Most of you know me as a calm, rational person, but I have an obsession to confess. I am obsessed with people. Not everyone, just certain kinds, very special kinds of people. Persons that make my heart bounce around instantly like a squash ball without the gravity. They make my head spin and help connect unknown parts of my brain. When I get to know them, it takes me a second to fall and it lasts a lifetime. I become a lover of their work, read everything I can find (and let me tell you this: I find a lot), follow their lives. These people – for me – bring out the best of the human spirit and have had as big as an impact on me as my friends or family.
One of them is Nina Simone.
Her music, her biography, her being: always balancing her heart on the tip of her tongue. From when she started – inventing the name Nina Simone, so her mother wouldn’t discover this hobby of hers – to her very ending, pending between alcoholism and mental hospitals, she was a person of many layers, fragile and brutal, held-back and propelled, furious and mournful, dark and oh so beautiful.
A good follow-up to her life provides this profile, a musical entrance to her oeuvre is this concert:
http://vimeo.com/36880003