McRae, the third song stylist on the LP, was featured on Burton Lane and E.Y. She's heard on songs by the Gershwins ("Someone to Watch Over Me"), Cole Porter ("I Concentrate on You," "From This Moment On"), and Jimmy Van Heusen and Eddie DeLange ("All This and Heaven, Too"). Fred Coots standard "For All We Know."Ĭhris Connor had spent 1953-1955 on Bethlehem before being snapped up by Atlantic Records where she remained for roughly seven years.
Nina simone discography tpb plus#
Her repertoire is rounded out with three outtakes from Little Girl Blue: the evocative, improvised piano-led instrumental "African Mailman" plus the spiritual "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands" and the Sam Lewis/J. Simone's selections include the Gershwins and DuBose Heyward's "I Loves You, Porgy," a top 20 Pop/top 5 R&B entry for the artist as released off Little Girl Blue. The 12-song sequence encompasses four cuts from each artist. Nina Simone and Her Friends was the result. (Simone departed for the greener pastures of Colpix Records.) But Bethlehem was eager to cash in on the new star. So had the two other artists who comprise her "friends" - jazz vocalists Chris Connor and Carmen McRae. By the time of the release of Nina Simone and Her Friends, Simone had already left the label.
Simone's discography for Bethlehem is famously small - just the Little Girl Blue album and the three additional songs on this collection. All formats will arrive in stores on December 3. The LP will be a Record Store Day Essentials emerald green 180-gram pressing available at record stores everywhere. Like the earlier title, this newly remastered edition will be available on CD, LP, and in both high-definition and standard digital/streaming versions. Nina Simone died of breast cancer in Carry-le-Rouet, in the south of France, on April 21, 2003.BMG is following up its reissue earlier this year of Nina Simone's 1959 Bethlehem Records debut Little Girl Blue with the label's follow-up, Nina Simone and Her Friends.
In her later years, there was a resurgence of interest in her music and she was acknowledged for her magnificent and influential body of work. She left the US in 1970 and spent the next 33 years dealing with personal issues, sporadically recording, performing live, and relocating in several countries over the years. With her own songs that tackled racial inequality, Simone developed into a uniquely individual performer with little tolerance for music industry conventions. By the mid 1960s, albums like Pastel Blues (1965), Let It All Out (1965), High Priestess of Soul (1967) and Silk & Soul (1967) were charting in the R&B Top 40 while barely making a mark on the jazz chart. While commonly referred to as a jazz artist, she would add a mix of blues and soul into her repertoire. Her first significant hit was “I Loves You Porgy” in 1958, followed by her debut album Little Girl Blue, which contained “My Baby Just Cares For Me," which became one of her signature songs. Playing Atlantic City bars, she adopted the name Nina Simone to avoid being chastised by her mother for playing the "devil's music”. Subsequent rejections for music scholarships on what she believed to be racial grounds, hardened her political sensibility and laid the seeds of her involvement with civil rights issues. The sixth of eight children, Nina Simone began playing piano at the age of three, then went on to study classical piano, giving her first recital at 12. She was a woman of many talents - singer, pianist, arranger, and composer - who was just as well-known for her activism and her volatile personality. Nina Simone - born Eunice Kathleen Waymon on February 21, 1933, in Tryon, North Carolina - was a jazz diva extraordinaire.