Abbey (Lincoln) and Annie (Ross): singers, composers, and sometimes actors: Saturday Music Club on Monday

Born within a fortnight of each other in 1930, Ross as Annabelle Allan Short on 25 July, Lincoln as Anna Marie Wooldridge on 6 August (34 years to the day before I was}, they both came softly but impressively into the jazz scene in the early 1950s, and did great solo work and were also important components of major bands/choruses of their era: Ross in Lambert, Hendricks and Ross and Lincoln in the Max Roach Quintet. They also had interesting side careers in drama, not solely playing musicians, but also that. Ross's first career was as a child actor; Lincoln also moved to California at not quite so young an age, and got a bit of a boost from recording for the film The Girl Can't Help It...

Annie Ross discography; drama and more
Abbey Lincoln discography; drama and more

Annie Ross: "The Way You Look Tonight"

Milt Jackson (vibes) Blossom Dearie (piano) Percy Heath (bass) Kenny Clarke (drums) Annie Ross (vocals) NYC, April 1, 1952

Annie Ross: "Cry Me a River"

Les Condon, Jimmy Deuchar (trumpet) Ken Wray (trombone) Derek Humble (alto sax) Al Cornish, Don Rendell (tenor sax) Ronnie Ross (baritone sax) Damian Robinson (piano) Lennie Bush (bass) Tony Crombie (drums) Annie Ross (vocals) London 1955

Annie Ross (with Lambert and Hendricks): "Twisted" and L, H & R with Joe William: "Every Day I Have the Blues"  with Count Basie (piano), Freddie Green (guitar), Ed Jones (bass), and Sonny Payne (drums) (with a scrap of Judy Garland appended) 

Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, with the Les McCann Trio: "Four"

Annie Ross: "Annie's Lament"

George Wallington (piano) Roger Ram Ramirez (organ) Percy Heath (bass) Art Blakey (drums) Annie Ross (vocals) NYC, October 9, 1952

Annie Ross: "Skylark"

Annie Ross: "Prisoner of Life" from Short Cuts

Nothing but a Man with Abbey Lincoln

Abbey Lincoln: "Do Nothing 'Til You Hear from Me"

Abbey Lincoln: "Lonely House"

Abbey Lincoln: "Left Alone"

Abbey Lincoln with the Max Roach Chorus and Orchestra: "Lonesome Lover"

Abbey Lincoln: "Blue Monk"

Abbey Lincoln:  "First Song"

Abbey Lincoln:  "Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise"

Annie Ross: "All the Things You Are"

Abbey Lincoln, 1930-2010

Abbey Linoln, who'd just turned 80 on our mutual birthday anniversaries Friday a week ago, died yesterday. She made it to eighty.

She wasn't the most technically dexterous of jazz singers, didn't break as many pathways as Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald (few, if any, of Lincoln's gerneration did or could) but she was a restless artistic spirit, unafraid to push her considerable ability to its limits, and with her then husband Max Roach in the latter '50s began a lifelong engagement with liberation activism...and by the early 't0s had also branched out into an ating career (I first remember seeing her thus kn the 1964 film Nothing but a Man, though as a child I'd no doubt seen her in, I thought, I Spy and more kid-oriented series--but it seems she guested on Mission: Impossible, not I Spy). The one obit I've seen/heard so far, from NPR, was careful to note her performances of the Freedom Now Suite, but failed to mention such follow-ups as It's Time, and tended to gloss over most of her continuing career as a musician. I've posted this here before, but we can only hope that Lincoln had achieved her personal Africa, either before her decath, or in whatever afterlife their could be:



From Night Music, the NBC-syndicated series around the turn of the '90s:


From her fifth, I believe, album, but perhaps her first recorded composition: