Simone finished her break and came up to the piano. She didn’t look at the guitarist, said nothing, and started playing the Christmas carol “Good King Wenceslas,” which she used as an introduction to “Little Girl Blue.”
“After about eight bars I came in, and before you knew it we were just weaving in and out, we were off and running,” said Schackman. “Right at the height of this—you couldn’t get more intense—she brings in her vocal, this love ballad with all of this going around, impossible.”
Simone’s long hours of work at the Midtown had helped hone her artistry, and she was now able to incorporate the use of multiple, independent musical lines that she had learned from Bach into pop songs and improvisation. This intricacy would allow her to stake out truly distinctive creative territory. “Years later,” Schackman said, “Miles Davis asked me, ‘How does she do it?’
“I have no idea how anybody could isolate so many parts of music at one time. And that was my introduction to Nina Simone.”
When she finished her set, the pianist and the guitarist were formally introduced. Simone asked Schackman if he would join her for tea the next Saturday. She gave him her address and as she was leaving said to him, “By the way, please bring your guitar.”
That weekend he went to her place—now she had a bright, sunny, third-floor apartment, a considerable upgrade from her old storefront residence—and they played for hours. It cemented a connection that was truly remarkable, that went beyond sympathetic accompaniment and into a blending of two uncommon, unlikely, uncanny styles. The relationship built by the music was so strong, in fact, that it would sustain them through decades often marked by Nina’s challenging personality.
“I had never felt such freedom in knowing that someone knew exactly where I was going, and that she knew that I knew exactly where she was going,” Schackman said. “In other words, we couldn’t lose each other. It was like telepathy.
“I think we saw, in each other’s playing, a reflection of the way we approached music, which was to tell a story beyond the notes and with color. Nina had a way of taking a piece of music and not interpreting it but . . . morphing it into her experience, and that’s what I always liked to do myself. I wanted the freedom of playing my guitar like a saxophone, more like a horn player, rather than the more angular lines of a guitar player. That allowed me to travel all over the fingerboard and harmonics and everything. And that’s what Nina did.”
It took a certain adaptability and a keen ear to accompany Simone’s inventive, virtuosic flights, but Schackman easily kept up with her. Beyond their own musical camaraderie, he also quickly realized that he was dealing with an extraordinary talent, a player whom he rated next to the true giants, regardless of genre. “The closest person that had a sound that was not Nina but similar was Thelonious Monk. The way he used chord clusters and it sounded like dissonance or like somebody slamming an elbow, but it was a real musical experience, like Jackson Pollock throwing a can of paint on a canvas. I put her in a place with Ravi Shankar or Glenn Gould.”
Schackman wasn’t the only person taking notice of Simone’s exceptional playing. Someone at Bethlehem Records in New York had apparently heard the demo recordings she’d made in Philadelphia and was interested in signing her to the label.
In December 1957, she went to New York and recorded thirteen songs backed by bassist Jimmy Bond and drummer Tootie Heath (Schackman was touring and unable to make the session). The selections were essentially the songs she played as her set at the time but, given the time restraints of a studio recording, without her extended improvisations. “I had sung all these songs in 1952,” she said, “so when I recorded them it was just like doing them again.”
The opening track was a stunning, surprisingly upbeat version of Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo.” She also included, of course, “I Loves You, Porgy,” the crowd-pleasing song Ted Axelrod had brought to her; her reading was magnificent, yearning but still strong, clear and deep but restrained, with none of the simpering or histrionics that other singers ladled onto the song. The thirty-second piano solo was a marvel of fleet concision. (She pointedly left out the “s” on “loves” in the title phrase, a remnant of the Gershwins’ effort at “Negro dialect.”) Simone also cut a one-take instrumental titled “Central Park Blues” because the album’s cover photograph had been taken earlier that day in the park.
The tone of the album was melancholy—“I didn’t know any happier love songs,” she said, “I only knew wistful love songs, things about unrequited love”—so near the end of the session the label requested an up-tempo song to lighten the mood. She quickly tossed off a breezy shuffle called “My Baby Just Cares for Me,” including a memorable, elegant piano solo. (Though Simone would often identify the song with Frank Sinatra, he didn’t actually record it until 1965; when she pulled it out for this album, the tune was relatively obscure, first written as a feature for Eddie Cantor to sing in the musical Whoopee!) The album took its title from “Little Girl Blue,” the first song she had played onstage with Schackman that featured the Bachlike embellishment; once the session was finished, she sold the rights to Bethlehem for a reported $3,000 and went home the next day.
Little Girl Blue was released in June 1958, and Simone was getting more and more calls to perform outside the Philadelphia area. Though she was still studying classical piano with Vladimir Sokoloff (such was her distaste for popular music that she said she played Beethoven for three days after the Bethlehem session to cleanse her system), she was considering making the move back to New York City, which had more professional opportunities for her, despite the sting of her youthful experiences.
“I had an agent named Jerry Fields,” she said. “He came and heard me and he said, ‘My name is Jerry Fields and I’m going to make you a star.’ I didn’t know what a star was.” Fields remained her agent until he died a few years later. He also introduced her to an attorney named Maxwell Cohen. “Max was very good for her,” said Schackman. “He was very strict, which was very good, because Nina was already showing her diva temperament and she couldn’t put it over on Max, he was too old guard.”
There was one thing she wanted to take care of, though, before relocating. Two years later, out of habit or a fear of facing solitude, she was still dating Don Ross. And still, no one in Simone’s life approved of him.
“I met him when I visited Nina for tea, but he pretty much stayed out of the way,” said Schackman. “I think that he hovered around her and took care of some things, paid attention to her.
“I didn’t care for him myself. To me, he always had some kind of scheme going and he needed money for it. He was insipid, inconsequential, a hanger-on who somehow captured Nina for a moment.”
According to her sister Frances, Simone was drinking heavily, abetted by the freebies offered to her at clubs. In addition, Simone had started taking LSD—she said that it was prescribed medication, but her sister wasn’t buying it. Decades later, Frances recalled seeing Simone “just out of it” back in these early days and felt that her intake had a long-term negative effect.
“I think she was very innocent, very gullible,” said Frances. “She was not exposed to a lot of stuff because of family, what we came from. In a small town, they didn’t have a lot of sophistication.”
Whatever the basis of their relationship—and even Simone seemed baffled by what had kept them together—in late 1958, following the release of Little Girl Blue, she and Don Ross were married at the county clerk’s office. Nobody attended, and she later wrote that she couldn’t even remember the wedding date. As for her family’s reaction, it was a moot point—in addition to struggling to recall the day, she was unsure she had ever even bothered to tell them that the wedding had happened.
Simone would look back on the