She lives in "upper Manhattan", like they say, where the more expansive cultural motif of high urban sophistication begins to turn, like the enjambment of a poetic line, imperceptibly toward the contrasting otherness of where the Blues People stay. So Abbey is like that, what she does, who she is, the artist and artistry connected as the persona of a sharply defined and articulated, yet delicate humanism, linking the given with the need to be, the deep with the deeper.
     Like the apartment, spacious, clearly an introduction to herself, comfortable, self proclaiming, engraved with not so much décor as confirmation of her own aesthetic particularity and presence. Evocative painting, including one of her mother and another, just parallel, of her father, each holding some of Abbey's brothers and sisters, Abbey herself, in both.
     Classic photographs, which themselves are archival gems narrating some aspect of the world she has moved through, the many giants and epiphanies she has experienced. Like one incredibly riveting photo of young Mr. B with Bird, and Diz and Lucky Thompson. Stunning drawings and posters and photos of Abbey, herself, making the walls also, a visual biography. Still, at 70, (and she wanted to know why "they" want to make so much of this number") a striking beauty.
     "I came to California when I was around twenty. My brother Alex brought me out there with him. I had been practicing, singing, but it didn't sound like much. When I got there I was Anna Marie Wooldrige. But the manager wanted me to have a French name and I already had one. But when I began singing at the Moulin Rouge, they changed it to Gaby. And I got some publicity, I was in some of the magazines. Ebony used to like me a lot, before I went social. " She says this with that wink in her laugh, cool and signifying.
     "I was meeting people like Jose Ferrer and his wife, then, Rosemary Clooney. And Mitch Miller, they introduced me to Bob Russell, really a brilliant lyricist. He wrote lyrics for "Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me", "Don't Get Around Much Anymore". The classic Ellington songs. It was Russell named me Abbey Lincoln. He thought I should be linked up to my own history. He was very up front about his own. He used to tell me, "Jews made the world" and talk about Marx, Freud, and Jesus Christ.
     Russell also functioned as Abbey's first manager along with Steve Roland; "They sent me on the road. I went to Honolulu and worked with a group called The Rampart Streeters. They played the music, a drummer named, "Blinky" Allen. He used to blink his eyes when he played. They were playing the music, but there was too much vice and stuff going on, \the place was wide open. People thought they could do anything they wanted to. It seems like it always gets like that just before they take your country over. A lot of people got busted finally. That's when they used to call me," that square broad that works at the Brown Derby".

Weiter >>