Despite being largely pieced together from leftover sessions by producer Hal Mooney, Wild Is the Wind is the strongest illustration of her uncanny ability to find the song within a song, revealing the secret tunnels and caverns that previous singers didn’t know existed and future interpreters couldn’t ignore. Starting with I Put a Spell on You in 1965, you can’t go wrong with Simone’s final five albums for Philips Records. Simone is fully aware of the power she wields: “Betcha thought I was kidding, didn’t you?” The final standing ovation is an explosion of awe and relief. The laughter carries into her own Mississippi Goddam – written in a frenzy hours after the 1963 Alabama church bombing – until the show-tune irony is burned away by a mounting rage that consumes the hall and you can hear in real time the realisation that they are listening to a protest song like none they’ve ever heard, owing more to cabaret than folk, and more to Malcolm X than Martin Luther King. During Go Limp, a kind of protester’s sex comedy written by CND campaigner Alex “The Joy of Sex” Comfort, the spectators chortle at the jokes, join in the goofy chorus and keep Simone airborne when she forgets the lyrics. Summoning the vengeful ghost of Brecht and Weill’s Pirate Jenny into the age of Medgar Evers and George Wallace, she stuns the room into a silence punctuated only by nervous coughs. Unlike most live albums, In Concert leaves the audience in the mix throughout and illustrates how deftly Simone could snap between tension and release.
It’s this nightcrawling version of Jack Hammer’s Plain Gold Ring that explains why Nick Cave later covered it, while Don’t Smoke in Bed is so stark that you can hear audience members shifting in their seats. She performs three songs from her jazzy 1959 debut Little Girl Blue with a newfound depth, drawn from painful personal experience and her recent political awakening at the hands of new friends in the civil rights movement, notably Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin. That said, In Concert, recorded at three Carnegie Hall shows during March and April 1964, represents her great leap forward as both a performer and activist: her escape from the “nothing world” of pop.
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