On Nina Simone's "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free"
Making the case for her 1976 live performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival as one of the best ever
When I think of some of the greatest live performances, I think of The Beatles’ 1969 rooftop concert, this low-volume, extremely funky performance from 1972 of “Ain’t No Sunshine” by Bill Withers (with legendary drummer James Gadson smiling throughout), this 1975 performance of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, Queen’s 1986 performance of “Bohemian Rhapsody” at Wembley Stadium (and this gem from the same show), Franz Ferdinand’s performance of “Take Me Out” at T in the Park 2014 in Scotland (with one of the best crowds I’ve seen), Aretha Franklin’s 2015 performance of “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” at the Kennedy Center Honors, and Jon Batiste’s masterful cover of “Blackbird” on The Late Show in 2016, just to name a very select few.
Or (because I can’t help myself) you might think of Prince’s rendition of “Purple Rain” in the literal rain, or Michael Jackson’s nearly 30-minute long 1993 Super Bowl Halftime Show, Evgeny Kissin’s encores from his 1997 solo performance at The Royal Albert Hall, Noboyuki Tsujii’s performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in 2013, Cory Henry’s and Jacob Collier’s 2016 cover of “Billie Jean” at the BBC Proms, this 2019 performance of Mr. Brightside by The Killers featuring Johnny Marr, or Bruno Mars, Anderson.Paak, and Silk Sonic’s 2021 performance of “Leave the Door Open” at the 63rd Grammys (replete with appropriate 70s attire and visuals, even down to the starburst lens flares and crossfades).
But one live performance that has been consistently overlooked in my view, for God knows what reason, is Nina Simone’s performance of “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free” at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival. Simply put, it is one of the best performances ever recorded in terms of musicality, technique, and spirit. The performance seems to play out an entire history of suffering and pain in just under six minutes. I recommend you watch it first before reading. It was originally written by jazz pianist Billy Taylor and songwriter Dick Dallas, recorded as “I Wish I Knew” on Taylor’s 1963 album Right Here, Right Now! and used as the theme song for BBC Television’s Film… series.
But Simone’s 1976 performance of it brings the song to a whole other level.
Don’t let the softness of Simone’s playing fool you. It’s measured, with not a bar or note wasted. Her playing is deliberate, carefully structured and paced. Hints of her classical music pedigree come through. She plays in a stride style, as opposed to the more straight-forward, upbeat accompaniment found in the version on Silk and Sound (1967), and creates a light, singsong-y, walk-along-with-me mood, punctuated by sparse right-hand notes and playful humming. Simone, to my ear at least, is only accompanied by a drummer playing with brushes. The focus is unmistakably on Simone, spotlighted, alone at the piano.
This performance’s insistence on lightness is mirrored in the song’s lyrics. Simone wishes she could be “like a bird in the sky … I’d soar to the sun and look down at the sea.” Even the word “free” entails a lightness, a freedom from physical and mental burdens. Yet freedom is not only an oppressive, but a suppressive, force: “I wish I could say, all the things that I can say when I’m relaxing … I wish I could share all the love that’s in my heart…” The lyrics, in a brilliant rhetoric move, outline all the things a lack of freedom prohibits you from doing. Sharing your love, saying what you want to say, being able to move (“I wish I could break all the chains holding me,”).
Noted by Emily Lordi in her article “Toni Morrison and Nina Simone, United in Soul”, Simone uses this same type of rhetoric in a song she wrote called “Ain’t Got No / I Got Life.” In it, she lists the objects and things she doesn’t have: “Ain't got no home, ain't got no shoes, ain't got no money, ain't got no class … ain’t got no friends, ain’t got no schooling.” No object or material possessions. Yet, Simone then sings about what she does have, every bit of herself: “I got my hair, got my head, got my brains, got my ears, got my eyes, got my nose, got my mouth, I got my smile.”
Simone is keen on building tension throughout the song. Her voice and playing grow stronger as the song nears its end. “I know, got news for ya, I already know,” she says. “Jonathan Livingston Seagull, ain’t got nothing on me!” (A reference to Richard Bach’s 1970 novella Jonathan Livingston Seagull, about, you guessed it, a seagull.) Simone chants, “Free! Free! Free! Free!” and her playing builds with each declaration. But just when it seems she’s on cusp of bubbling over, Simone brings her playing back down.
“I already know,” she says plainly, playing a simple line on the piano. “I already know,” she sings again, complicating the line with some octaves spread out along the keyboard. “I found out,” and a cascade of notes along the piano, “how it feels,” her right-hand begins trilling along the upper register of the piano, her left hand hitting octaves on the lower register, steadily, like the stroke of a clock, “not to be chained,” then both hands come together, “to anything,” enacting what’s called a tremolo, “to any race,” where, using all of her fingers, she moves her hands back and forth along the keys, side to side, shaking them, almost, to create a wall of sound, eventually reaching the breaking point, “to any, a-ny-thing,” she says emphatically, “I know! How it feels! To be free!” She holds out that last note, the veins in her neck bulging as she walks along the piano with measured chords, and then she breaks off, and a flurry of notes run thick and fast up and down the keyboard, and she swipes her hands off the keys and stands up in triumph to the crowd’s applause, hunched, her mouth-open, almost limp, as though there’s nothing else she can give or say.
I’m unsure why this song and this performance of it haven’t caught on more in mainstream media and culture, especially in light of the events of last summer, when the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor led to national protests against police brutality and racism. If we didn’t know it before, we knew it then: a large number of folks are still not free. And as Simone notes in this performance, withholding this freedom can translate to an act of murder: “I wish you could know what it means to be me. Then you’d see! You’d agree! Everybody should be free,” after which Simone ad-libs, “because if we ain’t we’re murderers/murderous.”
So, I encourage you to keep this performance handy. For me, in the right setting, it seems capable of ushering in generational change.
What’re some of your favorite live performances? Leave a comment below. And let me know what you thought of Simone’s performance.