At just 32 minutes in length, this album is short, but very much on the sweet side; in fact, it's utterly magnificent. Recorded live at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1966, not only has none of the material been made available before, it's also of the very highest grade – easily eclipsing Nina at Newport, the famous live album from the 1960 Newport festival. While that LP highlighted Simone's instrumental skills, this latest album's all about her singing, and how it intersects emotionally with her political engagement.

Newport promoter George Wein donated the tapes of Simone's performance to the US Library of Congress, where they lay forgotten until Wein's death in 2021, when historian Nadine Cohodas unearthed them.

How fortunate for us that she did: Simone is in dazzling form, and her backing musicians, Stevenson, Atkinson and Hamilton, provide a perfectly simpatico bedrock for her extraordinary vocal and pianistic peregrinations. No wonder this set is talked about with such awe by those who were lucky enough to witness it.

She projects both innocence and hardened realism, strength and vulnerability, especially on a spellbinding take on ‘I Loves You, Porgy’, which is both a resigned, pained sigh and an indominable, almost angry, statement of intent. The album opens with a slow, heartwrenching version of Charles Azvanour and Marcel Stellman's title tune, her only known live recording of the song. The self-penned ‘Blues For Mama’, with lyrics by Abbey Lincoln, is described by Nina as a “gutbucket blues”, and it is greasy, gritty and raw. The same description could be applied to the next track, ‘Be My Husband’, written by Nina's husband Andrew Stroud, and here performed by Simone and drummer Bobby Hamilton in a haunting, almost skeletal arrangement.

There's a lengthy, hard-swinging version of the famous protest song ‘Mississippi Goddam’ before the album closes with an unaccompanied encore, Bart Howard's ‘Music For Lovers’, which ends proceedings on a surprisingly upbeat note. With its soul-bearing, heart-rending singing and virtuosic piano flourishes, and its raw expressions of sorrow and anger, You’ve Got To Learn is a contender for archive release of the year.