Little Girl Blue

For this new Analogue Productions reissue of Little Girl Blue we’ve upped the ante. A single pocket jacket to suffice? No. We’ve done the lady right with a heavy Stoughton Printing tip-on gatefold jacket featuring gorgeous colour photos of Nina from a glamorous stage performance. And the peerless mastering by Ryan Smith at Sterling Sound in New York sounds incredible. Then top it off with 200-gram Quality Record Pressings vinyl that is unsurpassingly silent and gives incredibly rich playback.

As the liner notes say, there are plenty of musical singers who vocalize well and have an individual style but who never cross that thin and hard-to-define line that separates a good “pop” style from one that is jazz. The first few notes of this record will immediately confirm Nina’s jazz credentials. As she said, “You got to get to people.” That she does with a vibrant and husky contralto that tonally sounds like a blend of an unlikely combination of Marian Anderson and Ma Rainey.

Nina Simone was born February 21, 1933, in Tryon, North Carolina. She was one of eight children — all of whom sang or played an instrument. At 4 she started to play piano; by 4 1/2 she was singing and soon was part of a church trio with her sisters. By the time she reached high school she was playing jazz piano heavily tinged with the folk blues of the south. When she graduated at 17 she left home for Philadelphia. Later followed two years of serious piano study at New York’s Julliard School of Music. She made her first vocal appearance singing from the keyboard at the Mid-Town Club in Atlantic City. By this time she had heard and enjoyed and been influenced by such stylists as Louis Armstrong, Kitty White, Sarah Vaughn, Louis Jordan and Billie Holiday.

Her unusual combination of classical training, the ecstatic and serious quality of gospel church music that influenced her vocal delivery, and the funky and modern schools of jazz with which she came into close contact all made for an inspiring singer and instrumentalist.

For Little Girl Blue, Nina and her rhythm section recorded the entire album plus three additional tracks in just one session. In her biography of Nina, Nadine Cohodas recounts engineer Irv Greeenbaum’s recollection of that day: “Nothing like Nina’s artistry had ever happened before … Her voice and the keyboard playing were so rich and interesting that they could have stood alone.”

Little Girl Blue documents Nina Simone’s unparalleled and idiosyncratic musical persona at a particularly vibrant, formative stage, and helped launch her on a trajectory with more than its share of personal and professional trials and triumphs.