Pastel Blues

“Pastel Blues”—a very pretty title for an album, and this one is about blues; but perhaps the “Pastel” part may be a bit misleading. According to Mr. Webster, pastel means “a pale and light shade of color.” There is nothing very pale or light about this extraordinary Philips Records LP performance from the incomparable Nina Simone.

Rather, it is a dynamic album introduction to the blues for the artist in which Nina evokes all the windswept grandeur of classic Greek tragedy on a selection of nine pieces that, in the startling dramatic Simone interpretations, reverberate against the rock of memory long after their sound stills. For Nina Simone is more than just a singer, more than just a pianist, more that just a musician, even. She is a painter of moods, emotions, more often than not dark moods and emotions, the kind that give dimension to a human being and the depth and wisdom of the ages to a recording.

Sometimes her moods are shocking, as in the “Strange Fruit” band, perhaps the most overwhelming example of Nina’s dramatic as well as musical gifts in this package. Singing, or moaning, or wailing, or crying out about the horrors perpetrated in the modern South, Nina starts out on the selection as a woman numb with what she has seen, and smelled—“Blood on the leaves and blood at the roots,” “black bodies swinging from the trees,” “burning flesh”—and finishes with a chilling, stirring emotionalism that etches all the injustices of man to man, leaves them indelibly written on the wind. It is a tour de force performance, and is Nina’s only real tussle with The Problem on the album.

The rest of the material is mostly man vs. woman blues, and Nina proves she has the master’s feel.