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| From | "Sager, Greg" <greg.sager@bankofamerica.com> |
| Subject | Re: Nina meets Eric ... |
| Date | Tue, 22 Apr 2003 14:31:28 -0500 |
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> Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2003 20:41:41 -0400 (EDT)
> From: moteeko@telerama.com
> To: audities@smoe.org
> Subject: Nina meets Eric...
> Message-ID: <1050972101.3ea48fc548493@webmail.telerama.com>
>
> Quoting MBaroneO@aol.com:
>
> > I read that she could be quite a handful on stage sometimes and didn't
> suffer fools gladly. She could turn in a stellar performance on one night
> and then on the next night a very abrasive, confrontational one if the
> mood struck her.
> >
>
> In one of his books (or books on him), Eric Burton tells of meeting Nina.
> He
> absolutely idolized her, and when she laid eyes on him, she started to
> tear him
> apart for ripping off black music for his own career.
>
What an arrogant and misguided attitude. I wonder if she would've
accused Seiji Ozawa, Leontyne Price, or Yo-Yo Ma of ripping off white music
for *their* own careers.
Music has no color. The fact that one race or culture may have
cultivated a certain form of music doesn't make it the exclusive
intellectual property of that people. A big part of what makes music such a
vital part of people's lives is that it is by nature heterogenous and
adaptable across all sorts of human barriers. Just try to imagine if jazz
would've been able to be born if white people hadn't felt free to use
African and Caribbean musical forms, or if black people hadn't felt free to
use European musical forms. And how would there have been any rock'n'roll if
people hadn't been allowed to mix R&B and C&W?
The fact that British Invasion musicians adapted R&B and blues to
their own ends hardly means that they were ripping off black Americans. It's
more a matter of the old expression, "Imitation is the sincerest form of
flattery." It was the fact that those musicians were so moved by American
blues and R&B that led to their attempts to replicate it and/or expand upon
it, not the promise of riches earned from some other peoples' cultural
patrimony. And, coincidentally, it was the popularity of the Animals and
their peers that led to unprecedented public interest (and financial reward,
in some cases) for those older black R&B and blues musicians, many toiling
in poverty and obscurity, who had originally inspired the Brits.
It's comments like this one that always made Nina Simone such an
off-putting person in my eyes. As much as I enjoyed her music, I always had
the feeling that I'd dread being hectored by her between-songs patter or by
reading her interviews.
Gregory Sager
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