Jazz great Nina Simone dies at 70: “Nina Simone, the jazz great whose rapsy, forceful voice helped define the civil rights movement, died Monday at her home in France, according to her U.S. booking agent. She was 70.

Though she remained a top concert draw in her later years, she was quite frail… At a 2001 concert at Carnegie Hall, she had to be helped to the stage, and was later seen sitting backstage in a wheelchair.” AP/Salon I listen all the time to a compilation CD I made from my scratchy Simone LPs on the very day I first learned how to burn CDs. From the joyousness of ‘Here Comes the Sun’ to the plodding, inexorable anguish of ‘Just Like a Woman’, Simone’s jazz chops were not at all trivialized by covering pop tunes, which coinhabit the Simone heights for me with ‘I Need a Little Sugar…’ and ‘Mississippi Goddamn’.

Also: Nina Simone: The End of an Era. BBC