With Strings

Vinyl LP pressing. Reissue, originally released in 1966. The singer-songwriter and pianist Nina Simone came to prominence in the late 1950s after she signed to the Bethlehem label for her debut album, Little Girl Blue. Her move to Colpix Records, the audio subsidiary of Columbia Pictures, allowed her near total artistic control of her material and her lengthy tenure with the company brought plenty of popular album releases. The 1966 oddity Nina Simone With Strings was issued by Colpix a couple of years after she left the company to begin recording for Philips; a strange mix of live recordings and studio outtakes, released without her knowledge or permission where the presence of orchestral strings on several tracks gives the album it's title and overriding theme.