Abbey Lincoln passed away yesterday. Although it is always impossible for me to rank a favorite singer to be second-to-none, I can almost do this in Ms. Lincoln’s case. Her artistry as songwriter and singer was focused on moving the Great Black Music forward. At the same time, she is rightfully the most gripping and deepest of the heirs to Billie Holiday’s swinging deep-soul music.
Abbey has made a lot of superb records over her fifty+ year career. In a more wide-awake cultural circumstance she would be known by many many more as one of the great American singers. Start with You Gotta Pay the Band (1991, with Stan Getz,) and work in both directions.
I first heard Abbey Lincoln on Max Roach’s 1962 masterpiece, It’s Time. She caps the record with her song Lonesome Lover. I tracked down the few of her records one could acquire at the time, around 1978. I did happen upon scratchy copies of her classic record for Riverside, That’s Him, and her debut record. The trajectory of my tastes and enthusiasms in jazz singing begin with Lincoln and the singer she is related most to, Billie Holiday.
Beginning in 1980, she began to record more regularly, and, eventually I tracked down all of her records–because I wanted to hear every recorded note. She’s a cornerstone figure for me, and, when people speak of ‘spiritual jazz,’ she and Alice Coltrane are twin highest goddesses.
Sometime around 1984, me and some friends got in a car in the dead of a Vermont winter to make the trek to The Rising Sun in Montreal to pay hommage to, and hear, Ms. Lincoln. It was the kind of road trip where a half hour into it, trying to stay on Route 7, we all thought ‘we must be a bit crazy to be driving in this nasty weather.’ Then the weather turned ugly.
Making our way very carefully north, we got to the Rising Sun, made our way up the stairs and turned into the long rectangle of the club. Hardly anybody was there. This changed in a minor way, for another group had hit the bottom of the stairs. In any case, we turned toward the small stage and saw a set up for Abbey’s backup trio and a bunch of empty tables. We made our way to the front most table just a few minutes before the announced starting time for the concert. The party behind us grabbed a front table.
Then, Doudou Boicel, the renowned Montreal jazz maven and owner of the club, announced the main attraction. The trio, led by pianist Phillip Wright, played several songs. Then Wright introduced Abbey.
Unaffected by the miniscule turnout, she launched into a glorious opening set. Here’s the kicker: ten feet away, the singer not only beguiled, she also made laser-like eye contact with each of us. I have never before or since, listening to a singer, felt the direct physical connection Abbey created on this night, as she brought many moments of song in through the so-called window to the soul. Needless to say there was no problem hanging around for the slightly more populated second set. She sustained this direct connection throughout the evening. This evening’s experience remains for me one of the high points of being a fan of the human voice.
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Lonesome Lover; w. Max Roach, 1962
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I Should Care; unreleased, 1999
NPR’s Jazz Profiles section has a series of terrific interviews with Lincoln and her colleagues.
Louis Moholo-Moholo is a South African drummer, who has spent most of his career playing both in ensembles led by illuminaries of the European jazz community, and, leading his own distinctive groups. He turned seventy on March 10. His career stretches over sixty years, with most of it centered in the United Kingdom, his home, after he arrived in 1964 with the crew of self-exiled South Africans, until 2005, when he returned to South Africa.
It would take pages to recap the highlights he has provided in recording with the likes of Evan Parker, Cecil Taylor, Steve Lacy, Harry Miller, Irene Schweizer, David Murray, Keith Tippett, and many many others, as well as his singular work with The Blue Notes, The Brotherhood of Breath, Chris McGregor, and his own groups–over four decades. It is enough to say that he is the finest trap drummer an entire continent, Africa, has yet produced. His signature drumming qualities are, to me, two: stirringly organic, and, shockingly creative.
Last year, his recording with the pianist Marilyn Crispell, Sibanye, struck me as yet another peerless throw down with a piano-playing peer. The record is brilliant of course. It can’t really be dealt with unless the listener visits its virtuoso territory again and again. The same can be said for his outing with Stan Tracey, Khumbula (2005.)
Louis Moholo-Moholo has recently delivered, to my ears, the first five star affair of the 2010 jazz year, An Open Letter to My Wife Mpumi. The record seems to me to nail his vision for his own music. Moholo-Moholo’s music sounds a clarion song of liberation within its rigorous structures, and can be said to be freedom music, not free jazz. His bandmates, most of whom is has been working with for some time, form one of music’s most thrilling groups right now.
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Moholo-Moholo
Performance from 1996, Louis Moholo-Moholo and Viva Le Black
Pino Minafra’s MinAfric Orchestra featuring Keith & Julie Toppett and Louis Moholo-Moholo
The internet is amazing. take it away if you must, but leave the jazz videos, eh?
Jeanne Lee left the mortal coil at the too young age of 61 in 2000. I object to the Wikipedia’s description, ‘she was one of the foremost exponents of free jazz in the vocal application,’ (but I also don’t like the term free jazz much at all.) I have no idea where the wikipedian got the idea a fuzzy informal term could cover the taut and extremely focused inventiveness Jeanne Lee expressed right from the beginning of her career.
In the early sixties Ms. Lee, Sheila Jordan, Abby Lincoln, and Helen Merrill, (and a little later Betty Carter,) all strove to break through out of the Lady Day-Sassy-Ella-Chris Connor models. They went forth differently and succeeded too. They did free jazz singing from those heavy duty antecedents. But, there’s no cogent answer to the question, ‘what makes Jeanne Lee a free jazz singer?’
She sang freely. Hers was the most ambitious experiment of them all.
No musician is more represented, or over-represented, in my archives than Le Sony’r Ra, ne Sun Ra. I know why this is so. It’s because Sun Ra’s raucus avant-swing brings with each helping some measure of surprise, of jaw dropping delight. It helps the cause of surprise the flow of newly discovered recordings, formally released or illicit, is apparently to be ceaseless.
Obviously, in a case like this, meeting my desire for ‘ra’ surprise crosses over into mild obsession. Fortunately, Transparency Records aims to satisfy those of us so afflicted. In 2008, they delivered a 28 CD set, The Complete Detroit Jazz Center Residency, that is both well over the top of any normal concept of documentation, and, a nirvana of surprise.
My informed guess would be Sun Ra is the most recorded musician ever. Okay, maybe the Grateful Dead–another dependable source of surprise–grab the ring. (Who knows?) Still, the immense Sun Ra opus is manageable for the neophyte. I’d say to begin to deal with it, one only need deal with 20 records or so. Even this task would require a starting point, and, let’s suppose it is possible to identify the one cornerstone platter no music lover should be without.
I’d nominate two records, Blue Delight (1989), and, Live at Montreux (1976). One or the other… I could nominate twenty more too. Don’t get me started. If the 28 discs of Detroit were boiled down to a single disc, (or two!) I could nominate it. Certainly, the Detroit set is only for obsessives and deluded completists. Still, only the matter of its vastness intervenes in any sensible recommendation. For me, the set is essential and loaded with surprise.
As the two Rolling Stone covers demonstrate, Sun Ra and Neil Young gaze, resolutely, out into the cosmos. Young weighed in with a modest 8 CD set last year, Neil Young Archives, Vol. 1: 1963-1972. It was long anticipated and worth the wait. because Young has permitted live recordings to stream into the open source, if you’re torrent-savvy, you can indulge yourself in his own endless live opus. Electrified Neil Young is the only heavy metal I return to again and again.
Vol. 1 reprises the classic ‘first period’ of Young’s career. There are too many alternates which sound too close to the original versions. Otherwise, the set is chock full of prime Neil Young music. The first disc, with the earliest tracks and demos, is especially rewarding.
Incidentally, Neil’s first four Reprise records have recently been remastered and reissued.Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and After the Gold Rush have desert island status in my book. (Neil Young home page…weird + myspace)
English folkie Bert Jansch collaborated with Mike Nesmith on his 1974 gem,L.A. Turnaround. Nesmith brought along his colleague, pedal steel guitarist Red Rhodes too. By this time, Nesmith was three years into his travels down his own distinctive country-rock byway. Jansch had left Pentangle and returned to a solo career.
I don’t know the back story behind L.A. Turnaround, one of Jansch’s finest–among many fine–records. Much to my surprise, there are on youtube a series of clips of sessions featuring Jansch and Red Rhodes. The setting is a country cottage in Britain. The sessions are marvelous and intimate. Eventually, Nesmith would augment tracks cut in the impromptu studio with contributions from L.A. session men, guitarist Jesse Ed Davis and fiddler Byron Berline, as well as Brits, including bassist Klaus Voorman, and drummer Danny Lane.
The three youtube clips comprise a beguiling mini-documentary.
It’s easy to peg records I really enjoyed last year. I’m not–usually–a very close listener. Sometimes I have to work to recognize something extraordinary. …usually, I don’t have to work hard at all.My own immediate ‘belly’ response is decisive in most cases.
When I auditioned Willie Nelson’s new recording with venerable Texas little big band Asleep At the Wheel, I wasn’t expecting the big upside. But then about six or so minutes into the experience I’m vibing to Fan It and realizing all-of-sudden-like, ‘this fantastic!’ No record last year plastered the smile on my soul like this one did.
Willie Nelson is legendary, iconic, all that, and his record last year Willie and the Wheel is simply one of the best records he’s ever made. (Willie & the Wheel home)
If you ask me what I found so pleasurable, I would tell you the record is just great singin’ and playin’ from beginning to end. Heck, it’s kind of like pairing Art Tatum with Ben Webster. You want some analysis to back my sense up? Come on!
33 years ago, 1976, was the bicentennial year, but for me it was mainly the year I latched onto a dream job running a record department in the back of a book store in the college town of Middlebury, Vermont. Very soon after my arrival I struck up a friendship with a like-minded jazzbo and began sitting in on his weekly radio show on the college station, WRMC. One way or the other, I would spend one radio slot a week there for nine years, mostly presenting jazz on Tuesday nights under the title Groovin’ High. Tidbit: for two years CNN’s Frank Sesno read the news after my show.
So, this was the background for 1976. Graham Parker released two superb recordsHeat Treatment and Howlin’ Wind in the same year! I have to confess too: to my tastes, both records wiped away my fascination with the Boss, who had released Born to Run the previous year. To place these records in context, both Elvis Costello and the Sex Pistols would issue their debut records the next year. Meanwhile, the FM radio dial was increasingly dominated by corporate rock.
Parker recorded for Mercury, yet their hype machine fell short with his one-two punch in 76. There really wasn’t a place for pub-rock driven singer-songwriter rock and roll on the stateside dial. I didn’t need any extravagant pitch. As soon as I learned that Parker had hired en-mass the legendary Brinsley Schwarz outfit to be his back-up band I was off my rocker. They were my favorite countrified import from the isles, and Silver Pistol (1971) and Nervous On the Road (1972) remain among my favorite listens in the down home vein of The Band and Better Days and Bobby Charles. Okay, as it turned out: guitarist Schwarz and keyboardist Andrews, and they picked up buddy Martin Belmont from Ducks Deluxe.
Billy Rankin-drummer
Bob Andrews-piano
Nick Lowe-bass
Ian Gomm-guitar
Brinsley Schwarz-guitar
Only a little of that flavor is in the mix of Parker’s two opening shots. Parker is a ferocious soulman and one of the great rock-and-roll songwriters, and the Brinsleys morphed into The Rumour so as to match the ferocity with their own fervor. No hits was the reward for two statements of fierce rock and roll. Only surprising—since the era’s trends were unkind to so much terrific music—in that the two records have nary a bad cut, and, including lots of hit-worthy cuts.
(I count Heat Treatment, Black Honey, Pourin’ It All Out, and Fool’s Gold, just from Heat Treatment.) It was the same result for Squeezing Out the Sparks, released in 1979, albeit at least it is considered one of the great rock records. However, it came out in even more ungenerous times: 1979 was the year disco broke through, and, punk ruled most muso’s hearts.
Quality wins out in the end. Graham Parker has been churning out grown-up rock and roll ever since that bicentennial year–enough so that he is one of the masters.
Graham Parker tells the story himself on his defunct blog Chairman Parker. It’s an amusing and edifying read.
Louis Moholo-Moholo has recently delivered, to my ears, the first five star affair of the 2010 jazz year, 
