Wild Is the Wind

1966  ·  Album

Nina Simone in 1966, at the piano, singing as though the room had emptied and only one person stayed behind.

Wild Is the Wind is the Nina Simone album Philips released in 1966, and it is one of the most intimate records in her long catalogue. The title song comes from Dimitri Tiomkin, and in her hands it becomes a confession, slow and grave, with the piano leaning into every word. She holds a note until the silence after it feels like part of the song. Nobody else sings it this way. Nobody needs to. The arrangements stay out of her way, so that the voice and the piano carry nearly all of the weight, and every pause is left exactly where she put it. It is a record built on patience.

The cover singles out Four Women by name, and it is a song that stops the room every time it plays, but the album is more than one song. It moves between the tender and the fierce without warning, and her voice carries both in the same breath, low and dark and certain of itself. Play it late, with one lamp on and the rest of the house asleep, and give it your full attention. It asks for nothing less, and it gives back more than most records ever do.

---

VERDICT  ·  Nina Simone in 1966, grave and tender at the piano; a record for one lamp, a dark glass and someone who sits still.

POUR  ·  A black Manhattan.

Pairs with: The Voice and the Piano

The same late shelf holds Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours and Chet Baker Sings. Keep them for the hours after midnight.