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ivan@stellysee.de
| From | "Ryan Hoekstra" <erhoek@attbi.com> |
| Subject | Re: Nina meets Eric ... |
| Date | Tue, 22 Apr 2003 21:02:32 -0400 |
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There is an extremely sad (but at the same time funny) interview with Nina
Simone on one of those Celebrities At Their Worst comps.
It is a radio interview done by a dj who is obviously a fan but is greatly
disillusioned to find that she cannot seem to get over how the white man
kept her down. No matter how much praise the interviewer offered her she
kept going back to how the white man kept her from being successful.
I don't know who this white man is but somebody should do something to
punish him if he did single handedly keep Nina from going to secretarial
school (or whatever it was she blamed him for).
-r
np...Orange Park-the Extended Play
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sager, Greg" <greg.sager@bankofamerica.com>
To: <audities@smoe.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2003 3:31 PM
Subject: Re: Nina meets Eric ...
> > 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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