Good morning,
Today’s forecast for Whitewater calls for a slight chance of thunderstorms with a high of eighty-three degrees.
Jazz singer and activist Abbey Lincoln passed away over the weekend. Allison Keyes recalled Lincoln’s many accomplishments:
Abbey Lincoln, the legendary jazz singer who believed in singing as a political act, died Saturday in Manhattan. She was 80. An actress, artist and composer, Lincoln created music ranging from avant-garde civil-rights-era recordings to the equally powerful but more introspective work of her later years.
Her 1960 collaboration with jazz drummer Max Roach, We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, put her voice smack in the middle of the soundtrack of the civil-rights movement. In “Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace,” Lincoln literally screams her anger. But that’s not how she started out.
Village Voice jazz critic Nat Hentoff supervised the recording of the Freedom Now Suite and watched Lincoln transform from a sultry nightclub singer into a more sophisticated artist. Hentoff says Lincoln was a sometimes self-deprecating woman with a ready, sardonic wit, and says her death is a huge loss to a jazz community that doesn’t have musicians like her anymore.
See, Remembering Jazz Singer and Activist Abbey Lincoln.
Keyes’s tribute links to Lincoln singing Driva’Man, and here’s another song from the same album (We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite), Freedom Day: