Nina Simone's Gum: A Memoir of Things Lost and Found

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His micro-attentiveness to passing details of life seeps through the book. Sometimes with great comic timing (he’s on the way to buy bathroom taps, he finishes watching The Sopranos), sometimes as though he, literally, sees something hidden from the rest of us (the ghost of Beethoven, clowns in his childhood garden). It all accumulates into something with the quality of a lyric. The year was 1999. The location London’s Meltdown festival, where Simone was performing her last show. The gum, for me, embodies all that: the fact that I got it out into the world, for people to share in, and for people to get around.” Time is a dictator, as we know it,” Nina Simone (February 21, 1933–April 21, 2003) observed in her soulful 1969 meditation on time. “Where does it go? What does it do? Most of all, is it alive?”

Viewed from some distance, the miniature pedestal rises in its warm-lit case like a votive on the altar of some alien temple. Once the initial cast was made and the spell unbroken, Ellis went on to collaborate with other artists, turning the gum into relics both private and public: a silver ring, a white gold ingot, and finally a sculpture the size of the human heart — the same size and shape as the human fist, the fist Nina Simone had raised that long-ago summer night hard with her sorrow and her power, chewing her gum. Her spirit existed in the space between the gum and the towel. That concert was in the gum. That transcendence. That transformation. It took me some time to come to terms with the fact that this would be broken. Ellis’s dedication for the book reads “For Our Teachers.” He spares no praise for the mentors who have encouraged him along his way, from his aspiring musician father in Ballarat, Australia, to a guy in Scotland named Charlie who helped him level up his violin busking game in Inverness in the late 1980s, cluing him into playing folk tunes to please pedestrians and giving him “one of the first real, communal experiences that I’d had playing music.”You point out how the gum brings out the best in people, like Ann Demeulemeester. Just as other people bring out the best in you. Nina Simone’s Gum reveals how something seemingly insignificant and disposable can form beautiful connections between people. It is a story about the meaning we bestow on objects and experiences, and how these things can become imbued with spirituality. It is a celebration of the artistic process and the incomparable power of the art born from it – of friendship, understanding and love. I had this sort of feeling of this incredible love and care that was gathering underneath it,” Ellis says. “I could see it was sort of a metaphor for ideas, and a metaphor for people projecting their better souls onto something.”

I did what she asked and introduced her to the crowd, and then stood in the wings and watched her negotiate the stairs to the stage – it was clear that Nina Simone was not well. This book is Ellis' exploration of magic in found object, such as his first Accordion, a thing he found in the garbage; or the magic his first violin held, and continues to hold inside it and how that magic took him to a place where he could preserve a strange little bit of the Almighty Nina Simone's magic.In his completely charming and joyful memoir Nina Simone’s Gum, Ellis tells the story of his acquisition and stewardship of this magical keepsake, but also of vocation, understanding, interconnectedness, and the power of artistic communities to support and sustain their members and fans. It’s an incredible privilege to work with Warren,” Cave tells me when I get in touch to ask him about their relationship. “In any situation, he wants the best for me and I want the best for him. We have basically developed a way of working where we both relinquish control of the music we make together. We spend many hours improvising music together, sitting and playing in good faith without the politics and power grabs of many partnerships. We just let the songs find themselves.”