‘Nina’s’ issues much more than skin-deep – Museum gets only known film of Armstrong in studio

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The questionable casting of Zoe Saldana is only one of the many problems with Cynthia Mort’s limp and misjudged Nina Simone biopic “Nina”. Little of the High Priestess of Soul’s searing clarity of voice or profound struggle comes through in this insipid film whose fakeness is writ across Saldana’s dubiously darkened skin.

“Please take Nina’s name out of your mouth. For the rest of your life” was the harsh judgment laid on Saldana by Simone’s estate. Bitter battles over to whom an artist belongs are seldom good for anyone. But it’s reasonable to question whether Simone’s story should be in the hands of those who would employ black face to capture a proudly dark-skinned woman.

It should be said: It’s no easy task to gather the multitudes within Simone into a feature film. She was, like her music, unclassifiable. The classically trained pianist was termed a jazz singer and a soul diva, but she’s been most identified as a folk singer. As if another form of resistance in a life full of it, her career refused to bend to the typical arc found in music biopics. She had only one top 20 single (her first, 1959’s “I Loves You, Porgy”) and spent much of her later life in self-imposed exile in Barbados, Liberia and France.

Why Mort, who wrote and directed the film, has chosen to focus on Simone’s troubled 1990s period in France is anyone’s guess. It allows for a fiery kind of redemption story, going from heavy drinking and medical meltdown to a triumphant Central Park performance. But the film is a sloppily stitching of lethargic scenes between Simone and her assistant, Clifton (a sleepy David Oyelowo), in a French Riviera villa. Arguments over taking pills are possibly the least dramatic or important moments in a life that pulsed with and provided the impassioned tempo to the civil rights movement.

Limited

An increasingly unhinged Simone meets Clifton in a Los Angeles hospital where she has landed after pulling a gun on a record executive. Clifton, a sympathetic nurse whose awareness of Simone is limited to his mother’s vinyl collection, catches her eye. She plops down a wad of cash and tells him to accompany her to France as her personal assistant.

The majority of the film plays out between Simone and Clifton, as he tries to clean her up and get her back on the stage. The scenes are almost hermetically sealed, with few other characters of note and scant political or musical context to Simone’s rich story. The deep rage and sorrow of “Mississippi Goddamn” is nowhere to be found here.

Saldana, of “Avatar” and “Guardians of the Galaxy”, curiously varies her accent in flashback and present day scenes. In numerous song performances she sounds professional enough, but lacks any hint of Simone’s power or gravity. (Simone was in her 60s during the majority of “Nina”).

Seek out instead Liz Garbus’ 2015 documentary “What Happened, Miss Simone?” which knows enough not to simplify the complex Simone. Or pull up the footage that finished that film on YouTube: an extended performance of Simone singing “I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to be Free.”

There, in just over three glorious minutes, is so much more of Simone’s essence. With the band locked in groove and the crowd chanting “Because I know,” she — in full thrall to the music — slides out from the piano, bobs her head, claps her hands frenetically, shakes her body and shouts.

“Nina,” an RLJ Entertainment release, is not rated by the Motion Picture Association of America. It contains adult language and some violence. Running time: 90 minutes. One star out of four.

The Louis Armstrong House Museum has acquired the only known film of the great jazz musician in a recording studio, footage that was discovered in a storage facility.

The 33-minute, 16 mm film captures Armstrong recording his 1959 album “Satchmo Plays King Oliver” in Los Angeles for Audio Fidelity. The record producer, Sid Frey, had the film professionally shot but wound up not doing anything with it or telling anyone about it.

Michael Cogswell, the New York City museum’s executive director, called it “a groundbreaking discovery.” The museum announced the acquisition Wednesday.

“The film has spent the past six decades in private hands or in a storage locker. Not even the most diligent Armstrong researchers knew it existed,” he said.

Existence

Frey’s daughter, Andrea Bass, who helped the museum acquire the film, said she first learned about its existence in a chatroom discussion of her father’s company.

Frey, the founder and president of Audio Fidelity, was known in the industry as Stereo for being the first to release a commercially distributed stereo recording, she said.

Frey died in 1968. Bass said that after their mother died in 2005, her sister placed the Audio Fidelity tapes, films, albums and personal family items in a storage facility — unbeknownst to her.

“People were always asking me where the masters were,” said Bass, a former marketing director. “I went on one of these message boards about Audio Fidelity and someone said ‘I have the masters.’” It turned out to be a person who buys the contents of abandoned storage facilities.

Bass said she was unable at that time to purchase the Louis Armstrong material, but the man contacted her again six months ago, and this time they struck a deal.

The film’s recording session was made just after Armstrong appeared on Bing Crosby’s television special. It shows a relaxed Armstrong in a short-sleeved plaid shirt and shorts blowing his trumpet and singing with his All Stars band. He looks healthy despite a heart attack a few months earlier.

The film opens with two complete takes of “I Ain’t Got Nobody.” After the first attempt, Armstrong signals for “one more,” and then approvingly winks at his bandmates after the second — master— take.

Much of the film focuses on Armstrong and the All Stars working out a routine for “I Ain’t Gonna Give Nobody None of My Jelly Roll.” Armstrong didn’t have sheet music for the song so he improvised each take with “a new vocal made up of a mixture of dazzling scat singing,” the museum said.

The film ends with a complete take of “Jelly Roll Blues”, a tribute to jazz composer Jelly Roll Morton.

The museum has also acquired Frey’s master reel-to-reel tapes for “Louie and the Dukes of Dixieland”, which Armstrong recorded in 1960 for Audio Fidelity at Webster Hall in New York City. The album’s numbers include “Limehouse Blues” and “Avalon”.

“Capturing Louis in the act of recording is a unique and welcome discovery augmenting what we know about his artistry in an invaluable manner, proving that he was a leader in the true musical sense of that word,” said Dan Morgenstern, the former longtime director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University.

For now, the museum will post one complete song on its website and social media. It plans to show the complete film at a future date.

The museum is housed in Corona, Queens, in the modest brick building where Armstrong lived for 28 years and died in 1971. It has the largest publicly held archival collection devoted to a jazz musician in the world. (AP)

By Jake Coyle

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