Nina Simone: Wild Is the Wind

By all accounts, Eunice Kathleen Waymon, aka Nina Simone, who passed in 2003, was a troubled person and a brilliant artist. Why she was not more acclaimed during her lifetime is a question several recent film projects have tried to answer. Did her fierce stand on civil rights lose her fans?

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Or was it, as the films have implied, a case of self-sabotage driven by mental illness? Whatever the answer, her inimitable work continues to resonate with ever more force and depth.

Simone was a gifted, aspiring classical pianist who graduated as valedictorian from an integrated private high school and attended Juilliard for a year on scholarship, using her time there to prepare for the entrance exam at the Curtis Institute, from which she was rejected. (Days before her death, Simone would learn that Curtis intended to award her an honorary degree.) Her rejection from Curtis pushed her into jazz. In the mid-1960s, she underwent a radical change in her music and personal beliefs.

Up to that point, she'd played the music business game and stayed on the safe side, trying to widen her appeal with a mix of standards, bluesy numbers, and alsohesitantly-originals. But the murders of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers and the stirring of the Civil Rights movement convinced her of the righteousness of the cause, and she became a leading musical voice in the struggle.