Jazz Articles about Abbey Lincoln

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Abbey Lincoln: Who Used To Dance

by Jim Santella
January 1, 1998

Abbey Lincoln is different. Although strongly influenced by Billie Holiday's dramatic feel for and presentation of a song's message, and embedded in bebop through her eight-year marriage to drummer Max Roach, the singer maintains her own distinctive manner of delivering a lyric. Seven of the nine tracks on Who Used To Dance are ballads that serve to demonstrate the graininess in Lincoln's voice, the long, tied-together whole note phrases, and the carefully articulated words; these are some of the characteristics ...