Abbey Lincoln – Abbey Sings Abbey

Almost half a century after her landmark recording with the late Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln’s voice remains as beguiling and insistent as ever. Abbey Sings Abbey is retrospective in that the tracklist draws from her vast catalogue, but this is no stroll down memory lane.

Lincoln conducts a master class in phrasing, this time to a different heartbeat. Instead of her usual uptown jazz accompaniment, the accordion and string band enlisted evoke a late-night country blues bar or a boulevard cafe. The sound is more akin to Ry Cooder, Nina Simone or Tom Waits than to Stan Getz.

That’s apparent in “Music Is The Magic”, where the guitar coils and uncoils over a lowdown groove, and in the Tex-Mex shuffle that twirls partners on “And It’s Supposed To Be Love”. Thelonious Monk’s “Blue Monk” becomes a high-wire act stretched across the blue heavens; that’s the way Monk wrote it. But few singers could even approach Lincoln’s tricky vocal counterpoint — words stretched and clipped, yet always lovingly bound to the song’s angular contours. As the album’s centerpiece, “Down Here Below” achieves a bare-bones spiritual alchemy that is uniquely Lincoln in all her haunting serenity.

Gil Goldstein’s subtle arrangements and accordion accents lend a lovely Latin touch to the proceedings, and Larry Campbell continues to enhance his reputation as a string wizard. That said, the triumph, now as always, belongs to Abbey Lincoln, a true American original.