Every now and then I come across something I remember enjoying tremendously in my past life. I don’t mean past lives as in before I was born into my present being. I mean past life as in before I became someone’s wife and mother. Like the other night, I was channel surfing and I came across a broadcast of a Nina Simone concert at the 1994 Montreaux Jazz Festival.
Ms. Simone was fabulous and I enjoyed seeing her working it out at the piano as she sang a string of her haunting hits, and she even got up from the piano to treat the crowd to shameless shimmy as she sang See Line Woman. The woman was bad and she lived her entire existence unapologetic of her solidly African presence.
I remember imagining myself sophisticated and worldly, many lazy Sunday mornings as I played my various Simone discs, gravitating between cruising the Sunday Times and catching a few catnaps, something totally foreign to my current situation as a mother of an 8 and 5yr old.
A lot of Ms. Simone’s work is now relegated to movie soundtracks. I’m happy I could put my hands on some of her old CDs and as I listened today at work, I realized many of her recordings are more relevant than ever.
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