Cabaret Festival review: Ursula Yovich Sings Nina Simone
Aided and abetted by an excellent band, Ursula Yovich not only showcases the work of a musical legend, she artfully brings the lessons of the songs closer to home.
The more time passes, the more amazing is Nina Simone. Her musical gifts as both composer and performer are extraordinary and unique. Her legacy has been clouded in recent times – the Netflix documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? graphically reported on the decline of her later years – but few would dispute her genius and commanding presence.
In 1970, Nina Simone confided to a New York audience how tiring performing had become –and that she hoped that night’s live recording (released as Black Gold) would be something people could still listen to when she was gone.
And what remarkable treasures those albums now are, especially the concerts when her precision and gift for improvising across genres and styles is so apparent. Apart from her own brilliant compositions, there are the covers – Broadway tunes, spirituals, blues standards, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, George Harrison and Burt Bacharach songs– all transmuted into Nina Simone originals.
In her captivating Cabaret Festival tribute, Ursula Yovich fondly recalls, as a youngster in Darwin, watching Simone video clips on Rage. That admiration has grown into a profound sense of kinship, an affiliation with this singer, and her willingness to bear witness. “It is the artists’ duty,” says Yovich, “to reflect the times.” And she applauds Nina Simone as an artist, an activist, and ‘The High Priestess of Soul’.
After an extended and outstanding career as both actor and singer, Yovich has in some ways echoed Simone’s own. Identified for exceptional talent, she enrolled in theatre and music classes when very young. And her impressive bio includes more than 50 stage productions, including her own compositions, one person shows, high profile Australian films and TV, and multiple Helpmann and other prestigious awards – including this year’s ‘Cabaret Icon’, announced at the Cabaret Festival’s Variety Gala on Thursday.
As soon as Yovich and her terrific four-piece band take to the stage, the packed house in the Banquet Room is ready to roll. The show opens with ‘Sinnerman’, the diminutive Yovich filling the air with her powerful contralto: “Sinnerman where are you going to run to?”
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She doesn’t mimic Simone, but is clearly a match for the repertoire.
Her vocal is urgent and in lock-step with the roiling piano and the snap sharp snare drum. The call and response of ‘Power’ set a revival mood, but syncopated handvclapping and piano rhythms also remind us that Nina Simone harkened to such jazz stylings as Dave Brubeck’s ‘Unsquare Dance’.
In immediate contrast comes ‘Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair’, Simone’s variation on the widely revived Scottish ballad. With only piano accompaniment from Daniel Pilner, Yovich captures the tenderness of the Highland original – but also Simone’s celebration of Black identity.
In the first of a number of personal commentaries on the material chosen, Yovich recalls first hearing the song and feeling she could at last cast off the crushing connotations of Black as “ugly and evil and dark.” It remains quietly implicit in this version, however, unlike the variation Nina Simone also recorded which proudly asserted, “Black is her body / so firm and so bold / Black is beauty / Her soul is gold.”
The pairing of Jacques Brel’s ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’ with Gershwin’s ‘I Loves You Porgy’ which follows is not so much a mash-up as a sublime pairing of two compositions brought delectably to life. Ursula Yovich’s effortlessly phrased vocal captures not only the pensive Brel, but the gently mournful lilt and swing of Gershwin.
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An almost reggae beat for ‘Don’t Let Me be Misunderstood’ brings a tempo change and the band get into stride. Musical director and bass player Adam Ventoura adds chorus vocals, and guitarist Daniel March contributes tasty flourishes also. The song’s title leads Yovich to reflect on the alienation and indifference of misunderstanding.
Throughout the performance, in the manner of Nina Simone, she reflects on the chaos and cruelty of the larger world and also within our own borders. By saying the quiet stuff out loud, she bears witness to racial injustices – not with generalities, but the names of First Nations men and women who have suffered and died with no consequence for the perpetrators.
This leads into the most confronting song in the setlist. ‘Strange Fruit’ a graphic depiction of two racist lynchings (written by Abel Meeropol and made famous by Billie Holliday and Nina Simone) opens with slow-march dirge chords on piano – and Ursula Yovich’s penetrating vocal. “Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees / Pastoral scenes from the gallant South.” It is, and should be, a grim pause in the proceedings.
Yovich and her excellent band then swing into Simone’s portraits of discrimination and defiance in ‘Four Women’, and the upbeat hymn from the hippie musical, Hair (‘Ain’t Got No/I Got Life’ followed by Simone’s most celebrated anthem (co-written by Weldon Irvine) ‘To Be Young, Gifted and Black’, which took its title from a phrase coined by the African American playwright, Lorraine Hansberry. It could also describe the accomplishments of Ursula Yovich herself.
‘Stars’— Janis Ian’s musing on celebrity and self-worth – has the line “Truth tellers don’t fade”, leading Yovich to celebrate and lament the tribulations of people such as Nelson Mandela and Charlie Perkins, among others. This segues into a concern for artists in a hostile world, and, in her own case as an actor, immersed in performances depicting and protesting dire human predicaments that are no more resolved now than ever. “Truth doesn’t protect you,” she observes. “It can isolate you instead.”
Never letting the occasion to become fretful, however, Ursula Yovich and the band turn to another of Nina Simone’s rallying calls for revolution: ‘Everything Must Change’.
It is musically exhilarating, the players all lifting Yovich’s soaring vocal: Daniel Pilner on the ivories, Daniel March turning out tasty guitar riffs, and Fabian Hevia on drums, closely matching Adam Ventoura on bass. These players can turn on a dime.
The final number is Nina Simone’s open question, about liberty and freedom from persecution, ‘I Wish I Knew How it Feels to be Free.’ For many of us in the audience it is probably not a statement we properly comprehend. Certainly not in the way that Ursula Yovich does. It has been her gift to the festival not only to engage generously, but to memorably conjure up the amazing music of a pioneer whose day is still ahead of us.
Ursula Yovich Sings Nina Simone will be performed once more at Adelaide Festival Centre on Saturdaty Jun 6 as part of Adelaide Cabaret Festival
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