Rags & Old Iron/No Good Man/Gin House Blues/I’ll Look Around/I Love To Love/Work Song/Where Can I Go Without You/Just Say I Love Him/Memphis In June/Forbidden Fruit
Jazz vocalist Nina Simone stamps her own personal style on several tunes made famous by other artists. Forbidden Fruit is considered one of the best of her earlier albums.
“It's brilliant end to end. It rolls and weaves, suggests and states, looks under the skirts of the music. The title track has generated lasting interest - maybe more for Oscar Brown's lyrics than anything else, but it rollicks here. Still, my favourite is Gin House Blues, which aches and wails and seems to live inside the walls of what it describes.”
“There's not a mediocre song or rendition here. And you'll never hear anyone else do any of them the way she does.”
“The best of Simone's earlier albums. A fine collection of songs: my favourites are the two identified with Billie Holiday No Good Man and I'll Look Around - but Simone makes them completely her own. As she does with the Bessie Smith number Gin House Blues. On the other songs here, most of which are well known through other earlier versions, Simone stamps her own personality on them. Oscar Brown's Forbidden Fruit perhaps verges on the cute, but his other two songs, Rags & Old Iron and Work Song are intriguing.”
“I won't spend much time talking about how wonderful Nina's singing is - you wouldn't be here if you weren't already a believer. I'll Look Around is an amazingly beautiful slow torcher. Just Say I Love Him is a wonderfully smoky number with a pleasingly spare arrangement and an understated Cubano rhumba beat.”
“I love just about everything by Nina Simone. I especially love the song about nobody better be coming between me and my gin. Here's a woman who knew how to get good and liquored up, sassy, brassy, and retain her dignity in the process.”
“This is one of Nina's best collections of songs, with a wealth of her quirky arrangements.”
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