Ledisi On Nina Simone: More in Common Than She Thought

This Friday, Grammy Award-winner Ledisi will release Ledisi Sings Nina, a seven-song EP where she puts her own stamp on songs the legendary Nina Simone made famous. The next night she will introduce the audience at the Hollywood Bowl to her take on those songs when she joins the Los Angeles Philharmonic, lead by Thomas Wilkins.

As you can imagine, there’s a lot to unpack with Ledisi about this project. So I’m doing something a little different. I’m publishing the complete interview I conducted with her earlier this week with very few edits. Here goes:

Between the EP and some stage projects you’ve had, you’ve been working with Nina Simone’s material for a number of years. How has your relationship to her music evolved since you began this journey?

I’m learning we have a lot of similarities I didn’t know until I started having to put our music together. And I didn’t know how well our music matches together. It’s funny. Thomas Wilkins, when we started working on this show for the Hollywood Bowl, he fell in love with my music too. He was saying we have to have some of your songs in there, too, because there’s a reason you’re singing her music as there’s a similar story going on. At the beginning I didn’t notice it until I found ways of marrying our music together. I just do it in a different way, but her music is very right to the point. Mine is a little poetic, but it still has the same sentiment here and there.

You recently posted on your Twitter account, “You can’t do any job great if you don’t listen.” What do you hear when you listen to Nina Simone?

I hear a longing overtone in all of her music; that need to be loved and accepted. I hear, aside from her political fight to make change, I really hear this beautiful Black woman wanting to be received by others just as she is. I hear her directly saying it. I hear power. And pain. But I also feel her longing to be loved. That’s why, again, the choices I made on the album. There are so many Nina songs that have a mood, but I was very particular. It’s so easy to pick a lot of things. I wanted a long sentence just to say I love you and I hear you and I’m here. And thank you. 

Several of the songs are amongst Simone’s best-known. How did you approach the opportunity to show respect for what she had done, yet still make these performances indelibly yours?

Luckily I have a great producers with me. Jules Buckley and Rex Rideout; Gregg Field and Adonis Rose, they all contributed to making sure Ledisi is still Ledisi while honoring Nina Simone. Otherwise I would be mimicking and pretending to be something I’m not and that wouldn’t have worked. I had to live in this music and put my life in there, too, and interpret my way while touching on some of her phrasing, but still be myself.

It was really important having other ears. That was fun to be open to different perspectives. It’s hard to do that when you’re by yourself, so it’s really fun to have someone guide you; having great producers who understand who you are.

The album closes with I’m Going Back Home. Does singing this material feel like going back home for you?

Oh yes. It felt like a return to a genre of music of full self, full circle. Not only to honor a little bit of New Orleans, which is where I’m from and having people from New Orleans by having the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, but also to come back to a love of jazz and soul and folk and ballads from an era that’s still beautiful. This is tough music. This is not easy to sing with orchestras or brass bands. You have to really hold your own as a vocalist. It felt good to do what the greats have done and complete it on that note to say thank you to New Orleans and have that color in there.

And you’ll be performing at this year’s New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

I haven’t been there in so long. I can’t wait. I can’t wait.

In a 1968 interview with DownBeat Magazine, Simone said, “The pressure of show business is on all the time and show business is a fickle business. Whatever is popular now – that’s all that counts. I have to constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactive my own standards, my own convictions about what I’m doing and why.” 53 years later, what if anything has changed and has it changed for the better?

Nothing has changed. It’s still the same. That’s why everyone gravitates towards her. It’s still the same screaming and hollering for change. It’s still who are you? There are so many layers as an artist. You can either catch up with the times or be of the times or leave the times behind [she lets out a big laugh], one or the other. For me, I’m just showing all my layers for me and staying in my lane and not being afraid to leap around. I’m able to do that because of her. If she hadn’t been who she is, you wouldn’t have gotten Ledisi.

The writer followed-up by asking, “You talked about walking the tightrope between compromise and integrity. What if you didn’t have that limitation?” I pose the same question to you.

I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to do. Even when I didn’t understand. Even when I wanted to fit in with everyone and it didn’t work. I’m right where I’m supposed to be. I have her to thank, my mom to thank. I have my whole journey to thank. I don’t regret anything. I’m glad it didn’t happen the way I wanted it to happen. I would have been famous really fast, much faster than this, but I’m happy that I learned the way I’ve learned and gone the way I’ve gone. I’ve met some great people without being out front right away. I’m very happy. The goal is to make a great legacy. That’s my goal.

What can audiences learn today from the songs that Nina Simone sang and the life she lead?

That’s a great question. Authenticity. Transparency. Simplicity. And humanity. Compassion. Empathy. All those things we had to learn right from our own homes. Right from our screams. And she’s been screaming it in all her music and freedom.

What would you like people to know about what it means to be a Black woman in 2021?

Allow us to be more than angry. More than being everything. We are beautiful, complex flowers and butterflies and we love and when we love we love hard. When we give we give hard. And we want it reciprocated. [Another great laugh] I laugh, but it’s so real. I don’t know how else to say it. Please allow me to be and give it back to me like I do for you.

If the expression go big or go home resonates at all, it would be debuting Ledisi Sings Nina at the Hollywood Bowl. I know you appeared with Deva three years ago on that stage but not sure when else you might have been there.

I also did a show with Patti Austin and Dee Dee Bridgewater and Judith Hill. We all did a show and did 30s jazz music along with tributing Natalie Cole. And I was at the Playboy Jazz Festival.

Now it’s going to be just you out there in front of an audience that could reach 17,500 people. What excites you most about introducing people to this material there?

I know, right? I know. That’s a lot. It feels full circle to a completion with the album that’s out Friday and then perform it the next day on Saturday. I’m blown away. My mom is flying in. I just don’t know what to feel yet. The LA Phil? This has been a dream that I’ve been begging for for almost four years. It hasn’t hit me yet. I think it will when I hit rehearsal on the day of the show. I don’t know what to say. I’m still blown away it’s real. I couldn’t believe it when they said yes. This is real and this is Nina and it’s us together. But I know I’m going to sing the hell out of this music with my last breath. The LA Phil? This is crazy. I’m excited.

In addition to your work as a singer, you’ve also been on stage in shows like Witness Uganda, Caroline, or Change and you have been attached to an in-the-works stage version of The Preacher’s Wife. What role will theater play in your life moving forward?

It’s so wonderful to be able to experience theater. I’m pretty sure I’ll be in theater again in the future working with Billy Porter. Hopefully The Life will see the light of day next day we get there. We’ll see what happens. I’m hoping that will happen next. 

Will that be at Encores in New York?

Yes, I’m looking forward to doing that. I’m waiting for the actual confirmation this is when we’re doing it. I’m excited about it. We’ll see what happens. I definitely want to do theatre and get better. I want to do better in all the things I love. 

I want to wrap this up by asking you about something you said in your Grammy Award acceptance speech. You ended it by saying, “Just keep going, keep going, keep going. We endure.” Throughout your career how has Nina Simone inspired you to keep going and endure?

Well if she can sacrifice her whole life and being for the cause, even at a point where it hurt her, I can still stay in this run being just as I am. She never waivered from being something she wasn’t. That’s how she inspired me. To be a wonderful Black woman and expressing herself in whatever ways she finds comfortable, no matter what the consequences are. So that’s what I’ve always been. I’ve been called so many things for moving around, but if you know my story, I’m from a place that has so much in it like a gumbo or a jambalaya, and that goes wherever you are and whatever you do. I’m very proud of my roots and having her a part of this legacy and to honor her for all that work so that all of us can speak loud. Speak loud.

For tickets to Ledisi Sings Nina Simone at the Hollywood Bowl, please go here.

Ledisi will be at the Newport Jazz Festival on July 31st. She will perform Ledisi Sings Nina at the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park in San Diego on August 17th. She will also appear at the Monterey Jazz Festival on September 25th. In October she launches a tour in support of her 2020 album The Wild Card.