Since her 1957 recording debut, the seething soulstress has left her distinctive mark on pop standards, Simone-izing everything from "I Put a Spell on You" to "Falling in Love Again" to "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues." Name another singer capable of effortlessly appropriating the trademarked tunes of Screaming Jay Hawkins, Marlene Dietrich and Bob Dylan.  

Rhino's new two-disc collection, "Nina Simone: Anthology, The Colpix Years" chronicles a particularly prolific five-year period for the woman christened Eunice Waymon. Culled from 10 albums cut between 1959 and 1963, "The Colpix Years" is Simone on high simmer. As the '60s progressed, the headstrong North Carolinian boiled over in civil rights-inspired screeds like "Mississippi Goddam" and "To Be Young, Gifted and Black," but here she's nearer the supper club than the barricades. Simone's disgust with racism eventually prompted her to leave the country in 1969, but she continues to record; her latest work, "A Single Woman," came out three years ago on Elektra.  

While with Colpix (the long-defunct recording arm of Columbia Pictures), Simone's selections ranged from sophisticated standards like Duke Ellington's "Solitude" and Billie Holiday's "Fine and Mellow," to traditionals like "Little Liza Jane," "Cotton Eyed Joe" and "Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair." Five of her Colpix records were concert recordings - a good thing, since the intimacy of her alto comes through best on spare, intimate live tracks like the heartbreaking "He Was Too Good to Me" by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.  

In the studio, Simone and her arrangers steered in more commercial directions with dicier results. It's apparent the crossover success of Ray Charles swayed 1962's "Sings Ellington!" in a more commercial direction. Thus, the likes of Ellington's "Do Nothin' Till You Hear From Me" are marred by hackneyed arrangements and bleached-white background vocals performed by some group called the Malcolm Dodds Singers.  

 Simone is most fetching when she's brooding between a small combo and an adoring audience. "The Colpix Years" may not be the ultimate anthology of the High Priestess of Soul (someone's going to have to license material from several labels, foremost RCA, to pull that one off), but it provides ample evidence that Simone never was one to trifle with.  
 

Simone's time with Colpix spanned 1959-64 (an additional album of previously recorded tracks with strings added was released in 1966). The extraordinary range captured on this double disc would be the envy of most singers over an entire career, let alone an early breakthrough period.  

 Simone's art is unnervingly bare and yet equally artful, transmitting empowerment borne of oppression and disappointment, humor borne of pain, spirituality borne of earthly lessons, strength borne of weakness and fallibility. Simone is the rare singer who makes you listen to the song, and makes you listen to Nina Simone, and makes it almost impossible to figure out where one ends and the other begins. Listen to her performance of the Johnny Mathis-identified "The Twelfth of Never," or the Dietrich staple "Falling In Love Again;" Simone so inhabits the songs that they become something else entirely, and almost always more than they were before she sang them. (You will forget every other version while Simone sings.)  

Simone was a piano prodigy in her youth, classically trained. In her autobiography, she tells of heading to Atlantic City and playing in bars, where she developed her genre-gobbling style as a necessary tactic to herself interested while playing all night, every night. She started singing when a club owner said the piano wasn't enough; whether or not he was right, we can only thank him for putting a microphone in front of Simone.  

But to ignore Simone's piano playing would be a travesty -- she digested and understood Ellington, Monk, Bach, and rhythm'n'blues. As a result of her eclectic musical background, Simone flattens genre distinctions. "Exactly Like You," from the Colpix live album Nina At Town Hall, features block chording reminiscent of Brubeck (and even at times Keith Jarrett), swing reminiscent of Ellington, with rhythm and blues inflections in her singing. It recalls the label-smashing, intensely personal but universally poignant work of Charles Mingus in a terrifically integrated performance, highlighting almost every aspect of Simone's gift.  

"Black is the Color Of My True Love's Hair," could be even better, with Afro-gospel inflections wed to classical training and sensibility in full relief, Baroque turns mingling with impressionistic, Debussy-esque harmonies and an almost transparent sense of time. Like Mingus, Simone brought unabashedly African influences to her music. Spare drum accompaniment inspires her to some of her most deeply searching performances, and the influence of the church and the crossroads joint flares up throughout the album. Simone's influence reaches into every type of music that follows her, with artists from Aretha Franklin to Jeff Buckley covering her songs, and artists including John Lennon, Peter Gabriel, and Sade citing direct influences. "When I Was A Young Girl" both touches on Coltrane's droning African -isms and presages psychedelia in an amazing performance.  

Sit through the first ten songs on the second disc for a torrent of talent and feeling that is the match of any six other singers. Simone can shift from revival-meeting shouter to blues crooner to folk interpreter and work song belter to jazz singer to highbrow diva with not a whiff of cognitive dissonance -- there's never any sense that the listener is being played for effect, that Simone is anything but herself at any time. Simone is not shape-shifting for our listening pleasure; she's singing from a deep well of experience, heart and unerring taste. Almost incredibly, there's more to come from Simone's RCA years, and it can only get better.  
 

In Simone’s massive pipes lie untold suffering and a huge capacity for love, the weight of the world and the flight of angels. Always difficult to define, her vocals bespeak the influence of gospel and blues as well as jazz, and foretell to a degree the sound of the soul-music explosion that was yet to come. Simone’s sinewy, masculine contralto operates with such force it can make one believe her contention that she is the reincarnation of Nefertiti. Forty tunes and a lavish booklet with touching notes by David Nathan hallmark Anthology, and there’s scarcely any filler. 

Highlights include “Blue Prelude,” “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” and a take on “House of the Rising Sun” that supposedly was the inspiration for the hit version by the Animals in 1964. Weirdest cut: “Come on Back, Jack,” a long-out-of-print 1961 answer to Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road, Jack,” which positively reeks of some A&R man’s misguided meddling.