This is the official website of Kosi's tribute to Abbey Lincoln, also known as Aminata Moseka, and Anne Marie Wooldridge. She is a singer of jazz music, vocalist, jazz singer-songwriter, actress, civil rights activist, and feminist. Akosua Gyebi honors her life through music and poetry in her theater performance called Ghosts Appearing through the Sound.
|
Follow Kosi on Spotify:
Born in Chicago in 1930, Lincoln was raised with eleven siblings in rural Michigan. As a girl, she taught herself piano and was always making up songs and singing along with the radio. Young Lincoln performed in cabarets from Hawaii to Havana, and acted in Hollywood. In 1957, she moved to New York and joined a circle of artists committed to jazz and civil rights. Then, in the 1970s, while living in Los Angeles and taking care of her mother, Lincoln began to write and record her own songs, becoming one of the first singers to write and record her own material predominantly, and making her a pioneer of the jazz singer-songwriter genre.
Abbey Lincoln is known not only for her own compositions, but also for her dramatic interpretations of swing and bebop standards, and occasionally even rock and roll. She credits the recordings of Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington with teaching her how to sing with conviction. However, her own powerful voice is iconic in its own right, distinct from any of her influences. Furthermore, she's become one of the greatest influences on modern jazz singers, including Dee Dee Bridgewater, Cassandra Wilson, Dianne Reeves, and Gregory Porter.
Lincoln died in Manhattan in 2010, leaving behind an impressive twenty-four-album discography, beginning with Abbey Lincoln’s Affair in 1956, and ending with Abbey Sings Abbey in 2007.
- At North Sea Jazz Festival in Holland for NTS Television - Interview by Soesja Citroen
- Interview backstage at the Apollo Theater
- The Louis Armstrong Jazz Oral History Project: Abbey Lincoln (on Billie Holiday)
- "Where are the African Gods" and "The Man with the Magic" -- poems by Abbey Lincoln
- Abbey Lincoln on love and marriage (with Gil Noble 1979)