Und separat nochmal eine längere Passage aus dem Gespräch von 1996, in dem Lincoln sich über ihre Vorbilder und besonders über Billie Holiday äussert – und auch einen Vergleich zieht, wie junge Sänger*innen sich damals und in der Gegenwart der 90er (und sicherlich auch heute noch) gegenüber ihren Vorbildern verhalten:
ABBEY LINCOLN: […] Louis Armstrong was a singer. Most musicians are afraid to sing. It’s somehow a step down or something, and a lot of the singers today are imitating the horns. They’re jealous of the saxophones, saxophonists, but the saxophone is made. It has a range like the piano has a range. So, what is all this scatting? Ella used to scat after she told the story, after she sang the song exactly as the composer wrote it and the lyricist. Then she would improvise.
The singers, many of them today start out improvising because they think they’re singing jazz. There is no such thing as jazz. There’s only a song and your spirit and your ancestors. I don’t know what I’d have done without Billie Holliday or Bessie Smith or Sarah, all these. I follow in a tradition. Women who never sounded like anybody but themselves.
But then smoking was allowed in public places and you didn’t have to fasten your seatbelt. The government wasn’t responsible for your life in the car. Even though you owned the car, you can’t disconnect the airbags, unless the government says you can. It’s another time and the music reflects it, and this is dangerous.
SALLY PLAXSON: What did those women do? What did they leave that made it possible for you to take your place in that lineage?
ABBEY LINCOLN: Just their footprints. That’s all. They were all original and they had a philosophy of life that didn’t encourage anybody to approach them in any kind of a phony manner. They knew how to be real and I was afraid to go up to any of these queens and say, oh, Sarah, I wish you’d listen to my album or I wish you’d — do you think I could take a few lessons from you. I mean, I wouldn’t have dared. I wouldn’t have dared. Billie Holliday, you listened to the recording. What do you mean, teach you? Who are you, darling? Things have changed. Mm-hmm.
SALLY PLAXSON: Did you ever meet her, talk with her?
ABBEY LINCOLN: Billie? I met her. I never talked with her because I didn’t feel like her peer. I didn’t know how to have a conversation with Billie Holliday. I was in her presence a couple of times. She came to see me when I was in Honolulu at the Tradewinds. She came a couple of times. I think she was getting away from the atmosphere of where she was. It was only a few blocks away and she brought her little dogs, Mexican Chihuahuas, sat at the bar and drank whiskey out of a glass, and for a little while, I thought it was the whiskey that made her what she was, but I figured that out. It didn’t take me long.
She was a great queen without her court, and she would stand on the stage and hardly anything would ever move. Her eyes would slide from side to side and nobody talked. The room was still like that. Nobody talked. That was the only time I ever had seen her perform, but she did come where I was twice, but I didn’t go to the bar and say, oh, hi, Billie.
The singers approached me like that, like they really, you know, are my equals now, yes, and I’m friendly, but I wonder about it.
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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