Nina Simone - Wild Is The Wind (Verve Acoustic Sounds Series)

Nina Simone's Wild Is The Wind joins Verve's Acoustic Sounds Series, a reminder of just how much range and fire she packed into a single 1966 album.

Drawn from sessions recorded during her prolific years with Philips, the record moves from intimate ballads to blues and protest with a confidence few artists could match. By this point Simone was a fiercely political voice in the civil rights movement, and that urgency runs through the music alongside moments of breathtaking tenderness.

"Four Women" is the centrepiece, an unflinching portrait of four Black women whose stories trace the scars of slavery and racism, sung with controlled, simmering power. "Lilac Wine" is all hushed melancholy, her voice drifting over spare piano, while the title track "Wild Is the Wind" unfolds slowly and dramatically, so striking that David Bowie later recorded his own version for a 1976 album.

Elsewhere, her reading of the traditional "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair" glows with quiet devotion, a folk song transformed by her classically trained touch at the keys.

It is one of the most emotionally complete records in her catalogue, and an ideal starting point for anyone discovering the High Priestess of Soul for the first time.