Almost no one these days knows anything of this artist who was trained by her aunt as a child, eventually applying to the Juilliard School in New York only to be denied entrance because they didn’t accept black students.

It was her desire to be a concert pianist but she came to realize there was no place for a black person of any gender on the classical stage in America and decided to remake herself, change her birth name and then change her musical focus to a jazz based idiom.

Her classical training never left her fingers which is evident in her frequent contrapuntal accompaniments in so many songs. This arrangement of “Little Girl Blue” is, to me, the embodiment of the word enchanting. It’s a wonderful double duet where the first duet is between Nina the singer and Nina the pianist and the second duet is between the song melody and the melody of the accompaniment which uses the theme of “Good King Wenceslas.” Magical, this!

Nina often uses direct or partial quotes from children’s and familiar songs in her musical creations to great effect and this one is especially good. How inventive any artist can be if one boldly follows one’s creative instincts to create something completely new from any given score.

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