Listen to this
Every year about half way through my course on working with young people, I play my students a clip of Nina Simone at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976 performing the song “Feelings.” I play it cold with no introduction or explanation as to why we are watching it. For those who have not seen it, I recommend listening to the hyperlink I have provided before reading the rest of the column. It is an extraordinarily evocative and vulnerable performance by one the truly great musicians of the twentieth century. Like John Coltrane’s rendition of “My Favorite Things”, Simone takes a bit of a schmaltzy pop song and turns it into a musical and emotional tour de force. The great majority of my students don’t know Nina Simone, have not heard her before, and this performance is highly idiosyncratic even for her.
It is worth noting that Nina Simone has had a deep influence on any number of artists in the 21st century. For anyone paying close attention to the opening preface to Beyonce’s video Sandcastles, just before she opens the lyrical part of the song, there is a shot of a turntable with a Nina Simone album cover propped up behind it. It has also been noted by McDonald that,
Nina Simone has long been a source of inspiration for Beyoncé, and in Black is King, Bey’s newest visual album, she repurposes Simone’s lyric, “Black is the color of my true love’s hair,” changing it to: “Black is the color of my true love’s skin,” while also following in Simone’s footsteps to Africa.
Regrettably most of my students don’t have a sense of this kind of musical lineage and so when I play the performance for them it is both new and without context. In a sense that is uncharacteristic but intentional. Uncharacteristic in the sense that I am usually a stickler for context and background. However, in playing Nina Simone’s “Feelings” performance, I was more interested in the way they made sense of the song and the performance on its own. So, I simply played the clip and then asked them why I played it? Why would I play this somewhat unusual performance in a class on working with young people?
The initial response is usually a puzzled silence and then a few students venture that perhaps it was because it was an expression of emotion and trauma. They pointed to the lyrics that are about heartbreak and relational collapse. They mentioned Simone interrupting her own singing to challenge the audience with “I do not believe the conditions that produced a situation that demanded a song like that!” They break down the lyrics (full lyrics can be found here https://genius.com/Nina-simone-feelings-live-at-montreux-lyrics ) as a possible lesson in understanding how powerful loss can be. They mentioned the raw emotion of the performance and the obvious pain and anger in Simone’s voice and facial expressions. The question of loyalty under conditions of relational breakdown as raised in Simone’s chanting at the end of the song,
Here in my heart
You'll always stay here in my heart
No matter what the words may say
You will stay here in my heart
No matter what the day
You will stay here in my heart
No matter they say
No matter what they compose or do
No matter what the drugs may do or songs may do
Or, people do
Or machines will do to you
I will always have my feelings
Nothing can be destroy that 'cause I know that that is all
Perhaps they suggested that I had played the performance so that we could think about the experience of loss, pain and anger in the work, for both us and the young people we encounter.
I acknowledged their very legitimate interpretation of the performance and that such a reading would be a very good reason to play the song. However, while the lyrics are very important and the ability to interpret is a key characteristic of CYC work, the meaning of the lyrics is not the reason I played the song. It is something in the performance that goes beyond the lyrics, beyond the capacity for interpreting meaning. I suggest to them that they look to something in the performance itself.
Generally, the next comments have to do with the intensity of Simone’s presentation, the rawness of her voice and the sheer transparency of her facial expressions. Her ambivalent but almost driven engagement with the audience. At one point she says to them “feed me, feed me.” My students perceptively wonder whether I have played this as a demonstration of authenticity and congruence as elements of building relational practice. How raw can we be and how much of our work should be driven by the necessity that the work “feed us.”
In a sense, our work in CYC is also a performance, although who is the audience and who the performer is always more than a bit unclear. After all, the young people’s actions are also performative and often we are engaged in a dance together that Mark Krueger has so beautifully articulated. But, if the lesson is in the performance, our affective engagement and mutuality of movement physically, emotionally, and psychologically, what is the driving impetus for our actions? How do they evolve? And what delineates a peak performance from simply going through the motions?
At this point in the conversation, I usually ask whether Simone is simply repeating a rehearsed performance. In other words, is what she is doing preplanned and then executed? My students acknowledge that what Simone is doing appears to be spontaneous and unplanned, although built around the framework of the original song. So, I suggest that what she is doing is improvising. But in what basis does she make her choices? How does she decide what to modify, what to extend, and what to abandon as she opens the song to new possibilities. What exactly is improvisation and why is it relevant to CYC work?
We might begin by saying that improvisation is not simply playing anything you want. It is the judicious selection of the range of possibilities lying dormant in the piece of music being performed. To improvise well requires an in-depth knowledge of the music being performed, the instrument that will be used to play the music, the capacity of the performer to execute the physical manipulation of the instrument, the ability of the performer to hear what works and doesn’t work in their refiguring of the music being improvised. That is to say, improvisation takes skill, craft, and a degree of intuition.
It is at many levels a risky endeavor. After all, most of the popular music that we hear is presented to us as a finished project. The process of composition occurs out of view. The decision to add or subtract section or phrases, to abandon failed ideas, to correct wrong notes or false harmonies has all been done before the music is presented to us as a finished song. For better or worse the song we hear is the end product of a series of musical experimentation.
Live improvisation on the other hand is the performer experimenting in front of us. As Philip Alperson notes
Musical improvisation does add, however, to the conventional musical performance situation a greater element of risk which stems from the fact that the activity of improvisation is simultaneously an act of musical composition and an act of musical performance. The composer in the conventional situation can correct his or her mistakes before the composition becomes public. No one else need know … The improviser is in the most precarious position of all, at least in those cases where he or she engages in a substantial amount of spontaneous composition in a performance.
When Nina Simone takes the song “Feelings” and opens it to a whole range of musical possibilities through the way she plays the piano, uses her voice, her emotions, her facial expressions and even her interactions with the audience she is opening an open field of experimentation that could fail at any moment and be performatively disastrous. It takes a certain kind of courage to work that way. And it doesn’t always work. At times her interactions with the audience seem stilted and unsuccessful. Indeed, she sometimes appears frustrated with them. Her piano improvisations don’t always go where she wants them to and indeed at one point she stops and shakes her saying no, no, no before shifting to another approach. She persists however in her experiment, seeing what is possible and layering failure upon success, upon failure, upon success building in waves of varying intensity until she feels that she has said what she needs to say.
My students and I explore the way that musical improvisation works, and we listen to other musicians to see the virtuosity involved and at times the obvious physical impossibility of what they can do with their instruments. We talk about how to be able to truly and freely improvise there can be no gap between what the performer imagines and how it is executed on their instrument. There can be no moment of how do I play that? To improvise requires a blending of the performer and the instrument that is seamless.
I then ask them to remember that I have argued that there is only one tool they have in their work with young people and that is themselves. I suggest that a huge part of truly relational CYC work is improvisation with all that is implied by that term. However, to be able to improvise relationally, we need to really spend time learning how to use the instrument that is us.
For most of us, we have had a lifetime of training in a society that alienates us from ourselves and what we are capable of doing. To begin a process of retraining our bodies, our minds, and our emotions so that we can initiate a process of reclaiming our instrument takes both time and effort. We are like beginning music students who are just being introduced to the fundamentals of our craft. Of course, there are so many influences in our field who would have us only play the music that has already been written for us. There are supervisors and trainers who would have us believe that it is only in following the prerecorded versions of what we do that we can be at all successful.
But, to only play what is written for us is to lose all that is living force in the work we do. It is to leave ourselves behind, in order to repeat someone else’s version of who we should be and what we should do. While there are very clearly patterns to all living things, they are dynamic and ever shifting compositions of capacity and possibility. And while the work does require discipline and at times repetition, the goal is to break free into true creative possibility. Good relational work is never about controlling the other or modifying them in some way. It is instead, a living composition that has the ability to open new worlds for everyone involved. To do that takes the willingness to take the risk of improvisation. However, that does not mean to do just anything. It is to listen carefully to see if what you are trying to do works in harmony with the other. In improvisation it is even more important to listen in order to play. And to play only that which is required. To learn to play only what is necessary is a life art and one that can be learned and practiced in the work we do. If we seek that path and do the work required, our engagement with young people will be about life and it will always feed us.
