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Nina Simone - The Philips Years '2016

The Philips Years
ArtistNina Simone Related artists
Album name The Philips Years
Country
Date 2016
Genre
Play time 04:12:22
Format / Bitrate Stereo 1420 Kbps / 44.1 kHz
MP3 320 Kbps
Media CD
Size 582 MB / 1.40 GB
PriceDownload $8.95
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Tracks list

Tracklist:

CD1 - Nina Simone in Concert (1964)
01. I Loves You, Porgy
02. Plain Gold Ring
03. Pirate Jenny
04. Old Jim Crow
05. Dont Smoke In Bed
06. Go Limp
07. Mississippi Goddam

CD2 - Broadway,Blues,Ballads (1964)
01. Dont Let Me Be Misunderstood
02. Night Song
03. The Laziest Gal In Town
04. Something Wonderful
05. Dont Take All Night
06. Nobody
07. I Am Blessed
08. Of This Im Sure
09. See-Line Woman
10. Our Love
11. How Can I
12. The Last Rose Of Summer

CD3 - I put A Spell On You (1965)
01. I Put A Spell On You
02. Tomorrow Is My Turn
03. Ne Me Quitte Pas
04. Marriage Is For Old Folks
05. July Tree
06. Gimme Some
07. Feeling Good
08. One September Day
09. Blues On Purpose
10. Beautiful Land
11. Youve Got To Learn
12. Take Care Of Business[/size

CD4 - Pastel Blues (1966)
01. Be My Husband
02. Nobody Knows You When Youre Down And Out
03. End Of The Line
04. Trouble In Mind
05. Tell Me More And More And Then Some
06. Chilly Winds Dont Blow
07. Aint No Use
08. Strange Fruit
09. Sinnerman

CD5 - Let It All Out (1966)
01. Mood Indigo
02. The Other Woman
03. Love Me Or Leave Me
04. Dont Explain
05. Little Girl Blue [Live]
06. Chauffeur
07. For Myself
08. The Ballad Of Hollis Brown
09. This Years Kisses
10. Images [Live]
11. Nearer Blessed Lord

CD6 - Wild Is The Wind (1966)
01. I Love Your Lovin Ways
02. Four Women
03. What More Can I Say?
04. Lilac Wine
05. Thats All I Ask
06. Break Down And Let It All Out
07. Why Keep On Breaking My Heart
08. Wild Is The Wind (Live In New York/1964)
09. Black Is The Color Of My True Loves Hair (Live In New York/1964)
10. If I Should Lose You
11. Either Way I Lose

CD7 - High Priestess Of Soul (1967)
01. Dont You Pay Them No Mind
02. Im Gonna Leave You
03. Brown Eyed Handsome Man
04. Keeper Of The Flame
05. The Gal From Joes
06. Take Me To The Water
07. Im Going Back Home
08. I Hold No Grudge
09. Come Ye
10. He Aint Comin Home No More
11. Work Song
12. I Love My Baby

 The Philips Years is a humble title for a collection that contains some of
the most important, moving documents of American history. Nina
Simoneâ™s Philips records remain her most essential.
Nina Simone hurts you. She does it with her voice, which is sharpened and ready,
versatile as a set of top flight chefâ™s knives able to slice through
the music making a myriad of purposeful and precise incisions, wounds, gashes or
lacerations. She does it through words, delivered sometimes like poisoned darts,
other times like butterfly kisses from a child on the cheek of an exhausted
mother. She does it by staring you down and withering your resolve; looking at
you the way death looks at you, and in so doing giving you life.
Her pain becomes yours, and her pain is eternal and without limit. It is a human
pain, a ghostly, ancient suffering that comes through her more than it does from
her. Having been dropped to the earth in Depression-era America, she sang this
pain through blues and Broadway, through jazz and campy lovestruck standards.
She played Bach fugues and cantatas with the same urgent grace that she lent to
the hammer-busting work ballads of the black south. Born a classical prodigy in
a hot and rural segregated North Carolina town, she was formed into (or perhaps
already was) a warrior of unmatched regality; a woman in possession of kind,
delicate fingers and the kind of emotional bloodlust that only comes when you
grow up in a place where people are lynched for looking just like you.

Ms. Simone attended Juliard with money her hometown collected to further her
career, but left the school when her cash ran out. After a rejection from a
conservatory in Philadelphia, she took on gigs at a supper club, and eventually
earned a recording contract first with Bethlehem and then Colpix where she
released eight albums, became a darling of the folk scene and culminated with a
performance at Carnegie Hall in 1963.

But then civil rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated in his driveway by
a Klan member. And several months later a bomb ripped through a black church in
Birmingham, Alabama murdering four children. And within months Nina Simone
switched labels to Philips and unleashed a series of songs about civil rights
and anger and freedom, the most noted of which is “Mississippi
Goddamn,” a sprightly show tune that slow-builds into an unrestrained call
to arms. The tune is based on a passage on Bertolt Brechtâ™s and Kurt
Weillâ™s “Alabama Song” from the 1927 experimental play,
Mahagonny-Songspiel aka The Little Mahagonny. Brecht and Weill would prove
consistent and proper antecedents to the particular brew of theatricality and
revolution that defined much of Ms. Simoneâ™s work after she joined
Philips. Her cover of “Pirate Jenny” from Threepenny Opera is one of
the creepiest recordings of all time for a great many reasons, one of which
being Simoneâ™s implicit understanding of how closely 1930s Germany
paralleled the violent psychosis of American racism.

These songs and scores more all appear on the seven albums she recorded at
Philips from 1964-1967, which have been re-released as a boxed set. The set,
simply called, Nina Simone: The Philips Years, covers a period of time that is
arguably her creative best.

Too large to be subsumed under one description, the 74 songs contained herein
cover all corners of the Simone musical universe, from the bright and lacy
Sunday best of “Nearer Blessed Lord,” to the hellfire and brimstone
of “Sinnerman,” from the lush, indulgent ennui of “Ne Me
Quitte Pas,” to the bold, agonizing solemnity of “Strange
Fruit.” Nearly every song in this far-flung cycle has its opposite,
because Nina Simone was the nexus point of nearly all the western musical ideas
of her time. She may be the only artist to find the link between Sam Cooke and
Edith Piaf, between Bertolt Brecht and Malcolm X. Her thorough and strict
classical training (she was in the truest and least sensational sense a diva)
allowed her to treat the music of black Americans—soul, jazz, blues,
roots and folk—with a level of deference typically reserved for
Rachmaninov.

On display in these recordings is Simoneâ™s vast and unmatched set of
gifts, technical and otherwise. Her pure jazz keyboard work on tracks like
“Mood Indigo” makes her one of the few pianists to legitimately
rival Duke Ellingtonâ™s combination of clarity and melodic complexity.
Although she largely interpreted other peopleâ™s songs, some of the
strongest lyrical content in her catalogue comes from her own compositions,
particularly “Four Women,” a spare, trenchant character study that
manages to capture all the impossible contradictions of black American womanhood
in just 16 lines. And the impact of her vocals went beyond her distinctive
voice. She was an incisive and adroit singer, who could seamlessly navigate the
vulnerable passages that appeared in ballads like “Donâ™t Smoke
in Bed,” and “I Loves You Porgy,” while also bringing a
virtuosic gravitas even to syrupy standards like “One September
Day.”

The other end of her skill set was her unmatched ability to make listeners feel
every bit of what she was feeling. Think of the vast and prickly joy of a track
like “Feeling Good,” how it conveys a manic freedom, a
heart-bursting love that shoots from the chest in nerve-sized lightening bolts,
tingling like chandeliers shattering throughout your limbs. Or the meandering
mourning of “Plain Gold Ring,” that unfolds itself slowly over the
dark, creeping motive that comprises the songâ™s melodic underpinning.
She delivers, “In my heart it will never be spring” in a way that
darkens the skies of your own heart, stripping the foliage, laying bare the
branches of your skeleton. At their peak, Simoneâ™s powers bordered on
emotional clairvoyance.

Predictably it was when she turned the full power of these weapons to the cause
of affirming the rights and humanity of black people that her career began to
falter in ways from which she could never fully recover. It is difficult to
overstate how strident and militant she was about ending racism and injustice,
how unabashedly she proclaimed her love for blackness and the preciousness of
the lives of black people. My own mother and her sisters have told me for years
that of all the civil rights leaders of their generation, it was Ms. Simone,
dark-skinned, natural-haired, big lipped, seated at a piano with a head wrapped
in queenly cloths, and fingers that have mastered Western music, who meant the
most to them. It was Ms. Simone who loved them when she sang their pain. It was
Ms. Simone who entitled them when she sang their anger.

This boxed set contains some of the best pure music ever recorded. It
doesnâ™t really matter what your genre loyalties are. At its essence,
music is about chords, melodies, and harmonies, and an artist whose humanity is
so fully on display that you, as a listener canâ™t help but to vibrate
sympathetically. When you hear “Mississippi Goddamn,” sung in 1964
in New York City, you are hearing a song that is so honest and fearless that it
is still impossible to deny. And 2016 is a lot like 1964. Racially motivated
murders still take place under the cover of night. Black people are still killed
in churches to advance the cause of white supremacy. A nation still threatens to
devour itself. At its most glorious, the work collected here is an affirmation
of the level of humanity needed to keep the soul in tact and fight for
oneâ™s freedom. At its most mournful, it is evidence of the cost.

Nina Simone


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