For my last online jazz program, I scheduled two pieces from Max Roach’s We Insist! Freedom Now Suite: “Triptych: Prayer, Protest, Peace” and “All Africa.” When I considered the two pieces for the program, I was overwhelmed by the first, with its duet between singer Abbey Lincoln and drummer Max Roach. The music held me spellbound and I pondered how the singer would recover after seemingly ripping her voice from her body. The same effect was produced when I heard Dee Dee Bridgewater perform that music at Symphony Center in Chicago last year. But this was the original and I was doubly impressed by the commitment to an idea embedded in this performance and in the very writing of the music by Max Roach in collaboration with Oscar Brown Jr. On the morning of my program, I awoke with NPR (National Public Radio), in the midst of a feature on Abbey Lincoln, announcing that she had died the previous day, which would be 14 August 2010. Of course, I was struck by the news and can only hope now that many people listened to my program and heard that remarkable performance between Lincoln and Roach. For me, as with others I’m sure, Abbey Lincoln was the singer/songwriter of the 90s or the film actress. But her jazz singing and movie making careers flourished in the 1950s and 1960s.
Abbey Lincoln was born in Chicago on 6 August 1930 and named Anna Maria Wooldridge. The tenth of twelve children, she was raised on a farm in Michigan. After beginning a singing career, she assumed many names, such as Gaby Lee. After assuming Abbey Lincoln, she built a career. It seems that Lincoln would undergo, as many driven people do, other major developments in her life. She began a sultry nightclub singer. On one of her albums, the one with an orchestra led by Benny Carter, she’s posed reclining provocatively, in a slinky gown. The album was titled Abbey Lincoln’s Affair: The Story of a Girl in Love. She also had a bit part, playing a glamour girl, in The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), dressed in a gown Marilyn Monroe wore in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. When she met Max Roach, she burned her slinky outfit and began singing with small jazz groups, including Roach’s group, which had to have propelled her development as a jazz singer. As Nat Hentoff remembered in that NPR spot, Max demanded more and more from her performance of his challenging suite and Lincoln responded. She recorded with top-notched jazz musicians and, in 1962, married Max Roach. In film, she starred along side Ivan Dixon in Nothing but a Man (1964) and opposite Sidney Poiter in For Love of Ivy (1968). Then the marriage to Max Roach ended in 1970, and Lincoln retired from public life for the rest of the 70s and most of the 80s, settling for a while in California, and never remarrying.
When Lincoln resumed her professional career, she did so with a vengeance. During the eighties she traveled in Africa and was given the name Aminata Moseka by African statesmen. She also made a cameo appearance in Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues (1990).
After settling in New York and commencing to perform, she was quoted as saying, “I don’t scream anymore. I sing about my life.” And did she ever sing. In 1992, she recorded When There Is Love with the elegant jazz pianist Hank Jones. Some other successful albums were You Gotta Pay the Band (1991) with Stan Getz, Hank Jones, and Charlie Haden; and A Turtle’s Dream (1994) with Nicholas Payton and Bobby Hutcherson. Those productions are a mere sampling of her output. Songs such as “The World Is Falling Down,” “Throw It Away,” and “When I’m Called Home” are signature Lincoln pieces. The last album was Abbey Sings Abbey in 2007, the year in which she had open-heart surgery.
Finally, it’s quite plain that it was the way Abbey Lincoln sang about her life that separated her from other singers. For me, Lincoln’s style and storytelling qualities were the center of her art, her turns of phrases imparted meaning beyond words. She was not out of the mold of singers such as Sarah Vaughan or Ella Fitzgerald. Her art is comparable to singers such as Billie Holiday, whom she has acknowledged as an influence. I hear deep emotion and kinship to human frailties marking the best of her work. Hers was a life of survival and achievement. |
