Abbey Lincoln 'Abbey Sings Abbey' album

She came into the studio in New York when I was recording « And It's Supposed to Be Love », one of her songs that talks about marital violence. And I was blinded by the light...
Ayo

In her oblique, singular trajectory across the multiple currents and trends that have fashioned the incredibly rich and complex landscape of contemporary Afro-American music these past fifty years, Abbey Lincoln has gradually established herself in everyone's eye as the great female voice of the post-free era.

Perfectly timeless in her manner of deepening that anonymous furrow of tradition which, from Bessie Smith to Billie Holiday, has constantly sung the violence and tragedy of the dispossessed at the heart of the Black experience, and usually deploying disconcerting musical intelligence – and overwhelming obstinacy – in so doing, while at the same time remaining permanently alert, committed "body and soul" to the tumultuous reality of her community's history, and always prompt to be stirred by prevailing moods and so cause her voice to be heard "here and now", Abbey Lincoln is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the freest, most talented artists of our time.

And yet, though every one of us agrees on the hypnotic strength and bitterness in her sophisticated voice, the expressive power of the torn phrasing, by turns abrupt and languid, that is constantly upsetting in the way it adventures time and again to the very brink of the abyss with an exacerbated lyricism that is theatrical in its ready pathos – in a word, if Abbey Lincoln is today unanimously held to be a performer beyond the norm, allowing the intimate voice of "blues people" to resound within her and sing each time she takes hold of a standard, an essential part of her creative genius still remains curiously misunderstood, if not clearly lost from sight.

For Abbey Lincoln is also an extraordinary songwriter — an exceptional writer whose extremely personal universe, even though it undoubtedly belongs, from the inspirational angle, within the vast gestures of emancipation of the Afro-American people -, still goes largely beyond the (formal) limits of traditional jazz to deploy itself at the confines of the genres that make up all the richness and diversity of American popular culture, to participate absolutely in a syncretism that is perfectly contemporary.

Abbey likes to date her writer's vocation back to the dawn of her career when, in 1961, after three resolutely hard-bop records for the Riverside label, she made the album Straight Ahead (Candid), surrounded by a galaxy of first-rate musicians that included Coleman Hawkins, Eric Dolphy and Max Roach; on that album there was a spellbinding version of Blue Monk, and for the first time this tune applied the poetry of her own words to the plasticity of the melody. Thelonious Monk, who was present at the session, made this enigmatic remark at the end of the take: « You're one real composer! » They were prophetic words that Abbey Lincoln would keep preciously in a corner of her memory for a very long time. Because it was only a good few years later, in 1973 (the occasion was the album « People in Me », made after a long ellipse), that the singer would do her first recording entirely devoted to her own compositions, with her words and her music. And it was not until the Nineties, when Jean-Philippe Allard and Daniel Richard put the finishing touches to her creative resurrection when they signed her to Verve Records, that she dared take full and definitive responsibility for her compositional talents, and commit to record a series of sumptuous albums whose repertoire was, in essence, her own original songs.

It is this secret garden that Abbey Lincoln has decided to reveal today by means of this new album, one on which she performs exclusively personal songs (apart from the legendary Blue Monk, which opens the record and operates as a kind of talisman), songs carefully chosen from the nine recordings she made for Verve over the last fifteen years. With a consummate sense of theatre, alternating slow, crepuscular ballads - almost static in their imperceptible unfolding - and songs of timeless sophistication with melodies that are more archaistic, at the frontiers of country-music and folk, Abbey Lincoln, using little, almost secret Impressionist touches, recapitulates the skilfully "natural" art of phrasing with all its intimate deployments, breaks and suspensions, revealing the magic spells of a rift that can't be confessed while plucking constantly at the strings of emotion with discretion and restraint and distilling, in its slightest inflexions, melancholy that is literally overwhelming.

To attain this miracle of sensibility, and give shape and life to this perilous project, Abbey Lincoln has innovated in surrounding herself for the first time not with outstanding musicians as has been her custom, but rather with studio players with vast experience of all styles of American popular music. Led with deftness and intelligence by Larry Campbell, a guitarist of extraordinary precision who enjoys the favours of the greatest (he played for a long time with Bob Dylan), this is a group of exceptionally humble and sensitive musicians who master the art of accompaniment to the highest degree: unaffectedly, and with a foundation in restraint and fluidity, they avoid not only pathos but also all attempts at virtuosity; their sole concern throughout – over arrangements that are refined and minimalist in embracing the entire spectrum of American popular music, from dreamy country music to the blues of the Delta, and from jazz in its origins to folk-pop of the post-modern era -, is to give grace to the harmony between words and music. Never, no doubt, have the melodist-talents of Abbey Lincoln been shown in a more revealing light. Gorged with pernicious melodies that pulse with insidious grooves, and haunted by the strength and melancholy that are inextricably entwined in a life of commitment and wild passion, this sumptuous record is already writing itself into the history of Afro-American vocal artistry as one of those rare masterpieces to which people regularly return in search of renewed strength.

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Abbey Lincoln - Abbey Sings Abbey