Music review: Lisa Simone
In a tribute to her mother Nina Simone, Lisa Simone commands the stage in her own way, with impeccable vocals, soulful polish and a generous, generous warmth.
With a handful of solo albums and a Grammy nomination for her lead vocals with the acid jazz band Liquid Soul, Lisa Simone is an accomplished singer in her own right. But in Saturday night’s performance at Her Majesty’s Theatre, she shared the stage with her late mother, civil rights activist, and iconic soul singer Nina Simone.
It’s no secret that Simone’s relationship with her mother was a troubled one. The elder Simone’s struggles with addiction and depression, coupled with a demanding touring schedule and pressure to be a kind of saviour for Black America translated to a childhood of physical and emotional abuse for young Lisa Simone. Their relationship was a complex one, but clearly and ultimately one of loyalty and great respect. In a 2023 interview with The Guardian, Simone says, “I’m the only person on this entire planet who calls Nina Simone, Mommy. And I do so with joy and with pride – and with a sense of knowing who I am, where I come from and how I carry on this legacy today.” Globally, this has played out in the Oscar-nominated Netflix documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? which Lisa executive produced, and, closer to home, in this Australian tour of Lisa Simone: A Daughter’s Tribute to Nina Simone.
Coming out on the stage in a sparkling black headdress and sleek black shoulder-strap dress — “Who do I look like right now, right?” — Simone settles into ‘Black is the Colour (of My True Love’s Hair)’, smoky, haunting, staring off into the distance as if singing to the song’s lost lover or maybe to the mother who sang to the lover before her. And when the song’s over, what a cheeky grin! Even singing Nina Simone favourites like ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ and ‘Sugar in My Bowl’, Lisa Simone sets herself apart from her mother with her smoother, more polished and less direct musical style, and her perky personality, a let-love-in message that comes across in her cabaret-style communion with the audience.
Nina Simone was a master of cover songs in that she could take a classic such as The Beatles’ ‘Here Comes the Sun’ and turn it into her very own. Such is the serendipity of this performance: Lisa Simone puts her own stamp on her mother’s songs, turning the touching melancholy of ‘If You Knew’, for instance — a song written by Nina Simone for and about her daughter while missing her on the road — into a reggae rendition suited to the younger Simone’s sensibility. The audience was enthusiastically on board, owing much to Simone’s sheer talent. Though did her inconsequential-sounding, ‘goddam’ placed at the end of a melodic tirade in a tribute to her mother’s quintessential protest song ‘Mississippi Goddamn’ work? “If Mom was an anvil hitting a rock, I’m going to be a rock skipping over the water,” she says, though if one thing is clear it’s that she deals with her mother’s momentous gravity on her own terms. And she’s highly original.
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In the second half of the show, Simone loses the headdress and shakes her twist-out, red-tipped hair, glasses on, freer in her body. “I feel so much better,” she says, introducing herself as an artist now sharing her own songs, those she wrote for her mother, or that were inspired by her mother. Her song ‘Legacy’ showcases the kind of storytelling that can only come from a child brought up in such fame-riddled circumstances. Likewise ‘Tragique Beauty’. They’re songs with soulful rhythms and niche lyrics, not meant for mass recognition, but for setting a record straight, and in this way it felt a privilege to be invited into a song that took only a few minutes to sing but a lifetime to write.
Bill Risby as Musical Director and pianist contributes to some of the brightest musical moments, and bassist Nick Sinclair leads in bone-deep tenor — the band is slick and suits Simone’s professionalism and forte to a tee. This was as high quality and inclusive as they get, a show I’d not hesitate to recommend to any music lover, however, I’ve got to step back a moment and ask myself: What would Nina Simone think?
It’s difficult for any reviewer to end on a low note when the show they’re commenting on is as expertly staged and brilliantly preformed as this one, but the closing song — a seemingly near and dear one to Lisa Simone — invited us to ‘Imagine a world full of hearts and butterflies / Beautiful flowers, sunshine all the time / Ladybugs and blue skies’. ‘In My World,’ she sings, ‘things are so much simpler.’ In a night defined by the complicated legacy shared between mother and daughter, the contrast between such wishful thinking, and the incendiary politics of her mother’s work, was stark. Set against a backdrop of historic chaos and unrest, it was another moment that served to highlight the distance between the apple and the tree.
Lisa Simone performed at Her Majesty’s Theatre on July 26