Coming exactly at the time young white British men were casting the blues as gruff, instinctual, primitive, macho, this is Nina Simone presenting it as containing ancient significance but at the same time as high science, perhaps the most advanced form on earth. The songs are of failure (“Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out”), it’s forlorn hope (“Trouble in Mind”) and endless yearning (every single song on the album vibrates with unmet need) - but the advanced production, playing and Simone’s incredible vocal abstractions transform it into a dazzlingly complex laboratory of ideas, politics and emotion. And it’s fun to boot. Not only that but it builds to the mind-blowing transformational groove of “Sinner Man” — still, from the right angle, the greatest ten minutes of music ever recorded.