Abbey Lincoln, 1930-2010

Abbey Linoln, who'd just turned 80 on our mutual birthday anniversaries Friday a week ago, died yesterday. She made it to eighty.

She wasn't the most technically dexterous of jazz singers, didn't break as many pathways as Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald (few, if any, of Lincoln's gerneration did or could) but she was a restless artistic spirit, unafraid to push her considerable ability to its limits, and with her then husband Max Roach in the latter '50s began a lifelong engagement with liberation activism...and by the early 't0s had also branched out into an ating career (I first remember seeing her thus kn the 1964 film Nothing but a Man, though as a child I'd no doubt seen her in, I thought, I Spy and more kid-oriented series--but it seems she guested on Mission: Impossible, not I Spy). The one obit I've seen/heard so far, from NPR, was careful to note her performances of the Freedom Now Suite, but failed to mention such follow-ups as It's Time, and tended to gloss over most of her continuing career as a musician. I've posted this here before, but we can only hope that Lincoln had achieved her personal Africa, either before her decath, or in whatever afterlife their could be: