“I say this every time I do this tribute: Their music is timeless in a good way and in a bad way, because we’re fighting the same fights that they were fighting,” Allrich says of Simone and Makeba, who both legendarily combined music and civil rights activism. This year’s tribute is Sunday at the Atlas Performing Arts Center on H Street NE in D.C.

Allrich, a native Washingtonian with Howard University degrees in jazz vocals and social work, says the music of Simone and Makeba teaches that it’s possible to keep moving even when times are difficult.

“That’s what art does for us. It gives us an outlet so that we can still walk upright, and we can still be inspired,” says Allrich, who is in her 30s. “That’s part of my goal when I do these tributes … is, one, to stand up and speak up, but two, to empower people. And really give them inspiration.”

The annual tribute started at Bohemian Caverns, the U Street NW jazz landmark that closed earlier this year. Allrich — well-known in D.C. jazz and soul circles for more than just the Simone/Makeba shows — says that Atlas readily welcomed this year’s tribute. She’ll be backed by Kris Funn on bass, Mark G. Meadows on keyboards, Savannah Harris on drums, Agyei Osei Hargrove on percussion, Brent Birckhead on saxophone and flute, and Mongezi Ntaka on guitar.

“They came at the same thing in two different ways.”

The theater is helping her to try out an idea that she’d had for years: Serving drinks tailored to honor Simone and Makeba.

“Nina’s gotta be fire — somethin’ with whiskey, somethin’ hot. And Miriam’s gotta be somethin’ sweet. Sweet but strong,” Allrich says. “And I think that kinda sums them up — they came at the same thing in two different ways.”

The late Simone, known for the protest song “Mississippi Goddamn” and her deep involvement in the ’60s civil rights movement, is having a moment right now: The biographical documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? was nominated for an Oscar and opened her to new audiences. (That’s also a Simone song in those recent Apple Watch commercials.)

“She was just a walking spirit,” Allrich says. “She didn’t understand this place.”

The late Makeba helped popularize African music globally in the ’50s and ’60s, and her personal life included marriages to fellow South African musician Hugh Masekela and American activist Stokely Charmichael. For anyone looking to understand Makeba’s viewpoint better, Allrich points to the multilingual singer’s live recordings.

“The cool thing about Miriam Makeba is that she explains most of her songs,” Allrich says. “She always describes what it means, what it was for, and what it means for her.”

After eight years of celebrating the two singers — Simone, who “just didn’t care,” and Makeba, who was “very classy, very dedicated” — Allrich says she’s still inspired by their individual pride and savvy. She grew up in a household filled with jazz, soul and R&B records and political conversations. Her father, Agyei Akoto, is a jazz musician and a founder of the private, African-oriented Nation House school in D.C. Allrich, who is married and has two children, teaches there.

“Being raised the way I was, my parents were always saying, ‘There’s no such thing as art for art’s sake. If you have a gift as an artist, your job is to speak for the people,'” Allrich says. “So it’s a gift, but it’s also a responsibility.”

Akua Allrich’s 8th annual tribute to Nina Simone and Miriam Makeba is Sunday, Oct. 9, at the Atlas Performing Arts Center. There will be two sets: 6:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.

This tension shaped much of her career. While many of her most popular hits were her covers of love songs such as “I Loves You, Porgy” and “I Put A Spell on You,” civil rights activists canonized her as “The High Priestess of Soul” for composing and singing the protest songs “Mississippi Goddam” and “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.”

But Simone also transcended musical categorization altogether. She could imbue a torch song with such potency and resistance that she often ended up redefining the very meaning of the song itself. For how else can we explain Simone’s transformation of the love song, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” whose original melody and chorus lyric were written by Horace Ott after a temporary falling out with his girlfriend, Gloria Caldwell, into what sounds like a musical meditation on racial suffering and black existentialism.

That she was able to capture the breadth of the sixties, those “years of hope and days of rage” as author Todd Gittlin calls them, in song form was a feat that few artists dared to attempt and even fewer achieved. But it is just this complexity — of her sound and that era — that Nina Revisited… A Tribute to Nina Simone, an all-star tribute album pegged to the release of Liz Garbus’s documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?, strives to update for a contemporary audience.

It mostly hits its mark. Spearheaded by RCA and the production team of Jayson Jackson, Suzette Williams, Peter Edge and jazz pianist Robert Glasper, and hip-hop artist Lauryn Hill, the album features 16 tracks by 13 artists who hail from places as far-reaching as Brisbane and the Bronx, cover a variety of musical genres and range from indie fan favorites to Billboard chart topping legends.

The result is an album that at times feels rightfully nostalgic, at other moments profoundly contemporary. Its diverse mix of voices sometimes veers towards the unwieldy and inconsistent and, depending on which artist and on which song, gets close to the spirit of Simone herself.

In many ways, the album is as much homage to as it is from Simone’s musical children. It literally opens with her daughter Lisa Simone’s cheeky declaration “My Mama Could Sing,” and closes with Simone’s own masterful cover of the Billy Taylor classic, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.” In between, it covers a spectrum of moods and perhaps even social movements.

Jazmine Sullivan’s upbeat, reggae-inspired reinvigoration of “Baltimore” carries both a lament of Freddie Gray’s death and celebration of her generation’s “Black Lives Matter” protests. In the re-titled, “We Are Young Gifted and Black,” rapper Common poignantly links Ferguson, Staten Island and Baltimore to Simone’s defiance in “Mississippi Goddam” while his duet partner, Lalah Hathaway transports us to the neo-soul, if not soul, era with her sultry vocals.

Mary J. Blige, who was originally cast to play Simone in Cynthia Mort’s upcoming biopic, Nina, slows down and quietly inhabits “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.” The newbie, the 18-year-old Australian singer Grace, sounds like a veteran as she thoughtfully covers “Love Me or Leave Me.” And Usher, possibly the most unanticipated artist on this album, opens up “My Baby Just Cares for Me” with a hip-hop-sounding break beat, only to go retro vocally and playfully fuse the song with his swing jazz and pop phrasing.

The songs that deviate from Simone completely are the most mesmerizing. Jazz vocalist Gregory Porter powerfully turns “Sinnerman” into part-moan, part-mambo and part-spiritual movement; while Alice Smith gives an unforgettable, haunting interpretation of “I Put A Spell On You.”

But next to Simone, this album mainly showcases Lauryn Hill’s breadth and dexterity. Not formally marketed as Hill’s comeback album, her six tracks here make this her most comprehensive set of studio recordings since The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill in 1998.

Her expansive version of “Wild is the Wind” captures a love-sickness that is both soulful and hopeless; her take on the Jacques Brel’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas” is defiant and daring. Through her band’s cover of “African Mailman,” that Simone composed as a Cubop-like instrumental for her debut album “Little Girl Blue,” Hill showcases Simone’s virtuoso musicality and her own deep knowledge of that repertoire, while shrugging off past criticisms of her ability to be both bandleader and producer.

The songs that offer the greatest challenges, however, are also the ones where Hill makes the strongest impression. Her take on Simone’s classic “Feeling Good,” is a faithful adaptation that, combining Hill’s own powerful contralto and Eric Gales and Jordan Peters on guitar, is one of the best professional renditions of this most-covered of Simone’s songs. And yet it is her rhapsodic and lengthy version of “I’ve Got Life” from the musical Hair that proves why she was always Simone’s true heir apparent. Sampling Simone, Hill’s rhyme is reminiscent of the historical breadth, political insight and lyrical playfulness and urgency that her fans feared that they might not hear again.

That the album changes so much, though, is strangely its own form of tribute. Simone’s albums were inherently eclectic, as she often switched genres from song to song, and sometimes within one song itself. In the end, listeners might leave wondering how Hill would have carried the weight of a full Simone tribute album by herself (as artists like Meshell Ndegeocello and Xiu Xiu have done), but more appropriately, we close with Simone on her own terms — the voice that set these artists, and the nation, musically free in the first place.

Salamishah Tillet is an associate professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, the author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination and is writing a book on Nina Simone.

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