SAT 19.09 “NINA SIMONE, WILD AS THE WIND” TRIBUTE TO NINA SIMONE Tamara Geerts (vocals), Anne Wolf (piano), Sal La Rocca (bass), Thierry Gutmann (drums) - Photo reportage by Michel Van Rhijn

A promising young classical pianist hoping to become America’s first black classical pianist, Nina Simone was turned down at the prestigious Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. It is 1950 and racial segregation is raging. The young woman's humiliation and disappointment fueled all of her activist thinking and her artistic journey. Associated with the movement in favor of the civil rights of the black American population and those of women, friend of Martin Luther King, Nina Simone is above all a free spirit. She fights, at the risk of her life, armed with her only music and her authenticity to make the voices of minorities heard.

Crossing anthology songs between blues, jazz, gospel, and inspired monologues, this project is a powerful tribute to this complete artist with multiple identities, unclassifiable, nourished by lost hopes, inextinguishable force, distractions and rage. The music of Nina Simone, whom she herself considered to be a “soundtrack from a troubled era”, is placed there in the socio-political context which underlies it, in order to better understand the realities of the time, realities of today ...

Foto's Michel van Rhijn