Abbey Lincoln
Sophisticated Abbey
(High Note)

Abbey Lincoln was born Anna Marie Wooldridge in Chicago in 1930. She began her career in song as a supper-club singer and later as a film performer (singing in the 1957 Hollywood film The Girl Can’t Help It).

Then in the same year she met and later married the great bop drummer Max Roach, and together they were swept into the civil rights campaign and together recorded two highly conscious albums: We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite (1960) and Percussion Bitter Sweet (1961), and she spent the rest of her life as a brilliantly radical singer proving through her singular artistry that the woman could certainly help it.

After long periods away from recording, her series of Verve albums during the ’90s like You Gotta Pay the Band (1991), A Turtle’s Dream (1994) and Wholly Earth (1998) found her leading bands including luminaries like bassist Charlie Haden, trumpeter Roy Hargrove, altoist Oliver Lake and vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, and were characterised by carefully chosen songs — often with deeply meaningful lyrics and always marked by her devotion to the singing of Billie Holiday.

The previously unissued High Note album Sophisticated Abbey keeps all those principles alive, despite being cut in a San Francisco nightclub, The Keystone Korner, in 1980.

Towards its denouement and in the middle of singing We May Never Meet Again, she dedicates the song to Holiday, and we see again the mark of her true provenance as a singer.

She has a fine trio too to accompany her. On piano is Phil Wright, with whom she recorded in the late ’50s and who knew her music intimately.

The bassist is James Leary, who as an ex-Basie rhythm man was just as used to playing with a big band as a trio, and the drummer is Doug Sides, who also played on the renowned 1967 John Handy albums New View and At the Monterey Jazz Festival.

Scattered through the album are songs of three “ladies.” The opener is Abbey’s own Painted Lady, her profoundly now-times observation of celebrity culture giving young women “a vision of another world, I can take you there.”

Ellington’s Sophisticated Lady and Leary’s earthen bass lend her a critique of a life of “smoking, drinking, never thinking of tomorrow,” and Stevie Wonder’s Golden Lady is a blind man’s astonishing visual declaration of beauty, sung with Abbey’s very own beautiful lucidity and passion.

Her utterly life-affirming rendition of Long as You’re Living, composed by three jazz contemporaries, trumpeter Tommy Turrentine, vocalist Oscar Brown Jnr and trombonist Julian Priester, contains the lines that were Abbey’s watchwords: “Brother, sister, this is your time!”

She declares: “While you are sleeping/lifetime is creeping/Wake up and taste it!/Foolish to waste it!/Live every minute!/Put yourself in it!/Long as you’re living!”

A pretty accurate summary of her own life, also expressed in the optimism of her chosen love songs like Somos Novios, There Are Such Things and Whistling in the Dark, all in their own ways calls to action.

But the real jewel of the album is her own anthem People in Me, a song inspired by her mother and “the nation” within her own family history, “where the whole world is turning in me.”

She sings a song of huge human empathy: of “the Indian in me, the Chinese in me, the Japanese, the Vietnamese, the Jewish, the Arab, the Mexican, the Algerian, the Watusi, the Zimbabwean — the whole of Africa turning in me.”

And, unbounded human knowledge: “Lessons, learning, whatever people know/Inside of me!” It’s a song of wisdom and huge humanity.

To finish her performance it must be Billie, and it is a version of God Bless the Child and Holiday’s chilling commentary on the effects of US capitalism: “Them that’s got shall get/Them that’s not will lose/The strong get more/While the weak ones fade/Empty pockets don’t/Ever make the grade.”

1980 and 2016, still ripe, still true, still naked and Abbey Lincoln, no longer with us since 2010, still turns, sings and speaks through our turntables, her sense of melody, diction and clarity of insight as strong as ever.

And if you want proof of what singing of, for and about people really means, this record is a prime place to start.