"Let It All Out" is one of Nina Simone's more adult pop-oriented mid-'60s albums, with renditions of tunes by Duke Ellington ("Mood Indigo"), Billie Holiday ("Don't Explain"), Irving Berlin ("This Year's Kisses"), and Rodgers & Hart ("Little Girl Blue"). As ever, Simone ranges wide in her selection: Bob Dylan's "The Ballad of Hollis Brown," a swaggering adaptation of "Chauffeur Blues" (credited to her husband of the time, Andy Stroud), the gospel hymn "Nearer Blessed Lord," and Van McCoy's "For Myself." "Images" is an a cappella adaptation of a poem about the beauty of blackness by Waring Cuney. All of Simone's Philips albums are solid, and this is no exception, while it isn't the best of them.
"Love Me or Leave Me" and "Mood Indigo" were also featured on Simone's debut album "Little Girl Blue" (1958); these are new performances and different arrangements.
Tracklist:
| Mood Indigo | 2:25 |
| The Other Woman | 3:02 |
| Love Me Or Leave Me | 4:05 |
| Don't Explain | 4:18 |
| Little Girl Blue | 2:32 |
| Chauffeur | 2:48 |
| For Myself | 2:05 |
| The Ballad Of Hollis Brown | 4:55 |
| This Year's Kisses | 2:58 |
| Images | 2:50 |
| Nearer Blessed Lord | 4:30 |
Nina Simone - Let It All Out (1965)
(320 kbps, cover art included)
7 Kommentare:
zero, thank you for sharing Nina Simone's "Let It All Out"...also your work and ear.
You are welcome, heylee!
Thank you for this and all the other Nina Simone recordings you have posted. As much as I love her singing, I also enjoy her piano playing. I don't believe that, while she was alive, she ever received sufficient recognition for her ability to play. Regardless, she was a truly unique artist and I still remember hearing and being saddened by the news of her death twelve and half years ago in France, She comported herself with great dignity and demanded respect but was never a diva. The years she and other African artists, like James Baldwin, spent in exile is a profound comment on the racism they encountered while living in the United States. Their departure was our cultural and political loss.
When, a week before his assassination, Robert F. Kennedy stated on Voice of America in 1968 “Things are moving so fast in race relations. A Negro could be President in 40 years. There is no question about it. In the next 40 years, a Negro can achieve the same position that my brother has. Prejudice exists and probably will continue to…but we have tried to make progress and we are making progress. We are not going to accept the status quo,” James Baldwin scoffed at Kennedy’s naiveté and rebuked the notion he perceived as implicit in Kennedy’s comment that white Americans assumed that there was some intrinsic value of white standards that African Americans had to accept achieve to “become” equals. Kennedy clearly showed foresight and yet Baldwin’s criticism of white liberals also rang true. Still, I wonder how Simone, Baldwin, and even W.E.B. DuBois in Ghana, would have perceived from their exile the election of Barack Obama. Would Simone still sing “Goddam Mississippi” today? I have no doubt that she and Baldwin would have been outspoken about the murders by police of unarmed black men since the shooting of Michael Brown in August 2014. My musings aside, I am so grateful that you recognize Simone’s importance as an artist and voice of protest by posting so much of her music. Clearly, her spirit still lives through her music.
A belated thanks, too, for the Barbara Dane recordings. Until I discovered this blog, Dane was a footnote in most histories of folk music and I had never heard her music. What a wonderful artist who has been overlooked over the years. I grew up near Cambridge, Massachusetts the home of the renowned Club 47 and listened many times to music in, and on live radio concerts from, its current incarnation Club Passim. Although folk music and blues were frequently played on the local radio stations and there were even stations that played only folk music, I can’ recall ever hearing Dane during the thirty three years I lived in Massachusetts. I never heard her in the jazz and blues shows there or in the other states in which I have lived, Texas and Maryland. Dane is still alive and who knows maybe, like all too many artists, she will receive the greater recognition that she deserves after she is gone. No doubt, like Pete Seeger, she has paid a price in her career for her political activism. Still, musicians readily acknowledge Dane’s importance, as reflected by Bonnie Raitt’s statement in a 2010 profile on Dane "she’s always been a role model and a hero of mine – musically and politically. I mean, the arc of her life so informs mine that – she’s – I really can’t think of anyone I admire [more], the way that she’s lived her life." I value highly all the posts of Dane’s music that you have posted and only regret that I did not discover her music much earlier. I have to smile when I think of the irony of learning about Dane from a German music blog but, in fact, that is why I value this blog so much.
Thanks again for your always interesting thoughts! All the best!
Danke for das album.
Zero, is a refresh possible?
Of course - here it is!
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