Baltimore

Baltimore was Nina Simone's fourteenth studio album and her first new recording since 1974's It Is Finished, made after veteran producer Creed Taylor caught her live at London's Drury Lane Theatre in December 1977 and signed her to his CTI label. The sessions, held at Studio Katy in Brussels in January 1978, were reportedly tense: Simone bristled at Taylor's reggae-inflected arrangement of the Randy Newman title track and at the overall production concept, though she ultimately cut her vocals in a single sitting. The record is a covers album in character, drawing on songwriters as varied as Randy Newman, Judy Collins, Hall & Oates and traditional spirituals, filtered through CTI's polished late-70s studio sound with strings, horns and a crossover pop-soul-reggae palette. It marked Simone's only album for CTI and one of her few studio efforts of the decade, arriving after years of self-imposed exile from the American music industry and personal upheaval. Commercially it made little impact and drew mixed reviews at the time, seen by some critics as a mismatch between Simone's fierce artistic identity and Taylor's smooth production instincts. In retrospect it has been reassessed by admirers as an underrated late-period Simone record, valued for the raw ache she brings to the title track and to the closing gospel numbers, and it remains a significant, if divisive, entry in the catalog of one of American music's most singular vocalists and pianists.