Sing the Truth: Nina Simone Remembered
Starring Patti Austin, Dianne Reeves, Simone, and Lizz Wright
and the Nina Simone Band led by Al Schackman

"Nina Simone was the ultimate pop diva, notoriously temperamental, musically beyond category and at one time the definitive interpreter of Bob Dylan. Her expressions of bitterness, anger and embattled pride were matched by a supreme, classically trained musicality few could touch." The New York Times

Once in a lifetime chance to hear great female vocalists pay tribute to the extraordinary Nina Simone who left, at age 70, a unique body of music that blended jazz, gospel, folk, blues, pop, classical music, songs from musicals and opera, African chants and political awareness.

Grammy winners Patti Austin and Dianne Reeves, the late diva's daughter - Broadway star Simone, and bestselling recording artist Lizz Wright perform with the Nina Simone Band led by the legendary singer’s music director, Al Schackman.

Sing the Truth features songs from Simone’s classic catalogue including Four Women, I Loves You Porgy, My Baby Just Cares for Me, Ne Me Quitte Pas, Feeling Good, Lilac Wine and To Be Young, Gifted and Black.

An unforgettable occasion for passionate music lovers, Sing the Truth is only stopping at the Hong Kong Arts Festival in Asia.

Grammy winner Patti Austin's amazing career spans some 50 years, having reached the Billboard Hot 100 Number One spot as well as sung a duet with Michael Jackson.

Winner of multiple Grammy Awards, Dianne Reeves is a jazz legend with a career spanning more than three decades.

Nina Simone's daughter, Simone, is a multi-talented artist in her own right, conquering both Broadway and the jazz world.

Lizz Wright's sublime, expressive voice has made her one of the jazz world's most celebrated rising stars.

Produced by Danny Kapilian

A Tribute to Nina Simone: Sing the Truth
by Robin Lynam

"All my life I've wanted to shout out my feeling of being imprisoned," Nina Simone once observed, and by the time she died in 2003 she was widely recognised as one of the 20th century's great voices for the oppressed.

Sing the Truth pays tribute to the talent, passion, commitment and integrity of an extraordinary woman, revisiting a selection of the many classic songs she either wrote or made emphatically her own. Some were intensely personal, yet universal in their scope. Several became anthems of the American Civil Rights Movement.

Nina Simone was a stage name. She was born Eunice Waymon in 1933, and chose "Nina" – which means "little girl" in Spanish – from a boyfriend's endearment. "Simone" reflected her admiration for French actress Simone Signoret.

It is a sobering thought that the world might never have heard her sing had a night club owner in Atlantic City not made a mistake in booking her. She was trained as a classical pianist – an influence that remained recognisable in her keyboard work all her life – and in 1954 she accepted a gig playing jazz, blues and classics at the Midtown Bar and Grill. The owner had wrongly assumed that she also sang, and after the first night told her, "Tomorrow you're a singer or you're out of a job." Fortunately her vocals were well received and a new career opened up for her.

Her first album, Little Girl Blue, released in 1958, was based on her club set, and included both her first hit, Gershwin's I Loves You Porgy, and her biggest, My Baby Just Cares for Me, which reached the height of its popularity much later in the 1980s after it was used in a perfume commercial in the UK.

It is the songs she recorded during the 1960s however that made her an icon and established her reputation as a musician and a star. Her 1964 album Nina Simone in Concert includes several songs that commented explicitly on racial discrimination in the United States, including Mississippi Goddam and Old Jim Crow, both of which she wrote.

She recorded many more protest songs, including some by Bob Dylan, but perhaps the most potent were two more which she also wrote wholly or partly herself, Four Women, and To Be Young, Gifted and Black, for the second of which she set Weldon Irvine's words to music.

Four Women, released in 1966, articulated with insight and anger the plight of four different African American women. Misunderstood at the time in some quarters, it was criticised for perpetuating negative racial stereotypes and banned by several stations. Ironically Simone was the first populariser of the song Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood.

In 1970 To Be Young, Gifted and Black became another anthem and was widely covered, most notably by the "Queen of Soul" Aretha Franklin. Simone was known by this time as the "High Priestess of Soul", although she never much cared for the title which she considered limiting.

Being young, gifted and black was something she knew plenty about. The defining rejection of her life came from the Curtis Institute which refused her a place to study piano, she believed because of her race. She also sang and wrote music for poet Langston Hughes's Backlash Blues.

There is a risk of allowing Nina Simone the activist to obscure Nina Simone the artist. Although often considered a jazz singer, she pointed out herself that there was more folk and blues in her music, and strong gospel and classical elements were also present. Her fusion of those styles was personal, idiosyncratic and unique.

By any standards a fine songwriter, she was also a discriminating judge of others' work and had a gift for identifying writing and composing talents early in their careers. She chose the tunes she covered with great care, and was a compelling interpretative singer of composers and lyricists ranging from Gershwin to Randy Newman. Her versions of Screamin' Jay Hawkins's I Put a Spell on You, Jacques Brel's Ne Me Quitte Pas and Newman's Baltimore are unsurpassed. Many other examples could be cited.

She was a highly accomplished if underrated pianist, and considered the 1968 album Nina Simone and Piano, which featured no other instruments to be her finest work.

Nina Simone died in 2003 after a long illness, having made her last album in 1993, but Sing the Truth concentrates on perhaps her most creative period, between 1964 and 1966.

The singers – Dianne Reeves, Lizz Wright, Simone and Patti Austin – are the best that could be wished for in the absence of the diva herself, and the band is her own long-serving backing group.

Musical director and guitarist Al Schackman began working with Simone in 1957 and was implicitly trusted by the singer. Helping him recreate the arrangements he originally wrote for her will be her long time sidemen, bassist Chris White, drummer Paul Robinson and percussionist Leopoldo Fleming.

"She is like no other artist," says Sing the Truth's producer Danny Kapilian. "This concert is a 'thank you' to Nina Simone for the extraordinary gifts of life she bestowed on us. We will never adequately repay the debt, but to pass on the experience of her music to new generations is the least we can do, and hopefully inspire others as she inspires us."

Robin Lynam is the jazz columnist of the South China Morning Post and has also written on music for a variety of local and international publications.

THE SINGERS

Reinterpreting Nina Simone's songs – each in her own unique way but very much in the spirit in which the diva sang them – are four hugely talented singers with strong connections to her pioneering work.

One has a special right to sing those songs. "Simone" is the stage name of Broadway star Lisa Simone Kelly, Nina Simone's daughter.

Verve recording artist Lizz Wright shares the great singer's roots in gospel music, and has demonstrated a similar ability to translate a mixture of jazz and pop into hit records, as well as being a noteworthy songwriter in her own right.

Blue Note recording artist Dianne Reeves is a four time Grammy winner, and one of the great jazz singers of her generation.

Jazz and R&B artist Patti Austin has enjoyed years of both commercial and critical success, finally picking up a long overdue Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album at the 2008 awards ceremony for her 2007 CD Avant Gershwin.