Black Gold
Until recently I would have said I’d never heard a bad Nina Simone record; this one has got me thinking though. It’s not that I think it is bad per se, just that I think it could be better with very little effort.
Black Gold is taken from a concert Simone gave in New York in 1969. I haven’t found an exact release date, but it had been on the Billboard album charts for a couple of weeks by 21 March 1970, so it was most likely released late February. The material is eclectic and the performances are strong. So why do I have my doubts? Two reasons: one, it falls into the trap of a lot of live albums by allowing the audience noise to be too intrusive, to the detriment of the material. Second, I prefer her when she is alone with a piano, and here she has a band. It’s a good band, but I find they get in the way of some of the songs. I might add that, although it could just be my laptop and headphones, I found the actual recording quality a bit ropey too.
When it works for me, though, it really works. Her treatment of the traditional Black Is The Colour of My True Love’s Hair is very good, as is the percussive West Wind. I like her take on Sandy Denny’s Who Knows Where The Time Goes too, though would have prefered it to be piano rather than guitar based. Her between-songs comments are a delight. The expanded cd release contains an intriguing take on Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne, where she allows her voice to go places I haven’t heard it go previously.
But a couple of things definitely don’t work for me: The Assignment Sequence and a busy version of To Be Young, Gifted and Black.
Like Laura Nyro, like so many other people I like, Nina Simone was singular: she was her own woman with her own aesthetic. You can’t mistake her for anyone else and, once heard, you’ll recognise her anywhere. She doesn’t play blues and doesn’t play soul but something else, something fundamental to both, rooted in an assertion of identity. You can’t listen to one of her records and not take something away from it, and the same is true of this one, even though I have reservations about it.
The original album release is on YouTube, linked below.
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