jazz as f*ck: Nina

In 1963, after the Birmingham church bombing killed four young girls, Nina Simone wrote "Mississippi Goddam". She called it her first civil rights song, even though by her own account she'd been writing them all along without naming them that. It wasn't a protest song dressed up as music. It was a furious, swinging, theatre-trained classical pianist refusing to separate the art from the moment. She introduced it on stage by warning the audience it was a show tune — "but the show hasn't been written for it yet" — and then tore through it anyway.

She got banned from radio stations across the South. She didn't walk it back. She kept writing, kept performing, kept naming things plainly that other people were afraid to name.

That's why we think Nina Simone is jazz as f*ck.