June 24, 2004

A Younger Generation's Homage to a Soulful Diva

he saved our lives," the author Toni Morrison declared, assessing the lacerating honesty and passion of Nina Simone, who died last year at 71. Ms. Morrison, who read an excerpt from her novel "Jazz," was the first of many astutely chosen guests assembled at Carnegie Hall on Monday evening to pay tribute to the singer, pianist and sometime songwriter, once labeled the High Priestess of Soul. Ms. Morrison recalled Simone's ability to "hypnotize" an audience with her naked emotional intensity and raw, confrontational voice.

The concert, one of the main events of the JVC Jazz Festival, was a sad reminder that once upon a time before pop music became a televised lap dance, music and social history were intimately connected in a tradition that stood near the forefront of American culture.

Both the Chicago-based folk-blues storyteller Oscar Brown Jr. and the folk-blues legend Odetta, who appeared on Monday, are going strong in their 70's, although who would know? Mr. Brown acted out "Rags and Old Iron," a swatch of comic urban folklore he wrote with Norman Curtis. Odetta, her voice as loamy and timeless as ever, conjured painful history in Mr. Brown and Nat Adderley's "Work Song."

Although the tradition of bearing the mythology of a culture has been sidelined in the age of MTV, the inclusion of younger performers like Tracy Chapman, Lizz Wright and the popular British duo Floetry (Marsha Ambrosius and Natalie Stewart), showed that it still flickers.

Simone was the ultimate pop diva, notoriously temperamental, musically beyond category and at one time the definitive interpreter of Bob Dylan. Her expressions of bitterness, anger and embattled pride were matched by a supreme, classically trained musicality few could touch. I will never forget her spellbinding voice-and-piano rendition of "Alone Again, Naturally," into which she interpolated the traumatic events of her life in a devastating 20-minute autobiography.

Each younger guest captured a facet of Simone's sensibility. Ms. Chapman performed a quiet, trembling "Wild Is the Wind" to her own guitar in waltz time that evoked the vulnerable young romantic. Ms. Wright's fiercely concentrated "I Loves You Porgy" and "Lilac Wine" showed the expressive force of a great pop-jazz voice deployed without the camouflage of melisma.

Performing "To Be Young Gifted and Black" Floetry showed how the vocabulary of neo-soul adapted for the age of hip-hop could convey a persuasive message of black pride to a younger generation. The concert ended with a strong rendition of "Four Women," one of Simone's most famous songs, performed by Ms. Chapman, Ms. Wright, Odetta, and the diva's daughter, known simply as Simone. Behind all of Nina Simone's pain lay a reservoir of tenderness. It remained for her longtime musical colleague, Al Shackman, who began working with her in 1957, to sum up her essence on Monday. Beneath her layers of sophistication, he said, the singer, who was born in North Carolina, was at heart a "little Southern country girl."