jazz great abbey lincoln dies at age 80

Abbey Lincoln - singer, writer, composer, actor, visual artist, activist - has died. She was 80 years old and lived on New York City's Upper West Side.

Abbey Lincoln was a unique force in music, and she used her music in the cause of freedom and justice.

At work, I often listen to music on Wolfgang's Vault, an archive of live music with both free and pay downloads, that pays royalties to artists. I often use the site as a way to check out music I don't own and otherwise would not hear.

Not long ago, I listened to the Max Roach quartet performing Roach's and Lincoln's "We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite" at the 1964 Newport Jazz Festival. Lincoln and Roach, who is considered perhaps the greatest jazz drummer of all time, were married at the time. To use a cliche, the music gave me chills. I mean that literally.

(Wolfgang's Vault has tons of music from Newport - jazz, blues, folk and rock.)

Lincoln was a singer of extraordinary power and range. She was also a composer and songwriter, she painted and drew, and she starred in several movies, including "For the Love of Ivy," opposite Sidney Poitier. She was an amazing talent.

New York Times:

Ms. Lincoln’s career encompassed outspoken civil rights advocacy in the 1960s and fearless introspection in more recent years, and for a time in the 1960s she acted in films with Sidney Poitier.

Long recognized as one of jazz’s most arresting and uncompromising singers, Ms. Lincoln gained similar stature as a songwriter only over the last two decades. Her songs, rich in metaphor and philosophical reflection, provide the substance of “Abbey Sings Abbey,” an album released on Verve in 2007. As a body of work, the songs formed the basis of a three-concert retrospective presented by Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2002.

Her singing style was unique, a combined result of bold projection and expressive restraint. Because of her ability to inhabit the emotional dimensions of a song, she was often likened to Billie Holiday, her chief influence. But Ms. Lincoln had a deeper register and a darker tone, and her way with phrasing was more declarative.

“Her utter individuality and intensely passionate delivery can leave an audience breathless with the tension of real drama,” Peter Watrous wrote in The New York Times in 1989. “A slight, curling phrase is laden with significance, and the tone of her voice can signify hidden welts of emotion.”

She had a profound influence on other jazz vocalists, not only as a singer and composer but also as a role model. “I learned a lot about taking a different path from Abbey,” the singer Cassandra Wilson said. “Investing your lyrics with what your life is about in the moment.”

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delayed obit: john callahan

Ah, the dangers of taking a break from the news and Facebook. I missed the passing of John Callahan, now more than two weeks ago, and only found out inadvertently as we were throwing away an bit of old newspaper Allan picked up somewhere.

Callahan, as he was always known, was a cartoonist whose irreverent, sometimes morbid humour laughed at the world of disability, and at the public's response to disability. He was intimately familiar with that world, having lived as quadriplegic since the age of 21. Callahan was an alcoholic, and an adoptee, and I think he was deeply compassionate in a way that many people could not understand.

I constantly think of the line that he used for the title of his autobiography: "Don't worry, he won't get far on foot." His humour wasn't the pablum of "laughter is the best medicine," nor was it the trite self-deprecation of identity-standup. He just wasn't afraid to find humour in everything, and he didn't think he needed permission to laugh at anything.

The Callahan website is here. Here's some of the New York Times obit.

“This is John, I’m a little too depressed to take your call today,” the message on his answering machine said. “Please leave your message at the gunshot.”

Looking askance at the culture of confession and self-help fostered by the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera, he was not inclined in his work to be outwardly sympathetic to the afflicted or to respect the boundaries of racial and ethnic stereotyping. His cartoons were often polarizing: some found them outrageously funny, others outrageously offensive.

There was the drawing of a restaurant, the Anorexic Cafe, with a sign in the window saying, “Now Closed 24 Hours a Day.” There was one showing a group of confused-looking square dancers unable to respond to the caller’s instruction to “return to the girl that you just left,” with a headline reading, “The Alzheimer Hoedown.”

There was the drawing of a blind black man begging in the street, wearing a sign that read: “Please help me. I am blind and black, but not musical.” In another, a sheriff’s posse on horseback surrounds an empty wheelchair. The caption gave him the title of his 1990 autobiography: “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot.”

And there was the drawing of an aerobics class for quadriplegics, with the instructor saying, “O.K., let’s get those eyeballs moving.”

I never met Callahan in person, but I will really miss him.

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daniel schorr, city college and a brilliant concept we should revive

Daniel Schorr, esteemed journalist, died last Friday at the age of 93. Schorr built his career on truth-telling and risk-taking. When the institutions that he worked for no longer employed real journalists, he traded in the mainstream for NPR, where he worked for the last 25 years of his career.

There are two excellent pieces about Schorr at NPR, which I'll link to below. But I first want to acknowledge something I noticed in Schorr's obituary in the New York Times: that Schorr was a graduate of City College.

City College - technically the City College of the City University of New York, sometimes called CCNY - was the first free public institution of higher learning in the US. In the days when Ivy League schools were the gated playgrounds of wealthy white Protestants, thousands of New Yorkers whose heritages excluded them from those institutions attended City College. This includes people you may now think of as white: Jewish Americans, Italian Americans, Irish Americans. In truth, they had no other option, but they turned City College into "Harvard on the Hudson". They also turned it into a locus of radical political thought and debate. The list of New Yorkers who attended City College and went on to become notable in their fields is eye-popping. Many of the political figures are familiar only to New Yorkers, but keep scrolling through entertainment, arts and sciences.

Free quality higher education. Think of the investment. Think of the rewards. Thousands of intelligent, hard-working young people earning a university degree unburdened by debt - and so, able to seek meaningful work or create their own niches without being driven by finances.

We could afford it, too. If the banks and big corporations paid their fair share. And if our government wasn't spending our money on useless military toys.

Daniel Schorr, from NPR:

He wasn't the most handsome, nor the most famous, of the dashing "Murrow Boys" of CBS News, the ones who defined ambitious broadcast journalism in the middle of the last century.

Nor was Daniel Schorr among the first. It took years of freelancing abroad, and even a brief try-out at The New York Times, before Schorr caught the attention of Edward R. Murrow and was hired by CBS in 1953.

But Schorr, who died Friday at 93, left two unquestionable journalistic legacies all his own.

First, he exemplified the mission of bearing active witness to history, in his case, the decades that chronicled America's rise after World War II. His reporting and interpretation of developments provided important insights for generations of readers, viewers and listeners.

He covered the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954; a few years later, as Moscow bureau chief for CBS, Schorr won the first sit-down television interview with Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev — the first by a television news outlet from any country, including the U.S.S.R. He covered the Cold War from West Germany, too; and the Johnson administration's anti-poverty efforts when he returned to the U.S.; and, perhaps most famously, Watergate and the ensuing revelation of CIA abuses.

Schorr took a pride in his name's appearance on President Nixon's infamous "enemies list" that could not be underestimated. It served as a verbal talisman during his later appearances on NPR, particularly as he observed some parallels between the pushes for secrecy in the Nixon years and in the administration of President George W. Bush (especially as embodied by then-Vice President Richard B. Cheney).

Then, there is his second legacy: He uncompromisingly stood up to power. [More here.]

There's also a lovely tribute from Scott Simon. If you don't know the connection between Daniel Schorr and Frank Zappa, take a look.

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