Mississippi Goddam
Blue Note Records China puts out its first album, a six track anthology with Don Was on every session, and ECM brings Jan Garbarek's Rites to vinyl. Then Carnegie Hall, 1964, where a laughing audience hears Nina Simone name the next tune and finds out she means it.
LioraBlue Note's China label puts out its first record. Tonight, New Orleans opens free. Later, a Carnegie Hall audience laughs at the name of a song. It's Saturday. Let's go.
LioraIt's Saturday, October 24th. This is The Daily Quintet. I'm Liora. Five stories from the world of jazz, in about ten minutes. Here we go.
One. The Lead: Blue Note Records China releases its first album
LioraBlue Note has a label in China now, and this week it put out its first record.
The title is "Now's The Time: An Anthology Of Contemporary Chinese Jazz, Volume One," posted yesterday. The label says the title is a tribute to the standard of the same name.
Three producers share the credit: Don Was, who runs Blue Note, Zhang Yadong, and Ren Yuqing, who founded JZ Music.
Six tracks, six acts. It opens with "Arc Light," by the Red Hand Band, written by the band's pianist, Xia Jia. Blue Note dates that band to a Beijing club called D22 in 2006.
Also on it, the guitarist Zhang Xiongguan, the trumpeter Li Xiaochuan, the guitarist Zhihan Xu with the drummer Zhitong Xu and the electronic artist Gooooose, a bass and piano duet from Chenhuai Wang and Moreno Donadel, and the multi-instrumentalist Eugene Sun.
LioraDon Was went over for it. The label says he traveled to Shanghai and Beijing, met every artist on the record, and was deeply involved in all the sessions. His line on the scene there: it "will blow people's minds."
Universal Music Greater China started the label in May of 2025.
The label prints no catalog number, no price and no format. So you can hear about this record, and you cannot order it.
Two. Listen to This: Nina Simone in Concert, which one French national library notice dates to Carnegie Hall
LioraToday's record is the concert we are heading to next.
"Nina Simone in Concert." The French national library holds it three times. One notice carries the session: New York, Carnegie Hall, March 21st, 1964. It is the only one of the three that prints the hall and the date, so the date rests on one record.
The 2006 Verve disc is the only pressing that names a band. Simone on piano and voice, Rudy Stevenson on electric guitar, Lisle Atkinson on bass.
Here is the tip. The song from tonight's story is on a second album. "You've Got To Learn," on Verve in 2023, from Newport in 1966. "Mississippi Goddam" runs six minutes and fifty seconds on it.
LioraTwo new ones. ECM has Jan Garbarek's "Rites" on vinyl for the first time, a double album cut in 1998. The compact disc is out of print. Blue Note put out a single yesterday, Maya Delilah with Aquilo, "Been Here Before."
Now Carnegie Hall, 1964. Nina Simone is at the piano, and she tells the house the name of the next tune. They laugh. Tonight on The Bridge: she meant every word of it. Silas has the story.
Three. The Bridge: At Carnegie Hall in 1964 the house laughs when Nina Simone names the next tune
LioraOne true story from this music's history, every day. Silas tells it, I ask the questions. Silas, where are we?
SilasCarnegie Hall, New York. March 1964, and one source puts it on the 21st. Nina Simone is at the piano, playing to a mostly white house. She introduces a song. "The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam, and I mean every word of it." The audience laughs. They seem to take the title as a joke. It isn't one.
LioraThey laughed at that?
SilasGo back to June 12, 1963. Medgar Evers, a civil rights activist, is assassinated in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi. The man later convicted of it is Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist. Then September 15th. A bomb goes off at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Four young Black girls are killed. Up to then, Simone has kept protest out of her music. She's quoted as saying nightclubs, records and popular music were "dirty," so mixing them with politics seemed wrong.
LioraSo what did she do?
SilasBy a secondhand account, her first thought was violence: "At first I tried to make myself a gun." Her husband and manager, Andy Stroud, pushed her toward using her music instead. She wrote the song in under an hour after the bombing. One source says that very day; others say only within an hour of the news, so the exact day is open. In her words: "When I sat down the whole song happened. I never stopped writing until the thing was finished." She later called it "my first civil rights song." One unconfirmed account has her at the Village Gate with it days later, so Carnegie may not be its first night out.
LioraSo what does it sound like?
SilasThat's the twist. It bounces. A bright show tune, carrying a fierce message. It names three battleground states, and has a line about school children sitting in jail. By one account of the stage version, she sings "Go slow," and the band answers, "Too slow!" On the Carnegie recording she says it herself: "This is a show tune, but the show hasn't been written for it yet."
LioraHow did people take the record?
SilasThe live take goes on the 1964 album "Nina Simone in Concert." The single comes out with the curse bleeped, and by one account its sleeve notes call it "the most topical selection in years." Then, on the Steve Allen Show that year, she says: "We got several letters where they had actually broken up this recording and sent it back to the recording company, really, telling them it was in bad taste." One account adds a box of promotional singles from South Carolina that came back with each record "broken neatly in half." Accounts say it was banned in several Southern states, but they name no state, station, or law.
SilasOn that same show she swapped in lyrics about St. Augustine. She changed them again for Selma in 1965, and after Martin Luther King was killed in 1968. On March 25, 1965, she sang it at the end of the Selma to Montgomery march. One account puts her on a stage built from coffin crates, before ten thousand people. As for Medgar Evers's killer, two all-white juries in 1964 failed to reach a verdict. In February 1994, a racially mixed jury found him guilty of murder. More than thirty years after she wrote the song.
LioraA room laughed at a title, and she meant every word of it. That's The Bridge. Back to today, right after this.
Four. On the Road: New Orleans opens the night free at Snug Harbor before the Amina Figarova Sextet brings
LioraTonight, coast to coast.
Tonight's ticket is in New Orleans, and the first set is free.
Snug Harbor runs three bills. At half past four, Giulia Coba, voice and guitar, with Eduardo Tozzatto on piano. The club puts it plainly: a free performance, no ticketing, and tips go a hundred percent to the musicians. Then the Music Room twice, half past seven and half past nine, for the Amina Figarova Sextet with the Matsiko World Orphan Choir from Liberia. Thirty five dollars and sixty five cents.
Now the sweep.
In Los Angeles, Catalina has Morgan James, billed as a powerhouse soul and jazz vocalist. Doors at seven, show at half past eight, fifty seven dollars, plus a minimum.
In Chicago, the Jazz Showcase has the Lenard Simpson Quartet at eight and ten. Thirty dollars in, forty five for the preferred seats.
LioraIn Minneapolis, the Dakota closes a three night stand with Chris Botti, half past six and nine.
In New York, Birdland has the Pasquale Grasso Trio at half past five, then Ron Carter's Great Big Band at half past eight and half past ten. Sales on the big band have ended.
Five. One More Note: Sixty six years ago today John Coltrane recorded at Atlantic in New York in what the
LioraSixty six years ago today, John Coltrane was in the studio at Atlantic in New York.
October twenty fourth, 1960. The French national library files that date five times, on records including "Coltrane Plays the Blues" and "Coltrane's Sound." McCoy Tyner on piano, Steve Davis on bass, and on one notice, Elvin Jones on drums. Coltrane was born in 1926, which makes this his hundredth year.
Six years on, the same date, Miles Davis took a quintet into Columbia's 30th Street studio and began "Miles Smiles."
Outro
LioraThat's the Quintet. If today's show earned it, follow The Daily Quintet wherever you listen.
The Daily Quintet is an AI-crafted production, researched and checked by humans. Every listing you heard came from the venue or the festival's own organizer.
That's your Saturday. I'm Liora. See you tomorrow.