NONFICTION - Feb. 2, 1992

I PUT A SPELL ON YOU by Nina Simone with Stephen Clearly (Pantheon Books: $22; 181 pp.) Nina Simone’s voice is a truly wondrous instrument--complex, elusive, dark and insistent one minute and vulnerable, hopeful the next. Her life is a parallel jumble of events that one can only wish were more completely fleshed out in this autobiography. Simone’s early childhood was deceptively comfortable--deceptive, because the Depression soon stripped away her father’s opportunities and ended Nina’s idyllic life at home with her mother, who had to go out and find work. She dreamed of becoming a concert pianist, and one of the most powerful scenes in the book is her description of her first visit to Mrs. Massinovitch’s home for a piano lesson--the home of a musician and her painter husband, filled with sunlight, anchored by a concert grand piano. When her dream died (a casualty of racist admissions policies at a school she hoped to attend on scholarship), she turned, instead, to singing; the book traces her career, one that would make a seismograph happy, as well as her tumultuous private life. Unfortunately, too many of the episodes get short shrift here, as though time had reduced even the most painful interludes to distant landscapes, the details of which are now difficult to discern.