Some Jazz Records: Abbey Lincoln Clippings
Comments on recordings from musicians and other actors of the jazz scene. Random and not-so-random listening cues from the archives.
Billie Holiday, Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia, 1933-1944, Legacy CXK 85470, 2001, 10 CDs; and Coleman Hawkins, Body and Soul/Fine Dinner, Bluebird B-10523, 1939, 10" 78 rpm.
"When I was 14, my sister brought a recording home of Billie Holiday, and Coleman Hawkins, the same day. I heard them both. And he was playing 'Body And Soul.' I don’t remember what Billie was singing," Abbey Lincoln said of her inspiration for singing on NPR’s Fresh Air in 1986. The Hawkins recording Lincoln would have heard at 14 was his all-time classic rendition from 1939. The singer discussed Billie Holiday’s influence further with Coda editor Bill Smith in 1979. "She was an example of how you can be expressive," Lincoln said. "She told us the stories of her life. If you listen to all of her records, you will have a portrait of a woman. Of her time, how she lived, who she loved, and how she felt about the world she lived in—and that impressed me. I believe that that is the work of the artist. The collection of Tutankhamun is the work of the artist—they talk about the king, but the king had nothing to do with this collection. This is the work of the artists, who did not sign their names. Who left images for the people, so that they would know they didn’t come from apes and things, but that they came from people, from artists. So I seek to carry on that tradition. If it hadn’t been for Billie Holiday’s work, I wouldn’t have known how to begin."
Lena Horne, At the Waldorf Astoria, RCA Victor LOC 1028, 1957, LP.
Announcement of Abbey Lincoln’s New York debut—at the Village Vanguard—appeared in the Daily News on December 28, 1956. Lincoln discussed those early days in New York during Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program interviews. "It was the first time I saw Lena Horne," she said. "The band leader, his first name was Nat [Brandwynne], at the Waldorf Astoria, he came to visit me at the Village Vanguard and he took me to see Lena Horne at the Waldorf Astoria, and it was a changing point in my life. I’d never seen her in person, and I’d been compared to her. They compared everybody to Lena then. Barbara McNair, Diahann Carroll. I saw this absolutely original woman on stage who sang 'Evil Spelled Backwards means Live.' She was brilliant. Changed my life. I knew that I was never going to be anything like Lena. I was just going to be myself, like she was herself." Horne opened at the luxury hotel a few days after Lincoln’s Vanguard debut, and she was recorded live toward the end of her two-month residency there, in February 1957.
Bessie Smith, The Bessie Smith Story, Vol. 2, Columbia GL 504 (CL 856), 1951, LP.
In a 1970 episode of the Black Journal TV program that included a segment about her work with Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln listed Holiday, Horne, Sarah Vaughan, and Ella Fitzgerald as important early influences. "Later on I became aware of people such as Bessie Smith and Mahalia Jackson," she added. "All of these singers, all of these women, showed a direction to go into. Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, for instance, let me know that a singer can write. These women were like secretaries who recorded the lives of our people. If you listen to the songs that Bessie Smith sang, for instance she has a song called 'Black Mountain Blues' that she wrote, that says, 'Up on Black Mountain, a child will smack your face/babies cryin' for liquor and all the birds sing bass.'" This July 22, 1930 recording first released on shellac returned to circulation on a Columbia 4-LP Bessie Smith collection in 1951.
Always a pleasure to read your commentary, Pierre! And your research!