Soon Forward

White men know a dignity beyond fame and only half of it is obscure to all of me. In her 1976 performance at the Montreaux Jazz Festival, having just returned to the West after two years spent living in Liberia, Nina Simone needed to deliver more than song to feel free and appreciated and true to her spotlight. She began by playing the piano while and singing Little Girl Blue, replacing unhappy with liberated in the lyrics, the unhappy little girl blue became the liberated little girl blue, mood notwithstanding. Advancement. Nina had gone to Liberia and figured out everything that had been bothering her, she explained, and she was now capable of dancing naked with in a stark white mask and banishing irony from her trance state and locating the difference between paranoia and clairvoyance in that ban, but here she was in France again, performing for a mostly white audience, alternating between jazz and classical piano, between crooning and curtsying with her voice, when the need to get up and dance became paramount to all that. And so she rose, announced her plan and was greeted with cheers and excitement and only a mild degree of skepticism which she recognized and named, I don't know, we'll see what happens, it's getting weird in here, but I'm stone ready for you, a disarmingly honest threat. And then the drums shifted from tinny and brusk to a sensual wooden hollow, percussion came, and she got low in her knee-length black cotton halter dress, bowed and hissed in celebration of the revamped mood, and began to improvise in basic West African dance form, torso see-sawing like the sea itself, knees slightly bent like a birth could occur in the middle of a leap forward, and she lit up, high on her own riotous transformation. Identity is what had bothering her before Liberia. She was neither Bach nor Billie Holiday, neither entirely militant nor entirely romantic, she was an unplanned anomaly in black entertainment, discovered by white yuppie college kids in Atlantic City, where she played during summers to cover her tuition at Juilliard, where she was studying to be a concert pianist. One fated night the club owner walked over to he and said, girl you better sing. White patrons weren't accustomed to seeing black performers play classical music, she was being paid to create a sultry atmosphere that sold drinks, not to be a prodigy on her own terms. Jim Crow and Jane Crow go so far to be close. When she agreed to sing that night, her identity was reformed by the audience's opinion, before she had a chance to decide what kind of queen she was, she was turned into a 'colored' entertainer, at our service, playing the hits when we craved them. Liberia taught her a new relationship with spectacle, taught her that the audience is a myth, that in a respectful theater we are all participants and the rituals are interdependent and the urge to switch from song to dance and back need not be announced or warned of or discussed at all. But the most information about that night on stage at Monteaux is packed into the final gestures, when she's done dancing and returns to the piano for a few more bars of Sinnerman, no singing, before exiting centerstage. The mood is accomplished and dejected at the same time. She danced for them and her sacred and liberated ritual became the same kind of spectacle singing for the college kids in Atlantic City had been so many years ago, because she was a black woman virtually alone on stage clearly dancing to fulfill her own needs. This was not Beyoncé or Michael Jackson up there having neurotically planned and perfected every riff, this was Nina Simone wanting to purge her spirit of Europe while on stage in Europe and it left her perplexed, violated, somewhere between liberated and blue all over again. Never argue with the Blues, the Western world proves to us, the rules of our suffering will be insinuated far beyond their being technically outrun. What's wrong is that we are allowed to watch sitting down, analyzing, that no lesson on this side of the planet has taught us how to stand up and dance with her and exit centerstage when it gets weird or it's time for something more personal or less. To watch this footage is to feel her trying to figure out how her rebellion turned into a sorrow as she leaves the stage glistening and straight faced while the band fades out to the tune of My Baby Just Cares for Me.