classical world claimed her again . Her Methodist mother , never an open-hearted supporter and seemingly temperamentally at odds with her talented daughter , was implacably opposed to her singing in clubs and referred to it as “ working in the fires of hell ”.
After a further period of study , immediately passing on lessons quickly learned to students of her own , she returned to Atlantic City , where a ready-made audience awaited her . Of all the ambiguous guides Nina encountered on her journey was a young white man called Ted Axelrod ( you couldn ’ t get a name much whiter and straighter than that ), a guy who ’ d bought into the lifestyle of the Beats a little . He introduced Nina to his record collection . Her ignorance of popular music may not have been – surely couldn ’ t have been ? – total , but there were extraordinary gaps . One of the voices Ted introduced her to was that of Billie Holiday . Nina was entranced . She must have recognised that here was a singer who offered nothing in the way of piano virtuosity , no obviously schooled musicality at all , but who was still capable of raising goosebumps on the listener ’ s arms just by the way she entered into a lyric . Some lines were not much more than spoken and there were none of the vivid harmonic flights and rhythmic verve of an Ella Fitzgerald or a Sarah Vaughan . As Nina ’ s biographer David Brun-Lambert relates – though it would be obvious from her later discography and concert career – the song that stood out was “ I Loves You Porgy ”.
The song could hardly have a more complex provenance and in 1956 it was the object of serious ongoing discussion about the presentation of black lives and black voices in art . The composer was a New York Jew whose understanding of what
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