cody Landers' attic. We were all kids, and he took on this project because we were his friends. It was a labor of love, as well as a learning experience. We had no idea what to ask for and what sounded good. It's funny, looking back now on what we were trying to emulate.

What were you trying to emulate?

Well, Matthew [Gilliam] – the drummer and one of my closest friends – our biggest influences are probably Manchester Orchestra and Circa Survive. We wanted to sound big, bombastic, and theatrical, but with sinewy, reverb-y guitars. The other guitarist listened to Wilco, Guster, and folk-adult-rock. It ended up sounding half like Whiskeytown and half like Sunny Day Real Estate. Those are mixed very, very differently. Also, and this is true with youth, is that everything is more exaggerated. You want things as more drastic, colorful caricatures of themselves. I always wanted a 30-second reverb tail on my vocals. The guitars had to be super loud. Matthew had the biggest snare that was sold at the local music store, because everything had to be so powerful. A better way to put it is that it lacks taste or restraint. I learned so much every day, after school sitting in front of Cubase and crafting a record. Before I ever went to MTSU [Middle Tennessee State University], that's how I learned how automation works, why you track drums first, or why you don't want to put a whole bunch of reverb on the drum kit, even though it sounds cool as an idea.

You went to MTSU to study recording?

I did. I went to MTSU because they had a really notable and reputable recording industry program, but my thing was always live sound. There's an audio engineering major, and within that you can specialize in recording arts or live sound. I don't have the meticulous drive to pick apart a waveform in a DAW. I make my own demos, but they're simply for mapping out songs. I can't sit there and master forever. When I was a kid I learned how to use a PA, and then they would let me run the console at shows. I thought, "Well, I could do that. I know how to do simple circuits, so maybe I could work at a repair shop repairing guitars." I went to school to learn that, systems optimization, and building stages at festivals. But because we were all in the same program – all of my friends who were wearing their headphones around their neck and mixing at the campus Starbucks – those were the people who would say, "Hey, I have some extra studio time. Do you want to come in and record?" I think that it is important to keep yourself open to opportunities to gain experience.

You've got to get in there.

Hands-on experience taught me so much. I took so many classes on systems optimization, signal flow, and live sound mixing. But what taught me how to find my way in a live sound setting was doing sound for bands at venues. What taught me how to act, how to vocalize what I wanted, or the protocol inside a recording studio, was being able to spend that time. I think that's a good thing that MTSU gives you. There are resources on hand to take the theoretical knowledge from the classroom and apply it in a real setting. Otherwise, I couldn't have gotten to meet [engineer Michael] Hegner and do the first demos of what would eventually become Sprained Ankle. He was sitting in the library and asked, "Does anybody have a song they want to do? I've got a session in 30 minutes and no one to fill it." I was like, "Yeah."

Of course, you had to put the time into having a song.

I didn't think about that. Writing is always a compulsory thing, so I always have literally hundreds of voice memos.

Is that how you make your demos, just voice memos on the phone?

That's how I make the very first part; the writing process. If there's an idea while I'm playing guitar that I think is worthy of being explored, then I'll make a short little 1-minute voice demo and save it as "cool riff 85," or whatever. Then later it will be fleshed out as a song with placeholder lyrics. I finally took the plunge and got a real DAW. I use Logic now and I do those little MIDI things for keyboards. I can plug straight into a little one-input interface and have my actual guitar sounds from my pedalboard. Before that, I was using a straight-up 2005 Audacity program that I found. It was free. It looked awful. No hate on Audacity. But my version was so old.

It's a great program for cutting up samples.

Yeah. It's really limited. I guess that's how you learn. I was also using a Toshiba computer from 2006, because I held off for so long, saying, "I'm not going to buy a computer. This one works fine." It's so hard for me to give in and upgrade my gear, because I get used to working within the parameters I've become familiar with.

From that perspective, let's talk about going to Ardent Studios. Listening to the record for the first time, I kept waiting for the gigantic production to kick in. Almost all the songs have a moment where I thought, "Here it comes." But it never does.

It's really interesting to me that you say that. I felt self-conscious in the opposite way. I thought, "There're eight vocal tracks and strings, and my buddy's playing clarinet. This is so much." By comparison, it's much more expansive than Sprained Ankle. I was worried. I had this oxymoronic fear that it would be too similar to my past material and also too different, but not in the right ways. I wanted to have it be very dramatic – and have the parts that seem like soaring ballad climaxes – because I'm a sucker for that kind of dynamic. I think it's very emotive. But I also wanted to be careful that I didn't take so much of a maximalist approach that I weighed the song down, or it got to this critical mass where there's too much going on.

That's an incredibly mature perspective. I don't mean this because you're a younger person, but just in general. There are people who never get there.

Thank you. I'm going to acknowledge your compliment; I didn't take it as a thing about my age. But I agree. I think that restraint is such an important skill in music. For a long time when I was playing guitar in a band – and I think this had a lot to do with my insecurities about being a female in a male-dominated scene – but every time we played a show, I had to rip a crazy solo so that everybody knew I was "good." Still, one of my primary lurking fears about performing the material that I have today is that if I have a song that's three chords of quarter notes, everybody's going to be bored and put to sleep. But that's the challenge. Restraint is such an important thing. Just because you have every single color in your palette doesn't mean that every single color serves the painting. I think there are artists where the maximalist approach serves them well. When you think about a Bruce Springsteen record, like Born to Run. Or have you listened to Kimbra?

Yeah. A lot going on there.

Or St. Vincent. There are so many sounds; it's insane. But I think the challenge with my music is figuring out how to make it interesting while still leaving it pretty sparse. It's an interesting interplay. How many points of dynamic can you introduce into the song, as subtly as possible?

Do you go into recording feeling like you're going to do what you do live, but with a little extra?

There was this reciprocal relationship between the live and the recorded for this record. Another thing I wanted was not to say, "I don't know how I'm going to pull this off live, so I'm not going to explore this possibility." Now I do the weird play-guitar-and-piano-at-the-same-time. I decided if I wanted to have clarinet in there, then it'd be worth it to add clarinet. I think I was a lot more particular about the instrumentation on this record because I knew that it would be received in a different way. With Sprained Ankle, I was recording the songs as they had formed in my free time, using my looping pedal or whatever. With these songs, I sat down with a spiral [notebook] and mapped them out. I thought, "This song is tedious. What small embellishment can I add that will change the song enough to re-focus the listener's interest, without detracting or obscuring the totality of the song?" One of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten was from Josh Scogin [of bands The Chariot and '68]. We were at a show, and we were talking about how The Chariot's records are so interesting. They'll have this incredibly heavy breakdown, but it'll be free with no time signature at all. Or the song will completely stop and then something from Atlanta AM radio will play, and then the song will pick back up. "How do you know to do that? Is it just a novelty, or what?" Josh said, "I think you have to think of what will make people back up the track because they missed a thing." You don't want to make a song that goes on in a predictable fashion without introducing new elements.

You got an incredible guitar sound on the record. You tour with a [Fender] Twin and Deluxe, right?

Yes. We recorded a lot of Turn Out the Lights on my little 1x12 Deluxe, but I also have a 2x12 Blues Deluxe that I took the speakers out of and replaced with Warehouse guitar speakers called Veteran 30s. I got the higher-wattage option because there's way more gain room before it breaks up. My one gripe about Fender amps is that they break up too soon.

By design. A lot of people want blues.

Exactly. I get it. With the Twin, it's fine. It's a really sparkly break up. The Deluxe amps, I like the warmness of them. But when you start to break up such a warm, midrange-y amp, it gets fuzzy really quickly. I really like those speakers in that amp. I use so many of my instruments partly because they sound the way I want them to, but also partly because it took so much work for me to get them to sound the way they do that maybe my goal and my ability met in the middle. Especially with the wiring. I have a [Fender] Telecaster that I modded, and it took so long for me to figure that out when I was 18, trying to read a circuit diagram on how to get your pickups to go in series or parallel, and add that little option with the 4-switcher. Once I finally did it, I was like, "This is what I want, for sure." Whether or not it was what I was going for, I was so committed to doing it.

Do you go back and forth between series and parallel?

No. I have the blue guitar, it's a Mexican-made Tele, and then I have an American Tele, which is the butterscotch one. I leave it on series all the time. You have to put aftermarket pickups in Fender guitars. The Telecaster has the plucky clarity that I like; but I think everybody plays them so hot and bright, because that's the Nashville sound. I thought of Telecasters as country music guitars until I saw Now, Now and Circa Survive on tour. Both the guitarists were playing Telecasters. I was like, "What is happening? How are you guys getting this sound out of a Telecaster?" Then I used my next paycheck to buy a Mexican Tele. I love it.

Were you using Fender amps already?

Yeah. The first amp that I used was this Vox digital combo that was bad news. Well, it wasn't bad news, because I think those amps that have the effects built-in are good for learning. I wasn't playing big shows, so why would I need a $700 amp? The first real amp I bought was the Fender I replaced the speakers in. I had it for a really long time. Then I bought the 1x12 on tour when the tubes of my other amp broke, and now I play through stereo amps. It's interesting that the idea to do that never occurred to me, even though I had two amps on hand. Even on Sprained Ankle, I played through one amp.

You use so much reverb and delay, it's perfect for what you're doing.

Sometimes we'll be at a festival and I'll play through one amp. The way that my looping system is totally jury-rigged, I can use it into the first and second channels on a Fender amp.

It's a wonderful, underused feature, having the two channels on those amps.

It is. So much of my musical knowledge is very de facto and functional, and it doesn't result in a logical understanding of the mechanisms I'm using. On my Deluxe, there're two input jacks. I'd say, "Oh, I always plug into input 2 because it sounds different, and I like that sound." I didn't know until October of 2017 that one of them is high gain and one of them is lower gain. I had no idea. It sounded different. Now I have two A-B-C-Y splitters on my board; I send out from those two channels a dry channel and a reverb channel on one amp, and then yet a third reverb channel into a different amp.

Is the reverb channel 100 percent saturated?

It's all the way on, all the time. The dry channel is there in case the two stereo outs of my looper go off, because I'm paranoid about my loop breaking and there being no safety net for me to play through. I was not always that wise. I have been brought low by humiliation, the great teacher. Now I have one fail-safe channel. The rest of my loops come out on different outputs.

Do you use the amp reverb?

I used to have it pulled up to quarter to two almost all the time, but now I like the flat character of the amp enough, and I have three or four different reverbs. The Strymon blueSky is always on. I forget that I have it on my board, because it stays on. It's the staple of my tone.

I read that you used a [Neumann] U 67 for recording your voice. Is that right?

Yeah.

Did you do a shootout, or did you know going in you wanted a 67?

We tried out that mic because Calvin Lauber, engineer for Turn Out the Lights] suggested it. On Sprained Ankle, I recorded part of it on a [Shure] SM7B. We used a couple of different microphones on that one. I don't remember what the other one was. With the Neumann, I'm very reluctant to use mics with so much crispness, because I think my voice has a tendency to get really nitty and bland.

I respectfully disagree, but go on.

Well, okay. Maybe I'm hyper-critical of my voice. But that vocal mic sounded really nice, especially in the room. Once we started tracking with that, I was like, "Yeah, I'm really, really happy with this vocal sound." It's an incredible microphone. It sounds like it's capturing what's happening to your ears with intense clarity. Whenever I make my little Logic demos, I go in there and notch out 2.5 to 3 kHz, because it sounds really annoying. When I started singing in a band, I wanted the vocals to be pushed all the way to the back and ‘verbed out. I was self-conscious about my voice. I never really wanted to be a singer. I wanted to play guitar. Then our first show came up, and we didn't have a lead singer, so I said, "I'll sing until we find a singer." Then I became the singer. Every single time we performed live, someone would say, "That was really good. You should sing louder!"

Did you try to change the way you sing?

By the time The Star Killers had been a band for a while, I would do the shouty scream thing. But then that became a gimmick of my voice. It was atonal. It was less about the pitch and more about the intensity and having the gang vocals part where everybody sings along. It took touring for a while as a solo musician for me to become completely comfortable with my voice as an instrument. That was also probably because I still smoked at the time we recorded Sprained Ankle. Singing was really taxing on my voice. When I had not smoked for a little over a week, the way that my vocal control and the timbre of my voice changed was amazing. I thought, "This cannot be real." That made me much more confident, and it made me take singing seriously. My voice was no longer just a vehicle for poetry that I was using to "Leonard Cohen" out my lyrics. I think that's also what made recording this record a lot different. I was more ambitious with what I could do.

How long did you have at Ardent Studios?

I booked out six days, intentionally. We ended up staying there 12 hours a day. Time flies when you're in the studio, because it's fun, and exciting, and interesting. I think I limited it that way because of that fear of overproducing the record. If I gave myself too much time, I would fall into a paralysis of option anxiety. In hindsight it might have been good to have a deadline, but also take a rest. Record for a week, take a month off, let the tracks sit, and then come back with fresh ears. Maybe I was over-restrained, like I was overcompensating for my fear of overproducing.

It sounds like discipline is a huge part of your whole process.

Oh, definitely. I talk about this with so many of my friends in music. This land of words like discipline, motivation, and obsession are all fluidly bound. For any of the players on the record, like Cam [Boucher] from Sorority Noise, or Camille [Faulkner], who tours with me, the way that those people interact with music is almost obsessive, but in a way that drives them to be the most optimal players they can be. Not in a competitive way. I really don't think that trying to be the best you can be means that you have to be obsessed with being the best musician out there, or being superior.

It's its own reward.

Exactly. I think the fact you say that discipline is a huge part of the record is because maybe it wasn't that I had to apply an effort to sit down and map out the songs in a spiral notebook, or think about them and listen to them over, and over again. It's what preoccupies my mind all the time, so the only way to abate the anxiety of creating is to be engaged with it. But, at the same time, that's why I only wanted to book out six days. It's really important to get a great raw sound. We did a lot of setting levels for what would basically be how the record sounded.

It's a huge advantage not to "fix it in post."

Exactly! Get it right the first time. This thing that Calvin and I would say to each other all the time is, "It's worth it." When I would record a vocal track and it was almost what I wanted, and I felt I could live with it, we could nudge a note, or we could comp it. But I had the time. I'm not flying out to L.A. to do a two-hour recording session and we have to comp it. We had the time to get it right, and it's worth it. We ended up tracking a whole bunch of weird piano, guitar, and keyboard tracks that didn't make it on the record. But what if it had been awesome? It's worth it. When you start with good ingredients and you do less work on the back-end to try to wrangle it into sounding good, it's so much easier. And it sounds very pure and more organic, because I think you can tell when a song has had to be manipulated.

You can. It's almost never going to be as good as it would have been.

Exactly. There are so many great records that are tracked live. That's how recording used to be. Now I'm going to sound like one of those people who thinks that antiquated methods of recording are the only way and swears by tape only. No, there are amazing things we can use Pro Tools for. But I think the ethos of old-school recording is getting a great live sound. I watched a documentary about Tom Dowd [Tom Dowd & The Language of Music]. He plays the faders like a keyboard. It's so cool. Whenever I watch those documentaries, I'm amazed at that process, because it's happening to those people in real time; it's just their job. They have this very colloquial relationship with the music. Chilling out with Aretha Franklin and not knowing that it would change history. What I think you glean from those is not that it was better in the past, and we should only record to tape, and only use old vintage equipment. I think the process is that you should be able to accomplish the most with the least. You should know how to utilize a room, or you should know when it's enough. I think sometimes the necessity of having only four tracks, or having only eight channels, or what have you, makes you be more discerning. The options aren't endless. The time is not endless. You make a leaner, refined version.

Craig Silvey mixed Turn Out the Lights?

Yeah. We had a mixing day with Calvin; then he and I shot some mixes back and forth. I had very specific things I wanted out of the mix. It was really observable what Craig changed, but he didn't necessarily remove or add anything. I was amazed at how much he was able to add to the tracks. I think the people we involved on the record were all ones we wanted to use, either because of their prior work, or our prior history with them, indicated that they know how to be tasteful. Especially with Craig Silvey. I knew a few of the notable records that he had done, like Arcade Fire, but when I started to look at the breadth of the work he had been a part of, it was amazing.

Did you choose Craig, or did Matador say they wanted him?

Matador brought the idea. I was reluctant because I wanted the least tampering. They said, "We have this guy we think you'd really like. Give it a chance." I'll give anything a chance; but if I didn't like it, I was ready to say, "No." We sent a test mix, and when I got it back, I was like, "We should have the record mixed by this guy." It was ultimately a collaborative effort between Calvin being so personal and central to my life as a person and a friend, and knowing what I wanted, as well as Craig's expertise and impeccable ear. It made for a really special thing.

(link)

[hezuart]

What song/songs would you give Seven and Mono (Channel Change AU) based on their dynamic? (just asking cause I was curious lol)

Oh! I've never been asked for a playlist before! Exciting!

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3pyHvgSF8dYmnpKwPPC4i2?si=ca14c886e22547d4

Spanish Sahara, Foals (Leaving behind horror. Facing turmoil and loss. Ghosts in their heads.)

Message in a Bottle, The Police (Castaways. Calling for help. The suffering is universal.) Gone, JRJR (Fleeing expectations. Repetitive solution seeking. Someone is calling, but they can’t find them.) Summer Nights, SIAMES (Reminiscence. Red flags. Depression. Dragged down by a past. Now free and flying.) Hurricane, FYTCH (Fragile stability and comfort. A storm brewing on the horizon.) Silent Running, Mike + The Mechanics (Trust. Higher power. Calling. Running.) When Am I Gonna Lose You, Local Natives (Temporary comfort. Fear of loss.) To Build a Home, the Cinematic Orchestra, Patrick Watson (Diligence for security. Strength in each other. Turmoil faced together. Letting go. Irony. Surviving off scraps from the world that they destroyed.) Youth, Daughter  (Hidden truths unrevealed. Lucky to be alive. Troubled minds. Loss. Betrayal.) 

Beautiful Now, Zedd / Jon Bellion (Freedom. Euphoria. Collided paths. Making the most of what they have. Inspiring others.) 

Move Along, All American Rejects (Perseverance. Holding hands. Pushing through together. Losing oneself.)

[asexual-juliet]

hey we are not free nation (@igizzz @snarkiestchicken)… go listen to 1942 by no-no boy (aka julian saporiti)!! it’s a folk album "named for the year 120,000 Japanese Americans were sent off to concentration camps across the US." in writing 1942, Saporiti reflected on his childhood as a half-Vietnamese kid in Tennessee and "chased the yellow threads in the American tapestry" in order to tell the stories of the Asian Americans who came before him.

After moving to Wyoming as an adult, Saporiti began to look into the history of Heart Mountain, a former Japanese-American internment camp, and 1942 is the product of that research. While it focuses on many Asian American stories--Vietnamese refugees who fled to Canada in the late 20th century, modern Boston college kids, Japanese lovers sending letters back and forth between Hawaiian islands--the Japanese-American internment of the mid-1940s remains at the heart of the album, making it a perfect companion piece to Trachi Chee's We Are Not Free.

especially relevant highlights include:

“Pacific Fog” - there's no tangible narrative here, but whenever I listen, I imagine the Golden Gate Bridge emerging from the San Francisco fog like in one of Minnow's drawings.

“Disposable Youth” - Saporiti's "imagining of what it would have been like to be ever experience a Memorial Day BBQ with people who looked like me." A group of teenagers enjoying each others' company in a distinctly American way.

“Heart Mountain” - the tale of two young lovers living at Heart Mountain internment camp in Wyoming and the beauty they found there in spite of everything.

“Two Candles in the Dark” - a moment in time, two kids dancing a clumsy waltz in the dark of a Heart Mountain root cellar Reminds me a lot of Bette and Frankie's dance under the orange lamps outside the mess hall.

“Instructions to All Persons” - A song assembled out of stories Saporiti had been told by some of the former incarcerated Japanese-Americans he met during his research. One of these snippets actually took place at the Tanforan racetrack (though Saporiti changed the name of the racetrack to make the song flow more easily)

and also definitely check out “The Best God Damn Band in Wyoming,” a song off of one of Saporiti’s other albums, 1975–it tells the story of the George Igawa Orchestra, a swing band formed at Heart Mountain incarceration camp in 1942.

[halberdierminister]

Shuffle your favorite playlist and post the first five songs that come up. Then copy/ paste this ask to your favorite mutuals 💌

Yay okay!!! 💖💖💖 I'm going with my spotify liked songs.

1. Pretty Donna (Live) -- Collective Soul -- Home: A Live Concert Recording featuring the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra

2. Laser Beam (Live ver.) -- Lotus Juice -- Persona Super Live P-Sound Bomb!!!! 2017

3. Caroline -- Sub-Radio -- Same Train // Different Station

4. Death by Glamour -- Toby Fox -- Undertale Original Soundtrack

5. Rhapsody in Blue -- George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Columbia Symphony Orchestra -- Sony Classical Great Performances Leonard Bernstein Rhapsody In Blue and An American in Paris

GOOD HEAVENS I'M A DWEEB

[ausetkmt]

It’s After the End of the World By Daphne A. Brooks

I remember how it ended. A bespectacled, lanky, light-skinned sister sporting two braided pigtails stepped up to the mic. She was rocking garden-green pants and a yellow spaghetti-strap tank top, and she came out late in the Black Rock Coalition Orchestra’s Nina Simone tribute set in New York on June 13, 2003. Armed with a startling mezzo-soprano that dipped into the outer limits of audible desire, she was covering “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl” like her life depended on it. Her crooning felt sexy and dangerous and inquisitive as she declared, “I want a little sweetness down in my soul...I want a little steam on my clothes.” The crowd swooned. We were suspended for a moment between the grief of having lost our Nina some three weeks before (April 21, the day that Prince would die 13 years later) and ecstatic remembrance as this then-unknown singer, Alice Smith, summoned the potency of our lost patron saint.

“Our Nina”—as she is sometimes called by black feminists who feel especially possessive and protective of her—was a musician whose body of work pushed us and challenged us to know more about ourselves, what we longed for, and who we were as women navigating intersectional injuries and negations of mattering in the American body politic. She was beloved as much for the emotional force of her showmanship as she was for the lyrical, instrumental, and political force of her virtuosity. That night (one I remember so vividly, perhaps, because it was the Friday before my father died), Smith was conjuring that revolutionary, climactic Nina feeling—the erotic kind, which women of color historically have rarely been able to claim for their own, and the socially transformative kind, that marginalized peoples have called upon to bring about radical change.

That revolutionary Nina feeling runs like a high-voltage current from her earliest American Songbook covers through her  Frankfurt School battle cries, folk lullabies and eulogies, blues incantations, Black Power anthems, diasporic fever chants, Euro romantic laments, and experimental classical and freestyle jazz odysseys. It is the signal she sends out to tell us that something is turning, that we may be closing in on some new way of being in the world and being with each other, or we are at least reaching the point of breaking something open, tearing down Jim Crow institutions. Often enough, it indicated that we were joining her in tearing up those unspoken rules about how a Bach-loving, Lenin- and Marx-championing, “not-about-to-be-nonviolent-no-more” musician and black freedom struggle activist should sound. 

Photo by Gilles Petard/Getty Images

Soothsayer, chastiser, conjurer, philosopher, historian, actor, politician, archivist, ethnographer, black love proselytizer: She showed up on the frontlines of people-powered mass disturbances, delivering the good word (“It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day”) or shining discomforting light on the stubborn edifice of Southern white power (“Why don’t you see it?/Why don’t you feel it?”). And even when illness set in, and exile didn’t soften her grief for fallen friends and their unfinished revolution, she faltered for a time but ultimately stayed the course. She was fastidiously focused, insouciantly exploratory, and ferociously inventive at her many legendary, marathon concerts—Montreux, Fort Dix—the ones in which her mad skills, honed during her youthful years in late-night supper club jam sessions, returned in full. She was epic, our journey woman, the one who was capable of taking us to the ineffable, joyous elsewhere in that “Feeling Good” vocal improvisation that closes out that track. 

Today, we return to her more passionately than ever before, looking to her for answers, parables, strategies—not only for how to survive, but how to end this thing called white supremacist patriarchy that some of us had naïvely believed was ever-so-excruciatingly self-destructing. Since her death, her iconicity has grown, spreading to the world of hip-hop (which, as  the scholar Salamishah Tillet has shown, frequently samples her radicalism), to academia, where studies of Simone—articles and conference papers, seminars and book projects—pile high, making inroads in a segment of university culture previously cornered by Dylanologists. We take her with us to the weekend marches. Our students cue her up, summoning her wisdom and fortitude during the rallies.  

This massive old-new love for our Nina is a way of being, and her sound encapsulates the pursuit of emotional knowledge and ethical bravery. She forges our awakening.  I said as much a few weeks before Nina passed, when I offered a conference meditation on the late Jeff Buckley’s cover of “Lilac Wine,” a song I had kept on a loop during my grad years and one that had taught me a few things about heartbreak and heroism.  Through the voice of that white, Gen X, alt-rock daring balladeer and ardent fan of Nina’s, I could hear Ms. Simone singing to me, “Leave everything on the floor, and face the end triumphantly.”

It was a message that she conveyed all on her own when I saw her in 2000 at the Hollywood Bowl—one of her rare, stateside shows in her waning years. That night, she kept a feather duster at the piano, and after each song, she raised it like a conductor’s baton, beckoning an ovation. I remember that it was a gesture that felt cold and distant at the time, a sign of her lasting, antagonistic relationship with her audience—all of which is no doubt true. But in hindsight, I think more about the lessons she was bestowing on us, yet again, that evening. At the close of every number, we were invited to recognize the wonder of her artistry and to listen with anticipation for whatever would come next, the next better world she would create for us and with us—a black space, a women’s space, a free space. All those endings which might lead to new beginnings.

Daphne A. Brooks is Professor of African American Studies, Theater Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Yale University.  

Listen to Nina Simone: Her Art and Life in 33 Songs on Spotify and Apple Music.

Photo by David Redfern/Getty Images

“I Loves You Porgy”

Little Girl Blue

1958

Nina Simone’s first album,  Little Girl Blue, was just a run-through of the material she’d been singing in clubs, in the arrangements she’d already made. They were ready to go. “I Loves You Porgy” became a Billboard Top 20 hit in 1959 and established her career in New York. To hear it is to understand how Simone’s critical consciousness began early and never turned off. She approached the ballad from George and Ira Gershwin’s “folk opera” Porgy and Bess not as a classical musician, as per her training, or as a jazz or cabaret musician, as she had been called—only as herself. Even on paper, the song is emotionally loaded: a plea for protection to a man the narrator has come to trust. In emotional terms, Billie Holiday’s 1948 version feels optimistic, guardedly bright; Simone’s feels concentrated and gravely serious, almost private, even as she adds trills and rhythmic details to every line. When she sings, “If you can keep me, I want to stay here/With you forever, and I’ll be glad,” there is no way to know what “glad” means to her. –Ben Ratliff

Listen: “I Loves You Porgy”

“My Baby Just Cares for Me”

Little Girl Blue

1958

When Nina Simone cut  Little Girl Blue, she was still smarting from her rejection from a prestigious classical conservatory. Throughout the album, she proved her chops by dropping a reference to Bach in one swinging track and improvising with a fluidity that Mozart would have admired, and also by subtly changing a tune that American listeners thought they knew. The standard “My Baby Just Cares for Me” was first made popular by the 1930 musical  Whoopee!, and through such lyrics as, “My baby don’t care for shows/My baby don’t care for clothes,” its singer takes pride in a romantic prowess that can cut across class divisions. The vaudeville star Eddie Cantor performed it onscreen in a brassy, obvious way that fit the era (up to and including his use of blackface makeup). Simone’s reading is more soulful and complex. The tempo has been slowed, but the feel for jazz swing has been powerfully increased. In the middle of the song, over a finger-popping groove, Simone delivers a solo of pellucid elegance. Her vocals draw their power both from blues grit and crisp articulations, and from the way Simone bridges those styles. The way she plays this song, those old “high-tone places” and social codes no longer seem so untouchable—in the presence of such artistry, they only seem embarrassing and ripe for redefinition. –Seth Colter Walls

Listen: “My Baby Just Cares for Me”

“Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair”

Nina Simone At Town Hall

1959

Recontextualizing an Appalachian folk song, Simone transposed a mournful lament with roots in the Scottish highlands to 1959 America, where “black” was imbued with far greater heft. Coming early in her career, “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” promised an increasing political consciousness in her music, the intent clear in the cascade of loving, mournful, minor-key piano in the intro and her ever-profound, trembling contralto. The line “I love the ground on where he goes” held particular meaning in 1959, as the Civil Rights Movement was hitting a fever pitch but the racist laws of the Jim Crow South still held strong. Town Hall, where the album was recorded, was in midtown New York. It was the first concert hall she ever played, a venue where she would be venerated for singing her mind. The song arrived at the beginning of her fame but, more importantly, it was an incubator of her mindset to come. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

Listen:“Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair”

Photo by Herb Snitzer/Getty Images

“Just in Time”

At the Village Gate

1962

Simone’s live albums, recorded in clubs or theaters, were fundamental to her work. All of them still feel charged. By 1957, when she was still playing in Atlantic City clubs, she had established a hard line: You paid attention or she stopped playing. By 1959, when she first played at New York’s Town Hall, she graduated in self-definition from club singer to concert-hall singer, which is to say she knew there was a sufficient amount of people who would come to hear her. And in April 1961, when she recorded  At the Village Gate, she could bring back that imperial attitude to club dimensions, leading her quartet from the piano.   

For about one full, intense minute at the start of “Just in Time,” she winds up her quartet with dissonant, percussive chord clusters. Then she settles into the first verse, sung at confidential level, drawing out her vowels into quavers. Her piano solo is as hypnotic and repetitive as what John Lewis made famous doing with the Modern Jazz Quartet, but smudgier and more emphatic. This is comprehensive skill—singing, playing, bandleading—and the song is all zone: nearing it, then staying in it. –Ben Ratliff

Listen:“Just in Time”

“The Other Woman/Cotton Eyed Joe”

At Carnegie Hall

1963

Nina Simone once dreamed of becoming the first black female classical pianist to play Carnegie Hall, but when she finally made it there on April 12, 1963, she was working in a different idiom. Her set was filled with traditional songs and standards she made her own, including this striking mashup that closes her  At Carnegie Hall live album.

A staple in Simone’s sets, “The Other Woman” is a deceptively nuanced Jessie Mae Robinson tune with immense empathy for the mistress. It was first recorded by Sarah Vaughan, but Simone elevates the song further with her ability to conjure the loneliness of womanhood better than just about anyone, particularly when her accompaniments run slow and sparse. In performances over the years, the emotional burden of “The Other Woman” seemed to weigh heavier on Simone, as she experienced infidelity from both sides. At Carnegie Hall, though, she segues into the most elegant take on “Cotton Eyed Joe” imaginable, merging folk, jazz, and a touch of her beloved classical. –Jillian Mapes

Listen:“The Other Woman/Cotton Eyed Joe”

“Mississippi Goddam”

In Concert

1964

As the Civil Rights Movement gained traction, retaliation from racist whites became more intense, reaching a terrible apex in 1963, when the KKK murdered Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, and four children in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Nina Simone’s frustration and desperation is palpable in the biting, cynical way she performed “Mississippi Goddam” at Carnegie Hall—a room full of natty whites, but the rare New York concert hall that was never segregated. Within her voice, unloosed so explicitly for the first time, a sanguine irony formed the tension between its sentiment, the very real possibility of being murdered for her race (“I think every day’s gonna be my last”).

During her set at Carnegie, which was recorded for her album In Concert, Simone referred to this song as a show tune “but the show that hasn’t been written for it yet.” Its frantic tempo reflected the urgency of the moment, a template for protest songs to follow, and the piano chords propelled the song’s existentialism with the determination of a steam engine train. It was gonna make it on time, but its destination was still unknown. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

Listen:“Mississippi Goddam”

“Pirate Jenny”

In Concert

1964

Nina Simone seethes the lyrics to “Pirate Jenny,” taking every ounce of delight in openly threatening her audience. The song, penned in the late 1920s by the German theatrical composer Kurt Weill, is a revenge tale in which a lowly maid fantasizes that she is the Queen of Pirates and that a black ship will soon emerge from the mist to destroy the town in which she has been treated so poorly. In Simone’s hands, it transforms from political metaphor into dark and unchained spiritual catharsis. Her performance devolves from singing to whispering, with raspy venomous verses such as, “They’re chaining up the people and bringing ‘em to me/Asking me kill them now or later.” Accompanied only by piano and timpani, she allows for long pauses, using silence as a psychological weapon. You can all but hear the audience clutching their pearls. –Carvell Wallace

Listen:“Pirate Jenny”

“Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”

Broadway-Blues-Ballads

1964

Though the unremarkable  Broadway-Blues-Ballads followed “Mississippi Goddam”’s overwhelming reception a few months earlier, its opening number, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” quickly emerged and remains a tentpole of Nina Simone’s identity. (Never mind that its lyrics were written by Bennie Benjamin, Horace Ott, and Sol Marcus.) After years of “inferior” show tunes and “musically ignorant” popular audiences, as she would later call them in her autobiography I Put a Spell on You, Simone was all too familiar with this song’s themes of lonely remorse, of seeming edgy and taking it out on the people she loved, of “[finding herself] alone regretting/Some little foolish thing...that [she’s] done.”

Though “Goddam” began a pivotal year in which Simone would refocus her life on civil rights and black revolution, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” would continue to reflect her  personal struggles to come, including the bipolar disorder and manic depression that went undiagnosed and self-medicated until late in life. White audiences often saw her as the benign entertainer they wanted to; Simone long struggled to be seen as her whole, complex self. –Devon Maloney

Listen: “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”

Photo by Jack Robinson/Getty Images

“See-Line Woman”

Broadway-Blues-Ballads

1964

In the stretch between 1962 and 1967, Nina Simone was at her most prolific, releasing at least two albums per year—and three in 1964. Broadway-Blues-Ballads premiered several songs that became fixtures of Simone’s live repertoire, including the scintillating call-and-response number “See-Line Woman.” Built on the structure and rhythm of a  traditional children’s song, it tells the tale of four escorts, dressed in different colors that signify what they’re willing to do. In Simone’s rendering, the “See-Line Woman” is something of a femme fatale, who will “empty [a man’s] pockets” and “wreck his days/And she make him love her, then she sure fly away.” 

Simone’s performance showcases her voice as a powerful instrument, flirtatious and sly, backed by a stuttering hi-hat and flute arrangement that never outshines her vocals. The origins of the tune that inspired “See-Line Woman” remain uncertain, but Simone’s recording leaves little doubt that the song is hers. –Vanessa Okoth-Obbo

Listen:“See-Line Woman”

“Be My Husband”

Pastel Blues

1965

The lyrics of “Be My Husband” are attributed to Andrew Stroud, Nina Simone’s second husband and manager—a strong, guiding, sometimes violent hand in her career and her life. (Billie had one. Aretha, too.) The title seems mysterious at first: Is it a proposal, a bargain, or a command? Is she saying “marry me” or “act like a husband is supposed to act”? All of her musical and expressive genius is here. Her breath and guttural sighs seem to say, “This shit is work with an intermittent erotic respite.” Her voice dips, curves, bends, and flies, provides the melody and the rhythm. She demands, she pleads. She is all strength, then absolute vulnerability.  

The year Simone recorded “Be My Husband,” death came for both her closest friend, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, and Malcolm X. Spring brought Selma, and Nina serenaded the marchers. In this season of mourning and wakefulness, “Be My Husband” revealed itself to have been all these things: a proposition, a bargain,  and a command.  Do right by me, Simone sings, and I’ll do right by you. Love for a man, a people, a nation is struggle—it is work. –Farah Jasmine Griffin

Listen:“Be My Husband”

“I Put a Spell on You”

I Put a Spell on You

1965

History remembers Nina Simone as nothing if not resolute, thanks in significant part to “I Put a Spell on You.” Slinky and confident, with flashes of destructive insecurity, her now-iconic cover of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ blues lament begins matter-of-factly, informative even, then whips itself into the controlled fury of a woman who has made up her mind and is bracing for the inevitable fight. Simone refuses to be taken advantage of throughout, claiming what is rightfully hers: “I don’t care if you don’t want me/I’m yours right now.”

Personal meaning aside—in 1965, she was halfway through a marriage—“I Put a Spell on You” also evokes Simone’s relationship with her audiences over the years. Its release, after all, came just as she was finding her own magic: As she wrote in her autobiography, “It’s like I was hypnotizing an entire audience to feel a certain way….This was how I got my reputation as a live performer, because I went out from the mid-Sixties onward determined to get every audience to enjoy my concerts the way I wanted them to, and if they resisted at first, I had all the tricks to bewitch them with.” –Devon Maloney

Listen:“I Put a Spell on You”

“Feeling Good”

I Put a Spell on You

1965

Throughout her life, Nina Simone rebelled against the tendency for her music to be categorized as jazz or blues, as it gave little acknowledgement to her classical training and her fluidity in other genres. I Put a Spell on You cemented her status as a singer at ease with popular music, who could command attention even when her exceptional piano skills played a secondary role. Simone’s version of “Feeling Good” is one of the album’s masterworks, and it became a standard in its own right. From the opening notes of the strictly vocal intro, she looks to nature to describe contentment: birds flying high, the sun in the sky, a breeze drifting on by. When the big band orchestration comes in, the horns and strings transform the song into a sermon of unbridled joy, peaking with a rousing scat solo that can only emerge from the depths of a free soul. –Vanessa Okoth-Obbo

Listen:“Feeling Good”

“Ne Me Quitte Pas”

I Put a Spell on You

1965

This song finds Nina Simone’s emotions at their most indulgent, her shivering voice at its most precise. Penned by the Belgian crooner Jacques Brel and originally recorded in 1959, its cloying lyrics “Do not leave me” were meant to poke fun at men who could not keep their hearts in their shirts. On Simone’s recording, however, the work becomes something else entirely: It is an agonizing mediation on the kind of existential desolation that only a broken love can bring. Andrew Stroud, a retired NYPD lieutenant, once held her at gunpoint and raped her; she remained in this relationship for nearly 15 years, during which she recorded most of her defining albums. Here, she expands and contracts, pianissimo to fortissimo, as though the entire song were a series of sighs; when she sings, “Let me be the shadow of your shadow,” in its original French, a cosmic rumble emits from the depths of her heart. The chorus is simply the song’s title repeated, and the fourth one sounds precisely like the last flicker of a candle’s flame. –Carvell Wallace

Listen:“Ne Me Quitte Pas”

Photo by Frans Schellekens/Getty Images

“Strange Fruit”

Pastel Blues

1965

In 1965, three very important marches took place between Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, in protest of laws that prevented black citizens from exercising their right to vote. The third and most successful of these culminated in a concert organized by Harry Belafonte, at which Nina Simone performed. There, Simone—who once declared that she was “not non-violent”—used music as her weapon in the fight for liberty. 

Pastel Blues was not an overt protest record, but “Strange Fruit” was an unequivocal rebuke of the lynchings that claimed so many black lives. The song was originally popularized by Billie Holliday, who often performed it under strict conditions to avoid backlash over its severe message, but Simone was no longer held back by fear, having already put her career on the line with the similarly frank “Mississippi Goddam.” Over somber piano keys, she recounts the horror of seeing black bodies hanging from the trees like fruit, in one of the most startling metaphors ever set to wax. At the song’s apex, when describing how the bodies would be left “for the leaves to drop,” Simone wails the third word with an anguish that’s as unforgettable as the painful history that the song decries. —Vanessa Okoth-Obbo

Listen:“Strange Fruit”

“Sinnerman”

Pastel Blues

1965

One of Nina Simone’s most recognizable recordings, “Sinnerman” has been repurposed by everyone from David Lynch to Kanye West. What remains in its original form, however, is the pure punk of it. This live recording rides hard on a driving 2/4 backbeat, one that accelerates a full 10 bpm over its 10-minute run. Simone’s backing band is sharp, the rimshots and high hats insistent, the piano work both velvety and forceful. It is a song of apocalypse, of bleeding seas and boiling rivers and the inability to escape God’s wrath no matter where you turn. 

As a child, Simone learned “Sinnerman” from her mother, who sang it in revival meetings to help sinners become so overwhelmed as to confess their transgressions. Hellfire, brimstone, and damnation were the lullabies on which she was nursed, and it explains her disdain for the fearful. “Sinnerman” is an attack; its hypnotic repetition is designed to induce you to God or madness, whichever comes first. She unleashes her voice, sharp and wide, like sunlight glinting off the blade of a knife. Here, Simone—whose life was as violent and lawless as her music was transcendent—channels heaven and hell equal measure. –Carvell Wallace

Listen:“Sinnerman”

“Lilac Wine”

Wild Is the Wind

1966

“Lilac Wine,” a woozy torch song, originally appeared in James Shelton’s if-you-blinked-you-missed-it 1950 Broadway musical revue “Dance Me a Song.” In 1953, Eartha Kitt dropped a cover and the song became a standard. Nina Simone’s arch-dramatic reimagining is as exotic and dizzying as the titular intoxicant, veering drunkenly between minor and major keys. Simone slows down the tempo to a dirge-like crawl; her classically inflected piano accompaniment is spare and insistent like a metronome. But it’s her trembling singing that really delivers the devastation: The way she captures crestfallen confusion and inebriated fogginess in her vocal performance is astonishing, and no easy feat. Even more astonishing: The way she balances the song’s damaged gloom with a heaving romantic tenderness. –Jason King

Listen:“Lilac Wine”

“Wild Is the Wind”

Wild Is the Wind

1966

Nina Simone debuted her elegant take on “Wild Is the Wind” on 1959’s At Town Hall—a year after Johnny Mathis scored an Oscar nod for the standard—though it would be another seven years before Simone introduced her ominous studio version. Wild Is the Wind, one of three albums Simone released in 1966, is filled with songs that yearn for understanding and romantic resolution, but few capture the feeling with as much uneasiness as the title track. One minute she’s completely swept away by love’s rapture with classical-piano opulence; the next her vibrato purrs on its lowest setting. The music cuts out. Nina smirks sharply. “Don’t you know, you’re life itself,” she coos. Some annotations of this line end it with an exclamation point, but Simone sings it more like a question. She knows how she feels, but there’s still something uncertain about it, perhaps a reflection of her own turbulent private life at this moment. –Jillian Mapes

Listen:“Wild Is the Wind”

“Four Women”

Wild Is the Wind

1966

While most of her records featured interpretations of songs written by others,  Wild Is the Wind is special for a composition penned by Simone herself. On “Four Women,” she deconstructs the shameful dual legacies of slavery and racism in America, narrating from the perspective of four black female characters. Aunt Sarah is forced to work hard and be strong, lest a whip be cracked on her back; the biracial Saffronia exists between black and white worlds, shouldering the knowledge that her father “forced [her] mother late one night”; Sweet Thing is the little girl forced to grow up too fast, who has come to understand her body as something that has a cost. The song is set to a simple melody of bass and percussion, with Simone on the piano, but the tension builds with each vignette. By the time she gets to Peaches, the most vengeful character, Simone is yelling with the fury of many generations, and the instruments crescendo. With “Four Women,” Simone took a stand for black women, whose suffering at the nexus of race and gender discrimination is often rendered invisible. Shortly after its release, it was banned by several radio stations for supposedly incendiary content—a possibility that Simone must have anticipated. But she was a fearless fighter, and the song was her affirmation that black womanhood would remain at the heart of her activism. –Vanessa Okoth-Obbo

Listen: “Four Women”

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Stringer

“I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”

Silk & Soul

1967

Though urban America was unraveling in 1967, with riots exploding in Detroit and Newark, Simone was being encouraged by RCA Records to go easy on the activism and focus on her career. She released three studio albums that year, the final being  Silk & Soul, which was mostly filled with love songs and strings. However, right at the top of Side B was a track that would become an anthem of the Civil Rights Movement: “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” written by the jazz pianist and educator Dr. Billy Taylor.

The song’s swinging melody and finger-popping performance belies its message, summarized in the yearning ambiguity of its title. The contrast between the emotion of the lyrics (“I wish I could share all the love that’s in my heart/Remove all the bars that keep us apart”) and the upbeat, gospel-based arrangement added depth and power. Out of this tension, the song rang out as a hopeful but realistic vision of emancipation. –Alan Light

Listen:“I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”

“Come Ye” 

High Priestess of Soul

1967

“Come Ye” is the sparest track on  High Priestess of Soul, an album produced with a fairly heavy hand by Hal Mooney. By then, Simone was seen widely as not just a musician but as a kind of power station of black consciousness, with the ability to politicize audiences—even white and American ones. In vocals and percussion alone, this is an original African-American folk song: polyrhythmic, in a single tonal center, played with hand drums. In four verses, Simone gradually raises its stakes until it all ends direly: “Ye who would have love,” she sings. “It’s time to take a stand/Don’t mind the dues that must be paid/For the love of your fellow man.” This is the intersection of cultural memory, passion, and action—medicine, warning, and alarm. –Ben Ratliff

Listen:“Come Ye”

“Backlash Blues”

Nina Simone Sings the Blues

1967

Simone’s friend Langston Hughes mailed her the lyrics to this song in poem form, and she took immediately to his indictment of “Mr. Backlash,” a personification of white oppression of black America’s small gains (and the “black, yellow, beige and brown” among them, equally oppressed). Simone delivered these promises and threats with a slinky blues rasp, forecasting that the person to receive the backlash would be the oppressor himself. Its lyrics also dovetailed with the rise of the Black Panther Party, which had begun exercising their right to open-carry in their efforts to protect the black people of Oakland from police brutality. Simone sang easily, measuredly, with the confidence that one day a score would be settled: “Do you think that all colored folks are just second class fools?” –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

Listen:“Backlash Blues”

“I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl”

Nina Simone Sings the Blues

1967

In the 1960s, Simone left her first label, Colpix, ended up at Phillips, and then hopped over to RCA Victor. In 1967, she recorded her debut album for RCA: Nina Simone Sings the Blues, a hard-driving, tough-talking collection of originals and covers. On “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl,” she borrows the basic blues progressions from “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” a 1920s cautionary standard originally popularized by Bessie Smith. But Simone comes up with an original lyric that bypasses social commentary and conjures up bawdy flirtatiousness and lust instead: “I want a little sugar in my bowl/I want a little sweetness down in my soul/I could stand some lovin’, oh so bad/I feel so funny, I feel so sad.” Impressive in her thematic range, Simone had no problem mixing double entendre lyrics about ribald sex and in-your-face politics on her albums: “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl” appears alongside her classic civil rights protest song “Backlash Blues.” Songs like this serve as a reminder that the revolutionary activist who can’t occasionally admit to being horny isn’t really the revolutionary activist we need. –Jason King

Listen:“I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl”

“Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)”

’Nuff Said

1968

What and whom are we mourning? How will we mourn, and can we transform the depths of our despair into living in a way that honors what we’ve lost? Nina Simone turns each of these questions over and over from multiple vantage points in this nearly 13-minute performance, recorded on April 7, 1968, at Long Island’s Westbury Music Fair, three days after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. She and her band learned the song, written by bassist Gene Taylor, earlier in the day.

Shaped by the improvisational urgency and rawness of the moment, the live rendition of “Why?” captures many Ninas: the sermonizer accompanying herself on piano and leading her congregation through the wilderness; the Civil Rights dreamer delivering a delicate jazz tale of a nonviolent folk hero; the anguished pallbearer voicing a funeral hymn; and the master of the black freedom struggle jeremiad who laments, “Will the murders never cease?” before slipping fully into her militant “Mississippi” self. She mourns not just for King but for the numerous slain leaders, martyrs, fellow freedom-fighting artists, and “many thousands gone,” as her friend James Baldwin put it—the black subjugated masses who shape the epic sorrow and weariness of her subdued vocals. This dirge-turned-protest-song absorbs the weight of all these bodies but also defiantly affirms the presence of she who remains on the battlefield. “We’ve lost a lot of them in the last two years, but we have remaining Monk, Miles,” Simone reflects slowly, speaking to the audience. From the rafters, a stentorian voice finishes the list: “Nina.” –Daphne A. Brooks

Listen: “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)”

“The Desperate Ones”

Nina Simone and Piano!

1969

Nina Simone never had the widest vocal range or the purest pitch, but she had a once-in-a-generation talent for conveying the meaning of a song through tone and phrasing. With few exceptions, once she sang a song, it was hers, and she was never afraid to make bold choices that could seem downright strange at first listen. Throughout the 1960s, that incomparable voice appeared in many settings, from huge orchestral arrangements to minimal ballads, as she moved confidently from one musical genre to the next. And at the tail end of the decade, she made an album that returned her to the milieu of her first days as a performer.

Nina Simone and Piano! closes with “The Desperate Ones,” an oblique song by Jacques Brel that depicts, with heavy romantic imagery, the weariness of the ‘60s youth trying to remake the world. It was always a quiet song, both when Brel sang it in 1965 and after it was translated into English for the 1968 off-Broadway show Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. But Simone’s performance takes the hushed intensity to an almost frightening level, showcasing her staggering ability to convey feeling with simple elements. She just barely hints at a melody as she reframes the song’s story as something passed between strangers in a darkened alley. Singing in a raspy whisper, her voice is filled with yearning and empathy and wonder, and the starkness of the arrangement highlights its eerie magic. –Mark Richardson

Listen: “The Desperate Ones”

“To Be Young, Gifted and Black”

Black Gold

1970

Lorraine Hansberry, the first black woman to have her work produced on Broadway (A Raisin in the Sun), was a friend and mentor to Simone, and a key figure in her political awakening. When Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer in 1965, at age 34, the singer was devastated—and when Malcolm X was killed the next month, her radicalization was complete.

In 1969, Hansberry’s ex-husband adapted some of her writing into an off-Broadway play called “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” One Sunday, Simone opened the newspaper and saw a story about the production. She called her musical director, Weldon Irvine, to help with the lyrics, and the song—which would be her final contribution to the protest canon—was finished 48 hours later. With its simple, direct message of racial and personal pride and forceful melody, the single was a Top 10 R&B hit and Simone’s biggest crossover success since “I Loves You, Porgy.” It would be covered by Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, and Solange, and CORE named it the “Black National Anthem.” Simone even performed the song on “Sesame Street.” –Alan Light

Listen: “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”

“Just Like a Woman”

Here Comes the Sun

1971

In the early 1960s, as Simone’s star was rising at New York’s Village Gate club, a young Bob Dylan was scratching at the door of the folk scene brewing across the street, doing parody songs between sets by bigger names. Less than a decade later, Simone had five Dylan covers in her discography, none more necessary than “Just Like a Woman.” 

In Simone’s hands, Dylan’s half-improvised song about watching an ex-girlfriend walk away became a heartfelt paean to all women. Each once-bitter read from Dylan—“she takes just like a woman,” “she breaks just like a little girl”—was now delivered as an affirmation of female resilience and vulnerability, a human frailty that invited empathy rather than contempt.

Voiced by a woman—especially a famously forthright, tenacious one like Simone—the song got a first-person adaptation; rather than infantilizing the “woman” in question and separating her from the world, Simone’s interpretation closed the gap. Released near the height of her influence as a political artist, it’s a feminist treatment with an inversion that feels contemporary, even half a century later. –Devon Maloney

Listen: “Just Like a Woman”

“22nd Century”

Here Comes the Sun

1971

As Nina Simone tells it in her memoir, by the early 1970s, everything was coming undone for her; she had “fled to Barbados pursued by ghosts: Daddy, [sister] Lucille, the movement, Martin, Malcolm, [her] marriage, [her] hopes…” On its surface, “22nd Century” translates this personal moment of peril into big, broad, metaphorical strokes that wed the apocalyptic with cathartic possibility and radical euphoria. “There is no oxygen in the air/Men and women have lost their hair,” she prophesizes, holding steady at the center of an intoxicating swirl of flamenco guitar and calypso steel drums. “When life is taken and there are no more babies born....Tomorrow will be the 22nd century.”

In the future that is Nina’s, things fall apart so that notions of time, space, and the human can be razed and take on new shape. But in this era in which she sought out Caribbean maroonage, there is perhaps an even deeper connection forged by way of this hypnotic, nearly nine-minute odyssey. Covering Bahamian “Obeah Man” Exuma’s stirring, hybrid mix of junkanoo, carnival, and folk, she sticks close to his original recording from that same year and merges her Afrodiasporic revolutionary vision with his:  “Don’t try to sway me over to your day/On your day,” her reaching vocals insist. “Your day will go away.” –Daphne A. Brooks

Listen: “22nd Century”

Photo by David Redfern/Getty Images

Medley: “My Sweet Lord/Today Is a Killer”

“Emergency Ward!”

1972

No artist ever wielded power over an audience as deftly as Nina Simone, but the same can be said of her talent for turning covers into transcendent events. By 1972, she’d perfected—several times over—both delicate alchemies. She used her crowds’ expectations to lure them in before delivering uncomfortable yet necessary truths, all while constructing what one academic, quoting theorist William Parker, called “inside songs”—covers that dig up the song lying “in the shadows, in-between the sounds and silences and behind the words” of the original.

That creative electricity is palpable on this gargantuan, 18-minute live jam that takes up an entire side of Emergency Ward!, the record now considered Simone’s major anti-Vietnam War statement. Backed by a gospel choir, she invites the audience in with George Harrison’s then-two-year-old mega-hit, locking into a mesmerizing church sing-along before revealing the Trojans within: David Nelson’s brutal poem about the desperate, decaying hope of the Civil Rights era. Lines like "Today/Pressing his ugly face against mine/Staring at me with lifeless eyes/Crumbling away all memories of yesterday’s dreams,” dropped into the rhythm of Harrison’s exaltations, inflate the performance like a hot air balloon, making it the ultimate testament to Simone’s ability to turn even a simple interpretation into a political masterpiece. –Devon Maloney

Listen: Medley: “My Sweet Lord/Today Is a Killer,”

“Funkier Than a Mosquito’s Tweeter”

Is It Finished

1974

Nina Simone’s palate was always broad, but with this reimagining of a Tina Turner barnburner, she used minimalist funk arrangements as a platform for her unleashed vocals—mewling and crawling at alternate intervals, the disgusted cursing of a woman highly over a dusty dude. The openness of the 1970s served her more adventurous impulses well, though by the time she cut “Funkier,” she was fully spiraling into depression and alcoholism. (Who could blame her, with the serrated knife that had been the late 1960s, from Civil Rights to Vietnam?) Her edge showed in this song: Her voice cracks with exasperation, alluding that the predator she sings about might well be the good ol’ US of A. Spent, she wouldn’t record another album for four years. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

Listen: “Funkier Than a Mosquito’s Tweeter”

Photo by Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images

“Baltimore”

Baltimore

1978

Following the death of Freddie Gray in April 2015, Simone’s 1978 recording of Randy Newman’s “Baltimore”—“Oh, Baltimore/Ain’t it hard just to live”—was widely circulated on social media, illustrating the continuing endurance and power of her work. The song was the title track from a particularly fraught album that appeared as Simone was living in poverty in Paris and her recordings were getting increasingly rare. She fought so much with Creed Taylor, who had signed her to CTI Records, that she insisted he not only leave the studio, but the country. She finally cut all of her vocals in a single, hourlong session.

She did acknowledge, however, that she liked this song, which Newman had recorded the year before. The narrator of “Baltimore” is worn down by the American economy and malaise—“hard times in the city, in a hard town by the sea”—and finally decides to pack his family in a “big old wagon” and send them out of town. Having fled the U.S. years earlier, Simone’s reaction to the lyrics was personal. “And it refers to, I’m going to buy a fleet of Cadillacs,” she said, “and take my little sister, Frances, and my brother, and take them to the mountain and never come back here, until the day I die.” –Alan Light

Listen: “Baltimore”

“Fodder on Her Wings”

Fodder on My Wings

1982

In the early ’80s, Nina Simone was living in France and she was deeply lonely; her family life was strained, and she was suffering from encroaching mental illness. A new song on her 1982 album, Fodder on My Wings, captured with startling intimacy the pain of this period, and she returned to it frequently through the next decade, cutting another studio version three years later (the synth-heavy take on Nina’s Back!) and including it on several live albums, including an awe-inspiring performance on 1987’s Let It Be Me. The title of the song itself is titled “her” wings while the album it appears on uses “my”; the slippery point of view underscores its heavily personal nature, as Simone sings of a bird that traveled the world, from Switzerland to France and England—all places she herself had spent time—and then crashed to earth. “She had dust inside her brain” is the harrowing image the sticks with you, but Simone’s vocal makes a song of weariness and defeat carry an air of defiance, a wise word from someone who survived to tell the tale. –Mark Richardson 

Listen: “Fodder on Her Wings”

“Stars”

Let It Be Me

1987

Simone first covered Janis Ian’s searing, mordant meditation on fame during her infamous set at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival; suffering from bipolar disorder, she goes through something like a mental breakdown during the performance. (The scene is a highlight of Liz Garbus’ Oscar-nominated documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?) This spine-tingling 1987 version—Simone’s best, most coherent rendition—was recorded live at Hollywood’s intimate Vine Street Bar & Grill for Let It Be Me.

Written by Ian when she was just 20, “Stars” is a potent critique of star-making machinery: The narrator is both a weary observer of fame, watching faded stars who live their lives in “sad cafés and music halls,” and a tragic figure undone by fame herself. Simone’s embittered, conversational phrasing transforms the song into a cosmically exhausted, stream-of-consciousness rant. She sounds so nakedly weary and afflicted with pathos, you worry she might not even make it to the last verse. But ultimately, Simone’s piano accompaniment builds to a rousing, show-must-go-on climax: “I’ll come up singing for you even though I’m down.” Break out the Kleenex: Few other songs in Simone’s arsenal can make you truly grasp the toll she paid for being alive and giving us her music. –Jason King

Listen: “Stars”

“Papa, Can You Hear Me?”

A Single Woman

1993

In 1993, Nina Simone recorded and released her last studio album, A Single Woman. Living in Southern France, she was lured back into the booth by Elektra A&R executive Michael Alago, who brought major label marketing dollars and seasoned producers and orchestrators. Taken from the 1983 Barbra Streisand film Yentl and penned by Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman, and Michel Legrand, “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” is a powerhouse musical theater showstopper that no one would mistake for a conventional jazz standard. But Simone—who starts the song with an allusion to the Negro spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”—slyly reconstructs it as an interior, howling lament for her father, who passed away in the early 1970s while they were estranged.

Backed by swelling strings, Simone pulls every ounce of melancholic emotion out of the heart-wrenching lyrics. As the chords ramp up, so does her quivering voice; every time she tackles the song’s falling Middle Eastern vocals runs, it sounds like tears streaming down her face. One of her most dramatic performances captured on record, “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” finds Nina Simone working through the despair of her own orphanhood, exorcising her troubled relationship with the men who defined aspects of her complicated life. How fitting that her final album—a musical commentary on what it means to be a mature, single woman living in exile—captures such pure, unadulterated human feeling. –Jason King

Listen: “Papa, Can You Hear Me?”

[thelongstrangedrivehome2]

playlist for the seventh of march twenty twenty-four

The Prodigy - Their law

John Lennon - Cold Turkey

Tom Waits - Invitation for the Blues

Sonic Youth - Youth Against Fascism

David Bowie - Almost Grown

Amanda Palmer - On An Unknown Beach

Fall Out Boy - Sugar, We're Going Down

David Bowie - I'm Afraid Of Americans

Radiohead - Go To Sleep

Jane's Addiction - Of Course

R.E.M. - Perfect Circle

Nirvana - In Bloom

The London Symphony Orchestra feat. Pete Townshend - Pinball Wizard

The National - Without Permission

The Brunettes - The Record Store

Atoms For Peace - Amok

Karen Dalton - Ribbon Bow

The Flaming Lips - Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds

Cher - Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves

Happy Mondays - Step On

Ani DiFranco - Used Cars

Pink Floyd - A Pillow of Winds

Devo - (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction

Bobby Womack - That's The Way I Feel About Cha

Lou Reed - Satellite Of Love

TV on the Radio - Wolf Like Me

Blam Blam Blam - Don't Fight It Marsha, It's Bigger Than Both Of Us

Dee Dee Ramone - Negative Creep

The Velvet Underground - Pale Blue Eyes

[the-celluloid-correspondent]

Maestro Movie Review

A portrait of Leonard Bernstein's singular charisma and passion for music as he rose to fame as America's first native-born, world-renowned conductor, following his ambitions to compose symphonic and popular Broadway musicals. 

On November 14th, 1943, a young conductor and composer, Leonard Bernstein, substituted at the last minute to conduct the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. Since that fateful day, Leonard Bernstein has become a legend in the music industry as he is regarded as the first great American Maestro. Whose music will span for generations to come. Since his passing in 1990, many filmmakers have tried adapting his complicated life to the big screen. Even filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese have passed on the project to hand it off to Bradley Cooper. Cooper has proven himself over the past decade that he is one of the best actors in the business, but a rising writer and director. So it came as a shock to me to see how simple Maestro was. 

If you have seen any music-related biopic, then Maestro is going to feel very familiar as it follows the standard plotline of this genre. From the rise to the fall and the eventual redemption of said person, Maestro falls into all of the traps that plague the biopic genre. Thus causing the story, the characters, and their relationships to feel very surface-level and superficial. Leonard Berstein was a musical genius whose personal life was very complicated, yet the story portrays his life as a very simple matter. By the end of the film, we don’t understand what Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre were really like. Maestro never dives into Bernstein’s creative passion and what made him tick. Nor does it dive into his battle with his sexuality and how it affected his relationship with others, especially his wife. These essential biopic questions and many others are either entirely glossed over or vaguely touched on. And what further adds to my frustration is that the film acts a lot smarter than it is. 

Now the reason why it feels smarter than it is is due to Cooper’s brilliant direction. Despite writing an average biopic script with writer Josh Singer, Cooper’s direction elevates this script to the next level. Cooper’s direction is brilliant as he further refines his directorial touch. He transports his audiences through the decades of Bernstein's life with his beautiful visual storytelling. The film starts as a black-and-white musical fantasy that is straight from the 1940s and 50s to highlight the youth and joy of Bernstein's early life. Then the film transforms into the lush but gritty technicolor allure seen in the 1960s and 70s to highlight the marital struggles between Leonard and Felicia. As the decades progress, so does the filmmaking style that Cooper utilizes. Furthermore, his utilization of long, uninterrupted takes just further immerses the audience into this story. Cooper has clearly shown great care in his craft while crafting this film, especially in the film's musical scenes. The recreation of Bernstein conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s “Ressurection” is an out-of-body experience. Then for the rest of the film, utilizing Bernstein’s musical composition to tell his life story is beautifully touching and personal. 

Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan both gave some of the best performances of their careers in Maestro. The pair have impeccable chemistry on screen as they completely transform into their respective characters. Nailing all aspects of their characters from their mannerisms to their voices. We watch the pair go through all the trials of this very complicated relationship. From star-crossed-lovers to fiery fights, and heartbreaking diagnoses, they perfectly portray this couple's complicated life. Even though the material lacked the depth required to portray these characters properly, both were able to give their characters and their relationships some depth with their performances. However, despite being first billed, Carey Mulligan is sidelined in the film. I wished the film explored more of her perspective and her reaction to Leonard's constant cheating as he was a closeted bisexual/gay man. Mulligan elevates it as much as she can, but she is sadly left out to dry. The same can be stated for Cooper as there is no material for him to work with to show the internal conflicts of his closeted character. Both of them will easily earn an Oscar nomination but might miss the award because of how shallow their characters were written. 

With Netflix providing the majority of the film's financial backing, you know that it will look good. The cinematography is breathtaking as it transforms in style as the decades progress in Bernstein’s life. From the classic black-and-white Hollywood looks of the 1940s to the technicolor of the 1960s, you will be immersed in this story. What further adds to the immersion is the impeccable production and costume design that is period-accurate. However, I am sad that they gloss over that Felicia was an influential fashionista during the mid-century. 

I expected more out of Maestro than a standard musical biopic. Leonard Bernstein’s legacy will last generations, and to see his biopic play it safe is a little insulting. Especially when Lenny took massive risks in his musical career. This film has all of the elements of a masterpiece, but its safe and shallow script prevents it from achieving that status.

My Rating: B

[lovedetlost]

15 QUESTIONS / thanks for the tag baby @infatuatedjanes x

nickname tay

sign sagittarius

height 5”9

last thing i googled young marlon brando

song stuck in my head the funeral by band of horses

number of followers 719

amount of sleep 8 hours i’m sick and need it

dream job writing movies or tv shows. or working for deuxmoi hehe

wearing pjs baby i’m in my comfies

movies/books that summarise you pride & prejudice, normal people, fleabag, the tree of life, american honey

favourite song of all time either youth by daughter or on the nature of daylight by max richter

favourite instrument violin. string orchestra forever

aesthetic more is more

favourite author emily st. john mandel

random fun fact i know every single word of pride and prejudice (2003) and ever after (1998)

tags @storisdreamworld @emerlu @strwbrrymoon @tee-swizzle @flossiewrites @drewbooooo @softcoreparadise @notdisneychannel and honestly anyone else that wants to get in on it

[historysisco]

On This Day in New York City History February 15, 1968: Henry Lewis (October 16, 1932 - January 26, 1996) becomes the first African American to conduct at a major orchestra. In October of 1972, he would make his debut at the Metropolitan Opera, conducting Puccini's La Boheme.

Lewis broke though ceilings and created paths for many African Americans to follow. Lewis learned to play piano at the age of five and expanded to the clarinet and string instruments. His career started when he joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the age of 16 as a double-bassist. His talents would take him across the globe.

His obituary from the New York Times dated January 29, 1996 describes him as follows:

"Musically brilliant and a commanding figure with the baton, Mr. Lewis since the 1960's had conducted nearly every major American orchestra -- the Chicago Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Boston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic -- as well as orchestras and opera companies in Milan, London, Paris, Tokyo, Copenhagen and dozens of other music capitals.

In a 47-year career filled with landmark events, Mr. Lewis, whom some critics likened to Jackie Robinson, became the first black instrumentalist with a major American orchestra as a youth in 1948, the first black to conduct a world-class orchestra, in 1960; the first black to become music director of a major orchestra, in 1968, and the first black to conduct at the Metropolitan Opera, in 1972."

Lewis passed away on January 26, 1996 due to a heart attack at the age of 63.

#HenryLewis #BlackHistory #BlackStudies #BlackHistoryMatters #AfricanAmericanHistory #AfricanAmericanStudies #MusicHistory #OperaticHistory #EntertainmentHistory #NewYorkHistory #NYHistory #NYCHistory #History #Historia #Histoire #Geschichte #HistorySisco

https://www.instagram.com/p/CosMt9lO5TY/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[robotlesbianjavert]

well @six-of-ravens like an absolute tool tagged me for "10 songs i've been vibing to" idk. idk. why would she do that. and on my vulnerable drinking night too.

a) i shan't name the song in case it makes some of my beloved followers weep so i'll link this castiel amv i guess. tw f word i GUESS.

2) my favourite song of all time between the ages of 7-8 was tango shoes from bif naked's purge album. we had the cd when i was a child for which i had oft appropriated the walkman i had found somehow. and when we were driving with the radio i would listen intently for the radio people to hear me and play it. and i still vibe to it on the regular.

iii) combo'ing the protomen's iv: vengeance and v: the stand (man or machine) a lot lately.

my many complicated feelings about taylor swift's varied musical career aside. i listen to my tears ricochet i guess. here's a destiel amv.

5) one week by bare naked ladies. always a classic. the study group was right to shun jeff for shunning them.

f) epiphany by trans-siberian orchestra. other ppl remember the lyricstuck for it yeah?

vii) i haven't listened to the entirety of don mclean's american pie in three years for personal reasons but it is wedged into my soul.

8) you should probably leave by chris stapleton whatever it's fun and sad-sexy to sing along to.

i) head full of doubt / road full of promise is another song that has haunted me since my deep youth. i want to do a spinner thing with it someday. destiel amv.

and one honorary mention that just didn't make it onto the nomination listen by i listen to nickelback's this is how you remind me acoustic version every drunk night. so singable. anyways to most vibes song.

stream my apparently most listened to youtube video of 2022.

idk whoever wants to do it. @integnius. @holioc. @codenamesazanka. @stillness-in-green. @officecyborg. @quarkgirl. @fooreblogs. i don't know do it or don't or beat me up about it.

[hammondcast]

Hammond's Secret Sauce Jon Hammond with the Hammond Report for TGIF Friday

Hammond's Secret Sauce Jon Hammond with the Hammond Report for TGIF Friday Crispy Potatoes 

Potatoes, Onions, Garlic and a little bit of Hammond's secret sauce - Jon Hammond

#potatowednesday

#potatoes

#onions

#garlic

#secretsauce

Excellent, Jon Hammond Local 802 AFM stage letters now applied to my Sk PROHammond Keyboard/Organ with 4 Sound Engines, looking / sounding real good - and my Gator TSA flight case fits straight across the rear seat no pain no strain - ready to hit the dusty trail!https://hammondcast.com#skpro#signage#hammondorgan#HammondCast#JonHammond#GatorCasesSuzuki Musical InstrumentsHammond Organ USA 

Big thanks to Signco America Team signs and Sandra Mosca & Marco de Virgiliis Markbass Amps team, my mini cmd Markbass gigging amp changed my life - light powerful great sound with basso-profundo!

Sincerely, Jon Hammond

#markbass

#bassoprofundo

#neodymium

#amplification

#signs

Jon Hammond Funk Unit 

EVENT LINK: https://www.namm.org/thenammshow/2023/session/jon-hammond-funk-unit

9:45 am - 10:40 am

ACC, Plaza, ADJ Arena Plaza Stage

In-Person Only

Journalist Ricky Richardson Los Angeles News Observer: “Organist Jon Hammond served up a set of original compositions, funky, swinging jazz and blues to the delight of the crowd gathered at the ADJ Arena Plaza Stage."

Funky Swinging Jazz and Blues instrumentals original compositions by organist Jon Hammond featuring international soloists. As seen on cable TV for 38 years Jon Hammond Show, long-running music, travel and soft news program. Jon Hammond and band members have been performing at NAMM Shows and Frankfurt musikmesse for 33 years, as well as Music China, Japan Musical Instruments Fair and toured Germany with 21 piece Landesjugendjazzorchester German Youth Jazz Orchestra. ASCAP Composer Publisher and Member American Federation of Musicians Local 6 and Local 802, 2014 NAMM Believe in Music award recipient.

Leo Fender with Jon Hammond and Joe Berger - also Leo's longtime business partner Dale Hyatt and Mrs. Hyatt

Fender Musical Instruments Corporation's Leo Fender / Clarence Leonidas "Leo" Fender, Phyllis Fender (Mrs. Leo Fender) Joe Berger and myself Jon Hammond in Frankfurt Flughafen airport - Leo is holding my famous S.T. Dupont cigarette lighter Richard Nixon model special Chinese Lacquer studying the finish for possible use on one of his famous guitars - absolutely historic meeting folks - circa March 13, 1988 Frankfurt Germany

#leofender

#electricguitar

#lacquer

#guitars

#telecaster

#stratocaster

#showman

#bandmaster

#fender

#bandmaster

#fenderprinceton

#business

TWA Flight with Leo Fender, Phyllis Fender, Joe Berger, Jon Hammond

by

 Jon Hammond: 

#WATCHMOVIE HERE: 

https://ia601302.us.archive.org/14/items/LeoFenderWithJonHammondAndJoeBerger/Leo%20Fender%20with%20Jon%20Hammond%20and%20Joe%20Berger.m4v

Jon's archive https://archive.org/details/LeoFenderWithJonHammondAndJoeBerger

opics

 Leo Fender, Fender Guitars, Fender Amp, Electric Guitar, Jon Hammond, Richard Nixon, S.T. Dupont, TWA Airlines, Pan Am Airlines, Frankfurt Flughafen, musikmesse #LeoFender #Fender

Language

 English

Leo Fender​ / Clarence Leonidas "Leo" Fender, Phyllis Fender (Mrs. Leo Fender) Joe Berger​ and myself Jon Hammond​ in Frankfurt Flughafen airport - Leo is holding my famous S. T. Dupont​ cigarette lighter Richard Nixon model special Chinese Lacquer studying the finish for possible use on one of his famous guitars - absolutely historic meeting folks - circa March 13,1988 Frankfurt Germany http://www.Hammondcast.comToday August 10th is Leo Fender's birthday! - Remembering Leo Fender today -- Frankfurt 1988 -- TWA Flight with Leo Fender, Phyllis Fender, Joe Berger, Jon Hammond - Leo's long-time business partner Dale Hyatt and Richard Nixon's lighter!Coming back from musikmesse in March of 1988 - http://www.HammondCast.com

 Addeddate

 2015-07-07 16:55:24

Color

 color

Identifier

 LeoFenderWithJonHammondAndJoeBerger 

Stage Dad! Mark Magill

Leo Fender, Fender Guitars, Fender Amp, Electric Guitar, Jon Hammond, Richard Nixon, S.T. Dupont, TWA Airlines, Pan Am Airlines, Frankfurt Flughafen, 

hammond's Secret Sauce, Leo Fender, Fender Guitars, Fender Amp, Electric Guitar, Jon Hammond, Richard Nixon, S.T. Dupont, TWA Airlines, Pan Am Airlines, Frankfurt Flughafen, Crispy potatoes

[colorisbyshe]

I’m posting this early because Apple Replay doesn’t end when Spotify wrapped does and I don’t want a machine doing math telling me waht my fave music is... I want to tell you that on my own.

And I want to beat everyone else to doing this

My top ten favorite albums released in 2022, in alphabetical order lol:

American Gurl by Kilo Kish

Bad Mode by Utada Hikaru

Crash by Charli XCX

Gasoline by Key

The Loneliest Time by Carly Rae Jepsen

Multitude by Stromae

Raw Data Feel by Everything Everything

Renaissance by Beyonce

Reminders by Le Youth

Thank you EP by Brave Girls

Honorary Mentions: Bib10 by Bibio, Bloom by Red Velvet, Chordata Bytes 1 by Imogen Heap, Iota by Lous and the Yakuza, Las Ruinas by Rico Nasty, Kaizin by Eve, Plasma by Perfume, Reborn by Kavinsky.

My top ten favorite songs released in 2022 NOT FROM THOSE ALBUMS cause obviously... I like the songs on my fave albums

A Disappearing Act by Coheed and Cambria

All Comes Crashing by Metric

Chikichikibanban by QUEENDOM

Copycat by Chobom (Apink subunit)

Deep Down by Alok

Heart Burn by Sunmi

Let’s Get it Right by Royksopp (or Unity by Royksopp, they’re tied)

Love you Back by Madeon

Naturally by Tinashe

Somebody like You (Orchestra Version) by Bree Runway

I can’t take any song off but I MUST mention Super Yuppers by WJSN Chocome

Honorary Mentions: Be With You by Mystery Skulls, Disco Revenge by De De Mouse, Fly Away by Cookiee Kawaii, Futurez by Toconoma (Quest4 is ALSO amazing by Toconoma, has the energy of an upbeat song from the sims),  Gift by Minmi, Gauva by Naika, Hold me Closer by Britney Spears & Elton John, Losing Game by Leo, Pose by Loona, New Gold by Gorillaz, Patbingsu by Billlie, Savage by Tiesto, Scent by Yukika, Starlight by Dreamcatcher, Stay Soft by Mitski, Stressed by Doechii, Summertime by Flo, Talk that Talk by Twice, Te Felicito by Shakira, This is Why by Paramore,  The Whistle by Steve Aoki (ignore... the whistle bits), Zero kara Ichi he by Kat-tun, and เพียงไว้ใจ by Slot Machine (I did not finish Kinnporsche but I DID listen to that song a daily basis for a month)

This year was the return of dance music for me!!!

Also, if this seems like a lot of songs... I added almost 500 new songs in 2022. Well, I added 1000 new songs to my phone in 2022 but 500 were released this year.

Anyways everyone should feel free to rec me music based on this knowledge

[sheetmusiclibrarypdf]

Charlie Parker: the 100 most inspiring musicians of all time

Charlie Parker: the 100 most inspiring musicians of all time

American alto saxophonist, composer, and bandleader, Charlie Parker (b. Aug. 29, 1920, Kansas City, Kan., U.S.—d. March 12, 1955, New York, N.Y.) was the principal stimulus of the modern jazz idiom known as bebop, and—together with Louis Armstrong and Ornette Coleman—was one of the great revolutionary geniuses in jazz.

Charlie Parker grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, during the great years of Kansas City jazz, and began playing alto saxophone when he was 13. At 14, he quit school and began performing with youth bands, and at 16 he was married— the first of his four marriages. The most significant of his early stylistic influences were tenor saxophone innovator Lester Young and the advanced swing-era alto saxophonist Buster Smith, in whose band Parker played in 1937. Parker recorded his first solos as a member of Jay McShann’s band, with whom he toured the eastern United States in 1940–42. It was at this time that his childhood nickname “Yardbird” was shortened to “Bird.” His growing friendship with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie led Parker to develop his new music in avant-garde jam sessions in New York’s Harlem. Bebop grew out of these experiments by Parker, Gillespie, and their adventurous colleagues; the music featured chromatic harmonies and, influenced especially by Parker, small note values and seemingly impulsive rhythms. Parker and Gillespie played in Earl Hines’s swing oriented band and Billy Eckstine’s more modern band. In 1944, they formed their own small ensemble, the first working bebop group. The next year Parker made a series of classic recordings with Red Norvo, with Gillespie’s quintet (“Salt Peanuts” and “Shaw Nuff ”), and for his own first solo recording session (“Billie’s Bounce,” “Now’s the Time,” and “Koko”). The new music he was espousing aroused controversy, but also attracted a devoted audience. By this time Parker had been addicted to drugs for several years. While working in Los Angeles with Gillespie’s group and others, Parker collapsed in the summer of 1946, suffering from heroin and alcohol addiction, and was confined to a state mental hospital. Following his release after six months, Parker formed his own quintet, which included trumpeter Miles Davis and drummer Max Roach. He performed regularly in New York City and on tours to major U.S. cities and abroad, played in a Gillespie concert at Carnegie Hall (1947), recorded with Machito’s Afro-Cuban band (1949–50), and toured with the popular Jazz at the Philharmonic troupe (1949). A Broadway nightclub, Birdland, was named after him, and he performed there on opening night in late 1949; Birdland became the most famous of 1950s jazz clubs.

The recordings Parker made for the Savoy and Dial labels in 1945–48 (including the “Koko” session, “Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” “Night in Tunisia,” “Embraceable You,” “Donna Lee,” “Ornithology,” and “Parker’s Mood”) document his greatest period. He had become the model for a generation of young saxophonists. His alto tone was hard and ideally expressive, with a crying edge to his highest tones and little vibrato. One of his most influential innovations was the establishment of eighth notes as the basic units of his phrases. The phrases themselves he broke into irregular lengths and shapes and applied asymmetrical accenting. Parker’s most popular records, recorded in 1949–50, featured popular song themes and brief improvisations accompanied by a string orchestra. These recordings came at the end of a period of years when his narcotics and alcohol addictions had a less disruptive effect on his creative life. By the early 1950s, however, he had again begun to suffer from the cumulative effects of his excesses; while hospitalized for treatment of an ulcer, he was informed that he would die if he resumed drinking. He was banned from playing in New York City nightclubs for 15 months. He missed engagements and failed to pay his accompanying musicians, and his unreliability led his booking agency to stop scheduling performances for him. Even Birdland, where he had played regularly, eventually fired him. His two year-old daughter died of pneumonia; his fourth marriage fell apart. He twice attempted suicide and again spent time in a mental hospital. If Parker’s life was chaotic in the 1950s, he nonetheless retained his creative edge. From roughly 1950 he abandoned his quintet to perform with a succession of usually small, ad hoc jazz groups; on occasion he performed with Latin American bands, big jazz bands (including Stan Kenton’s and Woody Herman’s), or string ensembles. Recording sessions with several quartets and quintets produced such pieces as “Confirmation,” “Chi-Chi,” and “Bloomdido,” easily the equals of his best 1940s sessions. Outstanding performances that were recorded at concerts and in nightclubs also attest to his vigorous creativity during this difficult period. He wanted to study with classical composer Edgard Varèse, but, before the two could collaborate, Parker’s battle with ulcers and cirrhosis of the liver got the better of him. While visiting his friend Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, he was persuaded to remain at her home because of his illness; there, a week after his last engagement, he died of a heart attack. The impact of Parker’s tone and technique has already been discussed; his concepts of harmony and melody were equally influential. Rejecting the diatonic scales common to earlier jazz, Parker improvised melodies and composed themes using chromatic scales. Often he played phrases that implied added harmonies or created passages that were only distantly related to his songs’ harmonic foundations (chord changes). Yet for all the tumultuous feelings in his solos, he created flowing melodic lines. At slow tempos as well as fast, his were intense improvisations that communicated complex, often subtle emotions. The harmonies and inflections of the blues, which he played with passion and imagination, reverberated throughout his improvisations. Altogether, Parker’s lyric art was a virtuoso music resulting from a coordination of nerve, muscle, and intellect that pressed human agility and creativity to their limits.

Jazz sheet music and transcriptions download.

Charlie Parker - The Best of Charlie Parker volume 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeM0JMgj358

Track List:

1. Cool Blues 00:00 2. No problem 3:34 3. Satan in Hight Heels 12:26 4. What’s Right for you 15:52 5. Montage 19:03 6. Shawnuff 21:15 7. You and The Night and The Music 25:42 8. Cheryl 29:02 9. Lost and Lonely 35:14 10. Sidewinder 38:51 11. Abstract Art 41:12 12. Bongo Bop 44:05 13. Easy Side Drive 48:56 14. Jazz Vendor 51:46 15. Coffee Coffee 56:37 16. Over the rainbow 1:00:06 17. Subway Inn 1:02:25 18. The Hymn 1:06:27 19. All the things you are 1:12:04 20. Communion 1:15:25 21. Lake in the woods 1:21:31 22. The Feeling of Love 1:25:01 23. Bongo Beep 1:32:14 24. From Mundy On 1:36:55 25. Pittfall 1:40:15 26. Impulse 1:43:50 27. Long Knife 1:49:16 28. Melancholy Madeline 1:51:35 29. Stop and Listen 1:54:18 30. Blues For A Stripper 1:59:05 31. Born Again 2:02:30 32. Gabriel 2:08:14 Read the full article

[lboogie1906]

Regina Carter (born August 6, 1966) is an American jazz violinist. She is the cousin of jazz saxophonist James Carter.

She was born in Detroit and was one of three children in her family.

She began piano lessons at the age of two after playing a melody by ear for her brother’s piano teacher. After she deliberately played the wrong ending note at a concert, the piano teacher suggested she take up the violin, indicating that the Suzuki Method could be more conducive to her creativity. She enrolled at the Detroit Community Music School when she was four years old and she began studying the violin. She still studied the piano, as well as tap and ballet.

She played in the youth division of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. She was able to take master classes from Itzhak Perlman and Yehudi Menuhin.

She attended Cass Technical High School. She performed with the Detroit Civic Orchestra and played in a pop-funk group named Brainstorm. She took viola, oboe, and choir lessons.

She studied classical violin at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston when she decided to switch to jazz. She transferred to Oakland University, where she was a jazz major under the direction of Marvin “Doc” Holladay. She studied and performed with trumpeter Marcus Belgrave. She was able to meet musicians active in the Detroit jazz scene, including Lyman Woodard. After graduating, she taught strings in Detroit public schools. Needing a change of scene, she moved to Europe and lived in Germany for two years. She worked as a nanny for a German family and taught violin on a military base. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence