Remembering a legend

BY KIM KNIGHT

HOW DO you grieve for your mother when the whole world wants a piece of her death?

"I tell people I was sleepwalking," says Lisa Celeste Stroud. "It was like I was shot out of a cannon and my cheeks were flapping."

When music legend Nina Simone died in France in 2003, Stroud, her only child, took a call from President Bill Clinton. Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Erteguns phoned. So did Loretta Scott-King – civil rights campaigner and widow of Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The list went on and on," says Stroud, 47. "I had to step up to the plate and make a lot of decisions and deal with a lot of people and personalities. You don't know who the villains and heroes are. You don't know what people's angles are."

All this for the woman Stroud calls "one of the most lonely people I've ever met in my life".

It took five years to accept her mother's death: "On the anniversary, I bought a bottle of wine and I went down into the room where I keep a lot of her things and I was able to play my CD, and all her music, and toast her and celebrate her and not feel like I was going to fall apart."

Today, Lisa Celeste Stroud calls herself Simone. She is a Broadway musical star in her own right, and next month travels to Wellington to perform her mother's works at the New Zealand International Arts Festival. Sing the Truth: Nina Simone Remembered features Simone, Dianne Reeves, Patti Austin and Liz Wright.

Cue the inevitable comparisons. From London's Evening Standard: "... the singers, all powerful performers with more than a spark of Simone's feisty feminism in their souls, found no difficulty in making her anthemic songs their own..."

Simone: "As my father told me years ago when I did my first tribute to her, `you got compared to your mother and you survived – congratulations'."

In her lifetime, Nina Simone recorded close to 60 albums. Best known for songs like "My Baby Just Cares for Me", "I Put a Spell on You" and "Young, Gifted and Black", fans acknowledged her as the "high priestess of soul".

Simone says there's only one Nina. "We are paying tribute, we are honouring her, but we are not trying to recreate her. That would be a gross mistake."

If, according to legend, Nina Simone was a born musician, a child prodigy who began playing piano aged three, her daughter was, more simply, born into music.

"I've been singing my mother's songs my whole life..."

Nina Simone performed at the New Zealand International Arts Festival in 1988. Twenty-two years later, it's her daughter's first visit to the country, but one of her husband's business partners is a Kiwi, and, she says, she's seen Whale Rider. "I loved it – the dances, the chants, oh man, it was amazing."

The March 6 show, at Wellington's Michael Fowler Centre, will feature members of the original Nina Simone band, led by her long-time music director and guitarist (and Simone's godfather) Al Shackman.

"I'm at home. We're family, we're just coming together to remember someone we loved very much."

SIMONE TOOK a circuitous route to the stage. At 17, she thought she'd become a lawyer. Instead, she trained as an engineer for the United States Airforce.

"My college plans did not go the way I meticulously planned. Once the adults got involved, everything just went haywire. I still cannot remember how the military came up as an option ... but it was an act of rebellion that lasted 10 years."

Life lessons from the military: "Realising that it isn't always about what we want to do and when we want to do it. Sometimes it's about what you gotta do and it's about sucking it up."

She'd like to give back. "Being a veteran of the first Gulf War, I want to regale my service people and take them out of their immediate reality for a while. But at the same time, the first thing I will be telling the higher-ups is don't expect me to encourage them to re-enlist, because that is where we differ in our opinions. I don't agree with a lot of things, and I don't feel our young people should be sacrificed for some of the things that are happening now."

Nina Simone was a civil rights activist. Biographies pinpoint two seminal moments – her parents being sent to the back of the hall during a piano recital, and her failure to win a college scholarship because of her race. Her concerns were reflected in her choice of songs – a cover of Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit", for example (about lynchings in America's southern states); and "Four Women", which traces four African-American female stereotypes. In 2006, Broadway World asked her daughter, via an email interview, "Did you inherit any of Nina's activist leanings?" Her three-word, no further elaboration, reply: "Yes, I have."

Ask again, and Simone says, "My mother started speaking out against the injustices against her people, not only because of what she witnessed, but because of what she personally experienced from the time she was born onto this earth.

"A lot of the issues mommy spoke out against I think are still prevalent today – they have just taken on a more subtle form, or a different moniker."

Racism still exists? "In my opinion, absolutely. [Though] it might not be black people who are the ones being pinpointed now."

Simone teaches her own daughter, 10-year-old Re-Anna, "There are different religions, languages and cultures and there are reasons for that... but we're all gonna die, we all have hopes and dreams, we all grieve – we're all human. So why do we concentrate so much throughout the history of humankind on our differences?"

Activist leanings? "Yes, I have!"

SIMONE WAS on a military posting in Germany, singing in a night club, when she scored her first gig as a backing vocalist. More weekends, more shows, a stint touring – and, eventually, an audition for a US production of Jesus Christ Superstar. Her parents (her father, Andrew, was Nina Simone's manager before their separation in 1970) discouraged the move to music.

"I'm glad I took the risk, and had the tenacity and awareness to make the decision in spite of my parents' misgivings, in spite of the fact that people said I was too old, too this and that ... don't listen to what other people have to say, because ultimately, at the end of the day, it's not their life."

In 1999, Simone realised a dream – an on-stage appearance with her mother. In 2002, her mother was in the audience when Simone starred in the title role of the music Aida. A year later, Nina Simone was dead.

She lives on in restaurants, movies, television commercials – and Belgium elevators. Last year, at the Ghent Jazz festival, on tour with Sing the Truth, Simone stepped out of a hotel sauna and into the lift back to her room. She was wearing a fluffy bathrobe. She pressed the button, and Nina started singing.

"We all know our mother's voices... it's like time stands still for me. I start looking all around, looking for the source, and on that particular day, she was singing `Don't Explain', and I was, `Hmm, is that a message for me?' But I stayed in that elevator, rode it up and down with no particular destination, until the song was finished."

A daughter, finally at peace with a difficult mum?

"Some people think, to be extremely creative, to be a genius – and my mother was a genius – that part of that is you have to treat people like they're subhuman or sycophants. I heartily disagree with that."

Nina Simone's life, says Simone, "was extremely painful".

"We pass on what we are given as kids. If a person's way of loving you in the 1930s and 1940s is to beat you with a switch and make you practise piano for six hours a day, then when you have a kid of your own, you don't know how to pass on anything else. That is your way of learning.

"My grandmother wasn't around a lot of the time, so my mother was being raised by her eldest sister and her siblings. My grandmother wasn't around for her, my mother wasn't around a lot for me. But that didn't mean she didn't love me."

The yoke, says Simone, has been broken. "I know what I didn't like as a kid. I know what made me feel a certain way. And I'll be doggone if I'm going to pass that down to my daughter. That is where we differentiate."

Diff-er-ent-i-ate. Simone speaks stroppy American. A voice cracked, girlish and deep all at the same time. And she's on a roll.

"If I had to give up my career today to make sure my daughter was all right, I would not hesitate. I can sing in church. I can sing in a club and be just as fulfilled."

Would Nina Simone have settled for the same?

"Oh are you kidding?! Absolutely not."

Spoilt for choice

A play without speech recreates the idealistic utopia of 14 young people discovering the intricacies of loving and living after the cancellation of a Simon and Garfunkel concert in Riga, Latvia... Ladies and gentlemen, take your seats for the New Zealand International Arts Festival. Almost 1000 artists from 30 countries will perform in Wellington from February 26 to March 21.

The programme spans theatre (including aforementioned Sound of Silence), music, dance and visual arts programmes. A writers and readers week – which includes an already sold-out appearance by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins – runs within the main event from March 9.

"Audiences expect a sense of community, wonderment, relevance and fun," said artistic director Lissa Twomey. "It's their festival." Highlights? The official press kit lists 18 Australasian and five world premieres. Among the latter, theatre production's Mark Twain & Me in Maoriland (from Taki Rua Theatre and inspired by true events); and 360, where the audience will be seated on swivel seats in the middle of a circular stage.

Three New Zealand composers air their work for the first time: Jenny McLeod's Peaks of Clouds is a tenor and piano performance to poems by Janet Frame; David Downes' Kingdom will be played by NZTrio and Ross Harris's The Abiding Tides features the poems of Vincent O'Sullivan.

Opening night brings together 450 performers – eight of them from the international opera stage, with five major local choirs and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra – for Mahler's Symphony No. 8. The concert will be screened free on a giant screen in Civic Square.

A total of 50 free events have been scheduled throughout the festival. Watch out for Transports Exceptionnels at Waitangi Park. According to the publicity blurb, it's "a funny and touchingly romantic dance duet between male dancer Philippe Priasso and a mechanical digger".

Fifteen exhibitions and activities are listed on the visual arts programme, including opportunities to see work by Venice Biennale artists Francis Upritchard and Judy Millar at Te Papa, and Milan Mrkusich and Seraphine Pick at City Gallery. Wellington will be the third city in the world (behind Paris and London) to see theatre director Peter Brook's new work Eleven and Twelve.

There's another play with hardly any words from Polish company TR Warzsawa. T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T begins with a telegram and ends with the seduction of an entire household – with English subtitles and "adult themes and nudity that push right to the edge but remain discreet". On the music bill, Sing the Truth: Nina Simone Remembered, featuring Simone, the only child of the "high priestess of soul", and 90-year-old sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, with his daughter Anoushka.

Dance highlights include acrobatic Shaolin monks performing Sutra and contemporary circus, Swedish style, from Cirkus Cirkor ("even my seat wanted to make clapping noises", said a review from The Times). When choosing festival events, said Twomey, "excellence, innovation and diversity are key ingredients". Judge for yourself – full programme, bookings and free performances at www.nzfestival.nzpost.co.nz

Sing the Truth: Nina Simone Remembered, part of the New Zealand International Arts Festival, March 6, 8pm, Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington.

- © Fairfax NZ News