Nina Simone "wild As The Wind" at Heptone

Nina Simone was a promising classical pianist who hoped to become America's first Black concert pianist, yet she was rejected from the prestigious Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. It was 1950 and racial segregation was rife. The humiliation and disappointment suffered by the young woman would inform her entire activist thinking and artistic journey.
Associated with the civil rights movement for Black Americans and women, and a friend of Martin Luther King, Nina Simone was above all a free spirit. She fought, risking her life, armed only with her music and her authenticity, to make the voices of minorities heard...

read more

Nina Simone was a promising classical pianist who hoped to become America's first Black concert pianist, yet she was rejected from the prestigious Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. It was 1950 and racial segregation was rife. The humiliation and disappointment suffered by the young woman would inform her entire activist thinking and artistic journey.
Associated with the civil rights movement for Black Americans and women, and a friend of Martin Luther King, Nina Simone was above all a free spirit. She fought, risking her life, armed only with her music and her authenticity, to make the voices of minorities heard. Combining classic songs ranging from blues, jazz, gospel, and inspired monologues, this project is a powerful tribute to this versatile artist with multiple identities, unclassifiable, fueled by lost hopes, inextinguishable strength, lostness, and rage. Nina Simone's music, which she herself considered a "soundtrack to a troubled era," is placed in the socio-political context that underlies it, in order to better understand the realities of the time, realities that are catching up with us...

show less