What Nina taught Kellylee Evans

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We tend to think of tribute albums as being the work of fans, of musicians whose own identities wouldn’t have been fully formed without the influence of a classic artist. But while that’s true to some degree of Kellylee Evans’s new album, Nina, the young jazz singer’s relationship to the music and legend of Nina Simone is complicated, to say the least.

“I really didn’t like Nina Simone when I was growing up,” she says, over the phone from her home in Ottawa. “My mom listened to her all the time, but I wanted to listen to Michael Jackson and Blondie and stuff like that. I didn’t want to hear any of the stuff my mom had. But I was the one who put on the records, so she’d ask me to go down and put on Nina records.

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