Sunday, December 2, 2012

Music for a sunday night: Abbey Lincoln sings Abbey Lincoln

Heading towards 10.00pm on a Sunday night here in Perth and I am playing Abbey Lincoln's 2007 CD Abbey Sings Abbey.

Abbey Lincoln is singing Throw it Away, one of the standout tracks from the CD.
Throw it away. Throw it away
Give your love, live your life,
Each and every day
And keep your hand wide open
Let the sun shine through
Cause you can never lose a thing
If it belongs to you

There's a hand to rock the cradle
And a hand to help us stand
With a gentle kind of motion
As it moves across the land,
And the hand's unclenched and open.
Gifts of life and love it brings,
So Keep your hands wide open
If you're needing anything.
 Abbey Sings Abbey is a fine celebration of a distinguished career. It is a beautifully restrained album performed by a singer-songwriter of great wisdom at the top of her craft.  Lincoln sings these songs with humanity, gravitas and authority and profound musical and human understanding.

The Guardian wrote of the album:
In 2007, she made a swansong album, Abbey Sings Abbey – a poignant collection of new originals, covers of favourites such as Leonard Bernstein's Lucky To Be Me, a bold a capella account of Tender As a Rose and a distinctive reinvention of Windmills of Your Mind, with a superb Joe Lovano on saxophone. As she once said: "I live through music and it lives through me." It was no exaggeration"


Lincoln who died in 2010 aged 80 recorded more than 20 albums, acted in films, performed with Billie Holliday and became a leading voice in the civil rights movement during her six-decade career. As an actor she was one of the first African-American women to act in a leading role, alongside Sidney Poitier in the 1968 movie For Love of Ivy.
 
Her obituary from the New York Times is here. 
 
A You Tube clip of Thow it All away follows
 


 

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