It's become fashionable for older artists to stretch their wings and sow their wild musical oats by trying out new genres.

Bruce Springsteen rustled up a gigantic folk-jazz band and recorded a record of Pete Seeger covers. Pat Boone put on a creepy leather vest and did some vocal pop versions of hair metal tunes. And Elvis Costello… well, he's tried just about everything.

Many of these experiments in new musical styles turn out quite good, but none of them can really replace what each of these musicians does best. I liked Springsteen's Seeger Sessions well enough, but give me the E-Street Band any day.

It's rare, though, to find an artist where genre-hopping is so instinctive that each different musical style becomes absorbed into the artist.

Nina Simone is such an artist. Through her voice and piano skills, "genre" and "style" become meaningless words — jazz, ballads, funk, soul, pop, Broadway and the blues all mesh equally well within her music. Whatever music she performs immediately transcends genre — they all become Nina Simone songs, plain and simple.

RCA/Legacy and producer Richard Seidel have assembled three discs of music that capture the essence of what made Nina Simone such a singular, brilliant artist. To Be Free: The Nina Simone Story includes fifty-one tracks over four hours, including eight previously-unreleased tracks. Also included is a 23-minute DVD featuring a short documentary and live performances from Simone, and the requisite detailed booklet with excellent notes by Simone biographer David Nathan — it's a nice package.

This box set was my first real exposure to Simone's music, and it flat-out bowled me over. It's breathtaking to hear her evolve over the nearly forty years covered by the selected tracks, and yet, there's a remarkable continuity there too — a Nina Simone song from her late period reflects essentially the same incomparable gift for interpretation and nuance that is there on her earliest recordings.

Fundamentally, that is Simone's greatest gift — as an interpreter. She wrote her own songs, plenty of them, and great ones at that… but even on her own material, she acted as a vessel for the music and lyrics themselves. Phrasing, dynamics, emphasis — these and other elements make up the toolbox of the singer. No one employed them more effectively than Simone.

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