Great singing isn't measured in decibels or determined by brassy attitude but by the emotions it conveys. By that standard, Nina Simone is among the greatest.
Her well-programmed new career retrospective begins in 1950s jazz clubs, where she worked her supple voice around the standards. In those years when the standards were still relatively young, jazz remained a vital and popular music and Simone's mix of warmth and uncertainty, light and shadow, heralded her as a superb new talent. Her range only expanded from there. By the early '60s, as she gradually slipped the narrower bonds of jazz and blues, she recorded "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" before the Animals had their hit. Eric Burdon caught the anguish in her voice when he covered the song, but never the abysmal terror. Her majestic version of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You" is sheer witchy wickedness wrapped in a dark, swirling orchestral storm cloud.
Later in the '60s, the era of her civil rights protest song "Mississippi Goddam," Simone cast herself as an activist soul singer. Much of this material is more interesting as an angry, exuberant history lesson than as music; her versions of Dylan are pretty but inessential. But even then she continued to draw from the deeper well of jazz in the sad, sympathetic and fatalistic "The Other Woman" and the haunting "Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair."
The set's third disc spans the '70s and finds Simone headfirst in exploration of Afro funk and India in sounds that might have been called "world music" a decade later. Simone's restless creative spirit is well represented on To Be Free, which includes several rare or unreleased tracks along with a concert DVD recorded in 1970.
