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:
She was a great one.
ReplyDeleteI may have asked this before but why can't TV shows put musical credits at the end. Everyone is mentioned. It is really annoying to try and figure out later what song was on a show.
Because they don't have union pressure to do so, and the networks and stations want as little time spent on such things as possible (all credit sequences, really). Some series, notably BUFFY and some of the other WB/CW series, and usually PBS's, made and make a big point of crediting the soundtrack artists in exchange for some sort of money, but usually no. Not as many tv series as films hope to make collateral bucks off the soundtrack albums, too...
ReplyDeleteAs I commented at Crider's blog when he posted the R.I.P.:
ReplyDelete"Oh my. Time to take out my CD of You Gotta Pay the Band (Getz, Jones, Hayden, Johnson, on Verve, 1991), or maybe 1958's It's Magic (Fuller, Golsen, Shihab, on Riverside, 1958. They are my two favorite Lincoln albums."
Good choices. PEOPLE IN ME is probably my sentimental favorite of her 1980s albums, and all the albums with Roach have their charm for me...csf
ReplyDeleteA fine tribute here, Todd. What can I add but she was a favorite of mine and I have spent the last week listening to Abbey Sings Abbey over and over again. RIP.
ReplyDelete