Ledisi – Ledisi Sings Nina [LP]

Ledisi, the New Orleans-born and Oakland-raised singer, pays tribute to the legendary Nina Simone with the album Ledisi Sings Nina. Featuring seven songs of social and personal import drawn from Simone’s celebrated songbook, Ledisi Sings Nina is a finely crafted, arrangement-driven collection recorded in Holland, Los Angeles, London, and New Orleans – before and after the pandemic began. It balances upbeat, big-band energy with atmospheric balladry, and an attention to historic detail that succeeds in updating the music for a modern hip-hop/R&B era. With the prowess of Ledisi’s voice, the messages of Simone’s music – of personal empowerment and collective protest – retain a relevancy for a BLM generation facing the same harsh challenges and bitter struggles of the 1960s. The performances on Ledisi Sings Nina find the singer benefitting from top-tier support in a variety of contexts: the majority of tracks feature the world-renowned Metropole Orkest co