Aus dem Hörfaden zu Abbey Lincoln – Teil 1:
vorgarten
gypsy-tail-wind
vorgarten
gypsy-tail-windLincoln hat er erst ab 1962 [1961?] verkloppt, davor allenfalls ausserehelich, wer weiss
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ist das mit häuslicher gewalt irgendwo belegt? wusste das bisher nicht.
Hab ich vor so vielen Jahren irgendwo gelesen, dass ich es als bekannt voraussetzte, hoffe ich hab da nichts falsch abgelegt – ev. im „Du“ über über die Sängerinnen? (Ins Roach-Heft würd’s schlechter passen.) In einem der beiden gibt es ein Interview mit ihr, wenn ich mich nicht täusche. Suche später mal danach.
gerade gefunden, allen lowe auf org – bzw. war das keine neue nachricht für einige dort. krass. da kann man einige texte auf THAT’S HIM nochmal anders lesen („my man“)…
gypsy-tail-windJa, genau, da bin ich auch grad wieder gelandet – Chris Albertson bestätigt es, und Jim Sangrey hat wohl auch relativ nah Stories dazu zu hören gekriegt (der ist ja u.a. auf einem frühen Album von Dennis González dabei):
http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php?/topic/15425-max-roach-health/
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Der Post von Allen Lowe im Organissimo-Forum:
Posted 14 Feb 2005
I have great respect for Max musically, tempered, however, by the fact that he is another jazz/woman beater – if you don’t believe me, ask Abby Lincoln. This stuff has been swept under the rug too much when it comes to jazz musicians (thinking also about Miles and Ben Webster) –
Dazu Chris Albertson (aka „christiern“) lapidar:
Posted 14 Feb 2005
Allen speaks the truth.
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Aus dem Hörfaden, Teil 2:
gypsy-tail-wind
Hatte das falsch erinnert, im Du über Jazz-Sängerinnen gibt es ein – faszinierendes – langes Interview mit Jon Hendricks, der aber gerade in den Passagen über Lincoln als ziemlicher Macho rüberkommt (eine „chant-tootsie“ [lacht röhrend] aus dem Cabaret, die dank Roach den Übergang in die seriöse Jazzwelt geschafft habe – immerhin gibt es Respekt dafür, dass sie die einzige sie, der das gelungen sei).
Was ich hier erinnerte, war vermutlich tatsächlich der Faden auf Organissimo.
vorgarten
sie selbst hat das nicht unbedingt anders erzählt, aber das ist ja trotzdem nochmal ein unterschied. hab jetzt ihr debüt (1957, vor roach) nicht mehr im ohr, aber sie hatte immerhin vorher mit marty paitch und benny carter zusammengearbeitet und die hauptrolle im arlen-musical JAMAICA (einem der wenigen ‚mixed-race‘-stücke) – nicht broadway, aber sie war damit auf tour.
Im Interview mit Hendricks ist es nicht die Geschichte, die er erzählt, sondern der herablassend-paternalistische Tonfall, den er drauf hat – obwohl er dann ja auch seinen Respekt für Lincoln bekundet. Für sie halt, aber nicht für all die anderen mit ähnlichem Background.
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Weil das um das „Comeback“ der 90er herum aufkam und ich noch etwas weiter geguckt habe … diesen Artikel fand ich unter dem Gesichtspunkt spannend, also Cabaret, Thema Männer ganz allgemein und natürlich Max Roach:
JAZZ : Renaissance Singer : After multiple name changes and career detours, Abbey Lincoln re-emerges with new songs and a new spiritual reservoir–her own brew of Christianity, the I Ching and Egyptian cosmology
BY RICHARD GUILLIATTAPRIL 4, 1993 12 AM PT
RICHARD GUILLIATT IS A FREE-LANCE WRITER BASED IN NEW YORK.NEW YORK — Some performers keep scrapbooks of their past; Abbey Lincoln keeps history books.
In her uptown Manhattan apartment, the jazz singer emerges from the study bearing two thick, black ring binders that she sets down on the dining room table. The carefully preserved press clippings between their covers record a life that has shifted gears as dramatically as the society around it.
At first Anna Marie Wooldridge becomes Gaby Lee, a coquettish and beautiful 1950s supper club singer. Then she becomes Abbey Lincoln, the actress and jazz singer who appeared on the cover of Ebony magazine, her new name a sardonic reference to the slavery-era President.
Photographs of her marriage to jazz drummer Max Roach in 1962 show a woman with a short-cropped Afro haircut, the beginning of a civil rights awakening that would soon incorporate anguished protest records and a starring role in the film “For Love of Ivy.”
By the mid-1970s, she is briefly known as Aminata Moseka, in homage to her African roots. Then the clips begin to dwindle, in conjunction with her fading recognition and the commercial decline of jazz.
“I never stayed around to get the money–I was always changing,” Lincoln says in her rueful, smoky voice. She folds one elegant hand over another and composes her striking face into a determined expression. “I never wanted to be something I couldn’t live with.”
At 62, Abbey Lincoln remains true to that credo even as she adds several more volumes to her story. Since signing with Verve Records in 1990, Lincoln has enjoyed an artistic renaissance that has dovetailed with her emergence as a composer and arranger. Her last record, “You Gotta Pay the Band,” was one of the biggest-selling jazz albums of last year and was nominated for a Grammy. A documentary on her life was broadcast on public television in late February, and her other great film performance of the civil rights era, “Nothing but a Man,” was re-released in February in conjunction with Black History Month and will open at the Laemmle Monica in Santa Monica on April 30 in a new 35-millimeter print.
The term jazz diva might be overworked, but Abbey Lincoln would surely wear the mantle easily. This is a woman, after all, who once listed one of her own recordings among the essential albums she would take to a desert island. In her drug-plagued neighborhood north of Harlem, Lincoln’s neatly kept apartment is an oasis of self-affirmation, recalling a prouder pre-World War II era when this stretch of St. Nicholas Avenue was called Sugar Hill. Lincoln’s handsome face–with its almond-shaped eyes above a wide flash of teeth, its cascade of braids turning gray at the roots–stares down from posters and framed prints. Her colorful, figurative paintings decorate each room, and her most recent press clips are displayed on a music stand in the dining room, near her awards.
It seems superfluous to say that Lincoln lives here alone, in blissful independence. “I don’t want to live in a house with a man,” she says. “I want him to live in his own house and come see me sometime–when he’s in a good mood.” Her throaty chuckle sounds like a truck engine turning over.
As much a storyteller in person as she is in her music, Lincoln is candid in her assessment of most things, including herself. Conversation with her is a giddy ride through Egyptian cosmology, politicized anger and tearful reminiscing, with regular pit stops on the terra firma of her earthy laughter.
When Verve recently held a press luncheon for her new album, “Devil’s Got Your Tongue,” Lincoln sat at the head of the table in black hat and suit, sipping margaritas and informing bemused white male journalists about the joys of polygamy and the impending end of the world.
Expansiveness also characterizes her music, which draws blues, gospel and Africa into its spell. Not blessed with a great vocal range, Lincoln instead follows the lead of her early idol Billie Holiday, infusing her singing with a maximum of expressiveness. Her new record features the Staple Singers and a children’s choir on several songs and African percussionists on the playful “Jungle Queen.” Even its lyrical theme–the family–has broad implications. “Song for My Father” is partly about the plundering of Africa, partly about the hardships endured by her real father, Alexander Wooldridge, in rural Michigan during the Great Depression.
“I was thinking about my father, who sired 12 children and gave us his life,” Lincoln explains. “We learned how to say things behind his back because we took part in our mother’s arguments. . . . (So) I wrote this song and asked Dad to forgive us.”
The singer’s deep brown eyes roll up to the ceiling as the memory draws out tears. “My father was a hustler,” she continues, producing a tissue without self-consciousness. “He worked as a handyman, he learned how to support his family. So I learned how to be like that.”
Lincoln’s parents split up in 1940 after a tempestuous and sometimes violent 30-year relationship. One generation out of slavery, Lincoln’s mother raised her kids on welfare as they attended Kalamazoo High School. Today Lincoln sees her upbringing as the foundation of her forceful personality, and “Devil’s Got Your Tongue” is an unusually heartfelt tribute in an age of psychoanalytic parent-bashing.
When Lincoln set out for Los Angeles, using her real name, Anna Marie Wooldridge, she was a stunningly beautiful 19-year-old whose singing had been restricted to church and school.
She spent two years as a supper club singer called Anne Marie in Honolulu, where she first met Billie Holiday and learned to avoid the street life that dogged so many of her peers. That was followed by an elaborate Vegas-style show in Los Angeles under the name Gaby Lee and a role in the 1956 teen movie “The Girl Can’t Help It.” Her appearance on the cover of Ebony in 1957 in a red dress once worn by Marilyn Monroe inspired a barrage of press coverage about the new “black Monroe.”
Her new name was a wordplay suggested by her manager, songwriter Bob Russell. “He said, ‘Since Abraham Lincoln didn’t free the slaves, maybe you can handle it,’ ” she recalls sardonically.
But Lincoln was still a long way from her political awakening; her debut album in 1956 was called “Abbey Lincoln’s Affair: The Story of a Girl in Love” and featured a cover photograph posed for maximum cleavage. A magazine spread at the time featured a shot of the voluptuous Lincoln leaning into a backstage mirror.
“I was going in the wrong direction . . . but everyone thought it was wonderful because I was getting so much attention–including me,” Lincoln says.
After meeting and falling in love with jazz drummer Max Roach in the late 1950s, Lincoln finally rebelled against her glamorous image. She threw the Monroe dress in the incinerator, moved to New York and recorded three albums for Riverside Records that featured a roster of Roach’s jazz contemporaries, including saxophonist Sonny Rollins. Those records–„That’s Him,” “Abbey Is Blue” and “It’s Magic“–show a singer cautiously stretching her pipes on a variety of standards. But they barely hint at the storm to come.
„(She) was like an OK supper singer, but no particular individuality, none of the thrust that a jazz singer has to have,” recalls critic and producer Nat Hentoff. “Then I went down to the Village Gate here in New York, where Max and she were doing the ‘Freedom Now Suite.’ It was just extraordinary, the power of it.”
The year was 1960, the height of the student sit-ins in the South, and both Roach and Lincoln had poured their anger into the piece that Hentoff had heard, which had the full title: “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite.” Screaming and pleading, often wordless with rage, Lincoln’s voice clearly reflected a new attitude. Her next album, “Straight Ahead,” released in 1961, featured similarly charged material, and then Lincoln landed a starring role in Michael Roemer’s 1963 film “Nothing but a Man,” an unusually sensitive portrayal of an Alabama preacher’s daughter who falls in love with a poor itinerant worker.
“Nothing but a Man” rejuvenated Lincoln’s acting career. In 1968 she played opposite Sidney Poitier, then at the height of his career, in “For Love of Ivy.” Having married Roach in 1962, Lincoln now appeared to have life on a plate–a career as an actress, a partnership with a jazz musician who was in the full throes of creativity. Which made it seem inexplicable when she threw it all in and fled.
“It’s hard for a man and woman to be together when they’re under the gun in society–that’s what ‘Nothing but a Man’ is about,” she says. “A man wants to show everybody he is the biggest and the baddest. If he can’t be that in the greater society, in the home he wants to be king of the hill, and sometimes that’s expensive to a woman. Even though I had a famous romanticized marriage, I thought, ‘I can’t do this, because it’s a lie.’ It wasn’t that I didn’t love him; I just couldn’t handle that anymore. And so I left my career as well. I went to California (in 1971) and lived with my mother.”
In a $70-a-month Los Angeles apartment next door to her mother, Lincoln withdrew to “cleanse her spirit” and expiate her guilt. She hated the rigors of acting, and her ornery ways were not welcomed in Hollywood (she lost an offer to appear in the movie “The Owl and the Pussycat” by being rude to the producer on the telephone). She was haunted by the contradictions of her history with Roach–a subservient wife who screamed onstage about freedom. And despite her fame over the years, she had never made enough money to care for her ill mother.
For a decade, Lincoln supported herself with occasional acting jobs and nightclub appearances and a year as a Pan-African lecturer at what is now called Cal State Northridge. Singer Miriam Makeba took Lincoln to Zaire in 1973–it was the beginning of an awakening sense of her African roots. She was writing songs but had become a relatively obscure figure on the jazz scene by the time she moved back to New York in 1981.
“I think I’ve been hiding over the years and a little apprehensive of stardom,” Lincoln says, looking back over her multiple identities and abrupt career detours. “It scares me; it still does. Because I like practicing the arts, and I like having time to practice them. And to do that you have to have solitude.
“I never was buddy-buddy with anybody (in the jazz world) because, well, it’s got a lot to do with lifestyle. I made up my mind a long time ago that I wasn’t going to play at street life. Street life–in the arts they run to it. And I think it’s a shame on us.”
Lincoln’s sporadic recording for Japanese and European labels from 1973 to 1985 blossomed into a new career when she got a call from French record producer Jean-Philippe Allard in 1989.
The result was “The World Is Falling Down,” her critically acclaimed 1990 album for Verve, which featured saxophonist Jackie McLean and trumpeter Clark Terry. “You Gotta Pay the Band,” released in late 1991, heralded her true re-emergence. The record not only featured some of the final recordings of tenor sax player Stan Getz, but was also largely written and arranged by Lincoln in a display of her maturing talents as a composer.
Like those previous albums, Lincoln’s new record swings between rearranged standards (“Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year”) and her own idiosyncratic compositions, with their musical roots in the blues and their lyrical flights into magic-realism. The record is infused with an optimism that may reflect Lincoln’s artistic rejuvenation. “People in Me,” a song originally recorded in 1973, depicts mixed blood as a source of strength rather than shame; “Evalina Coffey (The Legend Of)” depicts her mother as a cosmic visitor, alluding to the singer’s metaphysical beliefs.
Lincoln believes her writing is moving toward a more explicit expression of those spiritual concerns, which appear to be a typically unorthodox brew of Christianity, the I Ching and Egyptian cosmology. At times, she alludes darkly to a belief that the world is in its last stages, that the scenes on the street outside her apartment are evidence enough about this impending apocalypse. Three decades after “Freedom Now Suite,” the plight of African-Americans is a subject that still moves her to tears and rage.
Then this cloud lifts, and Lincoln adds with a wry smile that it’s OK–she still believes the world is round and that we’ll still be living on it. Whether Abbey Lincoln herself is around to enjoy this “new world” is a question she does not seem chafed about.
“If I died tomorrow,” she says, “I couldn’t say that I didn’t get it all.”
Quelle: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-04-04-ca-18753-story.html
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #158 – Piano Jazz 2024 - 19.12.2024 – 20:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba