I first interviewed Abbey Lincoln when she came to perform at the Flynn Theater in Burlington Vermont. Until her passing in 2010, I’d drop in and visit her, and interview her again when I visited New York City.
Abbey Lincoln recorded her first album at the age of 26. She was a sex symbol in the fifties – sometimes billed as the “black Marilyn Monroe.” After a while in Hollywood, she became involved in the struggle for civil rights. In our time together, our conversation ranged from black pride to music to spirituality. The strength of her personality and will was inspiring. Here are some excerpts:

 The God of Love in the Form of a Muse

There is a garden spirit. There is a peaceful spirit. There is a spirit of knowledge and understanding. All music has a spirituality. The great old composers were always communicating with God and the human spirit. All great music is that. Mr. Beethoven. That is what music is. Praise of your God and of your spirit.

John Coltrane knew that jazz comes from a great muse. It's the spirit. He as possessed. If the muse holds you tight it is all about the muse. I am a medium. First you have to practice. I have been doing this since I was a little girl. The muse comes, and sometimes it holds me tight. And sometimes it stands off to the side and says, "I am not coming over there." So sometimes I have to struggle for it.

What is really beautiful? Understanding. The ability to reason. Humility is beautiful.

            "I am on the road a couple of times a month. I go up to the Blue Note and work for a week in New York. But I don't work a lot. Just enough to keep a band together. And support myself. The rest of the time I paint. I write. And I research the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1953. And I have some old dictionaries. I research the world. I research words I use. I look them up and see what they really mean.

            "What I am aiming for is self‑realization. I don't like drifting around on the ocean, not knowing who I am. But we don't know. I'd lie if I said I did. Maybe this is a penal institution -- they sent us here to learn something. Maybe we went through slavery to inherit the last days. There are all kinds of stories. We really don’t know anything. We don't know when we are going to die, or how. But my music searches for an understanding. A kind of understanding. A frequency."

            "I believe in beauty and serenity. Beauty is the sun that shines all day and all night, every moment, every hour. And is always there. Beautiful is having your health, and being able to breathe. What is really beautiful? Understanding. The ability to reason. Humility is beautiful. Beauty is a person who is not disillusioned and hurt, who is unafraid, who still believes. And with the years I'm learning that old is beautiful too. Tried and tested. People take you more seriously when you are old. And you have something to offer the world. Experiences. An ability to think.

            "And I believe that beautiful has cracks and holes in it. The Earth has cracks and holes and is beautiful and perfect. The wind and the rain -- the Earth does a dance every once in a while, and throws its stuff around. The planet can wipe you out; that is also beautiful.”

There is something very deep and wonderful about the notion that an artist is a medium — a medium for the God of Love. As artists we are engaged in work of the spirit if we choose to be.

    People who work just for money shouldn't come to this music. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington -- I met them when I was a youngster. I was on stage, and they treated me like I was their little sister. Duke Ellington Boulevard is just two blocks up from my house. The street that I live on. They didn't do anything for money. They didn't do anything for money. And so they are eternal.

    Money is like the cart after the horse. You need the horse. That's the spirit you ride. And people throw money in the wagon. It's okay. But I never wished to be rich in money. I don't want to be bothered with it really. I make a comfortable living. But that is not what I am here for. 

    Sometimes it is the spirit of the devil that comes. The image makers are wicked. Some people will do anything attract a crowd. Some people have no shame. And they have no love.

    You can't kill the devil, but you don't have to lay around with him. If you see a lie, you don't have to join the lie. The devil is the Lie. You can either accept that lie or reject it. I don't hang with misery. I have always known when to walk away. Thank God. You have to be really careful because you can lose your mind. And that happens to a lot of people, like it happened to Marilyn Monroe. Your habits have to defend yourself in this work.

    I don't do anything I don't want to do. Even though it is offered to me sometimes. I didn't do anything for money or fame. In my young life, some of the performers would taunt me. I didn't go for the “ok-ke-doke.” The “okay, whatever.” I didn't do that. I have always been myself. “There is only so far you can go with Abbey. She don't take it. She cannot handle that.” If you can't call the shots, if you can't decide how things are going to be, then you learn to accept what is. And what it is, is what it is. They would say, “Abbey's a nice girl.” I didn't stick junk in my arms or up my nose. My mother taught me better than that. I wasn't abused as a child. I wasn't cursed as a child. I was taught to be respectful of myself.

    But if you go against the flow, sometimes you wonder if you are going to work again. Or where you are going to work. Are you going to pay the rent? But you can't obsess over that. Your principles will see you through. You can't be a gutter snipe and come to the stage with this music. You have to stand for your principle. If you don't have principle, the house won't stand up. If you can't afford to have principles, if you do what other people do because it is popular, you are wasting everybody's time.

                        "The arts are the human spirit, and jazz is the music of the African muse. My ancestors. I never can forget them. They are in my face. My hair. They gave me my life. And they are more important to me than anything here.

            “When I was a girl they used to say that all Negroes can sing and dance. And it used to bother us. But it is true. Do you know why all Negroes can sing and dance? Because our ancestors did this to a fare-thee-well. Not for an industry. Not for an audience. For the human spirit. They danced in the yard, they danced wherever and performed and played instruments. That is why we have this ability, after all this time. I don't know how a people can call themselves poor and disadvantaged with music like this. It's disgusting....

            “If you are lucky in life, you practice the arts. You get up in the morning when you feel like it, and do what you want to do with your hands and mind. If that isn't beautiful, I don't know what is. Freedom is as good as it gets. People who encourage us, who help us live, who come to the nightclubs and performances, and bring the producer some money that he or she gives to their artists. . .that is beautiful. The people affirm your life. If you give the people something, they remember you for what you gave. And if you gave them an illusion, if you sell them out, they know it. They might encourage you to do it, and buy the record and everything, but ultimately they forget about you.

            Everybody has to have a job in this world. Enjoy it. Writing songs gets me out of the doldrums. Songs about life. Revelations come in song.

A figure made of clay.
And think about the things I lost.
The things I gave away.

And when I am in a certain mood,
I search the halls and look.
One night I found these magic words
in a magic book. 
Throw it away!
- The I Ching.

    Billie Holliday didn't do anything for money. People know when you sell them. If you sell them out, people know it. They might encourage you to do it, and buy the record and everything, but they remember. As soon as Billie Holliday died, they went to do her life story. Her movie. Billie Holliday sang Strange Fruits....They were lynching black men in the South. Black bodies hanging from poplar trees. She wrote God Bless The Child That's Got His Own. She was a philosopher.

    Yeah. She was brilliant. A beautiful woman....Billie's mother was thirteen when she was born. Mine was thirty‑eight. I am the tenth of twelve children. My mother was an experienced mentor. Billie didn't have that. She was working in a brothel, cleaning up behind the prostitutes. That is where she heard Louis Armstrong. She was a beautiful woman. Without her court, she was a queen. Without her court. And her life was painful. And she used drugs to dull the pain. She was arrested. Medicine it was for her. It wasn't a good life that they gave her, and they used her life after she died to make money with, and lied on her. That was not her story. She did have a painful existence. And she was attracted to men who would hurt and abuse her. Over and over. Billie tried over and over and over again for a relationship with a man. She always found the ones who knocked her down. . .

    I took one husband. I will never take another one here. I am an African woman and I believe in polygamy. I think a man should have a few wives. And respect them all and help them all to live. I am not jealous of another woman. I don't like hypocrisy. I don't want to hear, "She means nothing to me." "Well, then what do I mean to you? If she doesn't mean anything to you, then I don't mean anything either. Do you love your mother? Do you love your sister? Well then, love me."

    As Billie said:

            Hush now,
            Don't explain,
            Just say
           you'll remain.
- Heron Dance Interview, issue 23.

That one man she married was jazz drummer Max Roach. When she talked about him it was with deep reverence. If you look at a photograph of him, you can see how deep he is. I can’t find the quote but remember that she attributed her survival as a young beautiful woman in the movie business in part to Max Roach’s support of her and his pride in being African American. So recently, when I came across a collection of interviews by Ben Sidran, an accomplished artist in a number of different fields: jazz musician (fifteen solo albums), producer, composer, journalist and NPR commentator, I was particularly interested in his interview of Roach. Towards the end of the interview, Roach says:

You know, recently I did something with Sam Shepard. Some music for three of his plays in repertoire. All three were totally different. All three required different kinds of music. And Sam Shepard was a drummer. His father was also a drummer. And, of course, when you look at Shepard, he deals with country-western-flavored things. He deals with avant-garde stuff. He deals with the jazz world. Well, that’s the drummer’s life.

And I began to understand he was a drummer when we did the three plays in repertoire up here at the La Mama Theater . . .

Earlier this year I quoted from Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids in which she gets into her romantic relationship and creative collaboration with Sam Shepard.

And from there I thought of something I read in a great book, Uncommon Genius by Denise Shekerjian. She interviewed Ellen Stewart, director of the La Mama theater:

Here you are waitin' to know about cree-a-tivity. Lemme tell you somethin', baby. Carin' is where it's at. Trust me now because I know what I'm talkin' `bout -- you got a love for what you're doin' and everythin' else, all the rest of this cree-a-tivity stuff you're wonderin' `bout, baby, it just comes.

Part of what you give up as a creative person living outside New York City or Los Angeles or somewhere with a concentration of highly accomplished artists, in my case in the Adirondack woods, is the opportunity to associate and collaborate with other highly creative people. I know I’m living the life I should live with the people I should live it, but part me of yearns for that.

I’ve written before about the creative explosion that occurred in American in the 1950s in both jazz and painting. I wasn’t aware though of the extent to which the two fed off each other.

Ben Sidran’s interviews (from the book Talking Jazz, an Illustrated Oral History), in particular his interview of jazz musician Don Cherry (trumpet, pocket trumpet, flute, African string instruments) got into that a little.

Ben Sidran: What was the scene like at the Five Spot? I know a lot of musicians were coming around to check the group out.

Cherry: Yeah. And a lot of artists. It was mostly the support of the whole art scene. Painters from the Cedar Bar, you know, de Kooning and Bob Thompson and Larry Rivers, LeRoi Jones and poets like Ginsberg. It was just the whole scene – Jackson Pollock and Hans Hoffmann was the whole inspiration of the art scene at the time. I can remember Chamberlain, many other names come to mind, because everyone came at one time or another. And musicians from Thelonious Monk to Miles Davis and Coltrane came a lot. And Mingus and Phineas Newborn and Max Roach, they would come, and sometimes they would sit in. Even Lionel Hampton came one night and sat in.

It just so happens that when I paint I tend to listen to jazz from that era, especially Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. The freedom of that music, the experimentation, the subtle delicateness and the boldness of it – it was a truly great decade in American creativity. Art feeds off art.

Abbey Lincoln’s thoughts on the music and life of Billie Holliday, led me to look up and think about something I read years ago:

At the time of recording ‘Billie’s Blues’ (clarinetist Artie) Shaw was impressed enough to suggest that Billie join the band he was organizing, but Billie, who had heard Benny Goodman talk vaguely in the same way three years earlier, shrugged the suggestion off. She couldn’t see a white bandleader and a black vocalist overcoming the Jim Crow restrictions that many ballroom owners and club operators firmly believed in.

     It was not that Billie was unduly cynical, but recent events had made her more and more realistic. In June 1936, Joe Glaser again asked Ed Fox if he would feature Billie at the Grand Terrace, Chicago (for seventy-five dollars a week). This time, Fox reluctantly agreed. The engagement was to be one of the shortest of Billie’s career. She left New York full of enthusiasm, knowing that she was to be accompanied by Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra, which contained several old friends.

     The optimism quickly faded. After one performance, Fox made it clear that he thought Billie’s style of singing was entirely unsuitable for one of his shows. Each night, he began shouting at her as soon has she had finished her set. Billie, mindful of previous rows with owners kept calm for longer than usual. However, when she was called into Fox’s office for a show-down the battle was two-sided. Twenty years later Billie recalled the viciousness of the row. She recounted: ‘Jesus Christ, they ran me out of Chicago. Ed Fox, who owned the god-damn Grand Terrace said, “What the hell, my Grand Terrace. Why the fuck should I pay you 250 (sic) dollars a week to stink my god-damn show up? Everybody says you sing too slow. Get out.” Fox, who had seen his fair share of violence in Prohibition Chicago, felt that he had met his match when Billie began hurtling office furniture at him. He fired her then and there, no salary, no recompense.

     Several of Fletcher Henderson’s band felt that their leader should have helped Billie, either by getting her re-instated, or by obtaining travel expenses for her. However, Henderson deliberately avoided getting involved. Babe Matthews, then working with Nat Cole’s Band at the Panama Café, was asked to take Billie’s place immediately.

     Someone once said that Billie in a full rage was ‘as wild as a tigress’, but usually her anger passed quickly; soon after the Chicago debacle she was full of despondency. Back in New York she go no sympathy from Joe Glaser. Billie recalled Glaser saying, ‘You’ve got to speed up the tempo, you gotta sing hot stuff.’ Billie remembered saying to Glaser, ‘I want to sing like I want to sing … that’s my way of doing it.’ Later, when the conversation became more heated, Billie ended the meeting by saying, ‘Look, you son-of-a-bitch, you sing it. I’m going to sing my way. You sing your way.’ The outlook soon looked less bleak when Billie heard that the sales of her own recordings were gradually increasing.

-   John Chilton, Billie’s Blues: The Billie Holiday Story 1933-1959

 Babe Matthews may have taken Billie’s place at The Grand Terrace, but not her place in history. Matthews played by the rules and disappeared.

 I salute Billie Holliday’s courage. When you listen to her music, she’s not the most melodic singer around. Ella Fitzgerald, at least in that era, probably better deserves that title. But there was so much depth, spirit, courage in Holliday’s voice and work.

 Billie Holliday did it her own way, persevered with her vision despite rejection, had the courage of her conviction, and it ultimately prevailed. I salute that.

Lester Bowie: Jazz is the flower that still managed to grow . . . and you don’t have to hang out with any squares.

           When I interviewed him, Lester Bowie was a fifty seven-year-old jazz trumpet performer who had recorded or performed on 87 albums. When we met, one of the subjects we talked about was "The Invincible Flower,” his work with choreographer and dancer Diane McIntyre.

            Jazz grew out of racism and conflict and problems. Jazz is the flower that still managed to grow. The beauty that managed to survive. That's why jazz is so rebellious and why it is so much fun to play. The music gives you the strength to keep going. Otherwise you couldn't survive the driving all night. Being broke. Getting two hours sleep a night for months on end. The times you don't get paid. That doesn't happen on the level I'm on now, but when I was beginning there was a time when I might not get paid. . .

            "But the overall balances out. The main thing is that you get to hang out with some hip people. And your life is hip. You don't have to hang with any squares. You don't have to do anything square. Everything is about the music. It's about having fun.

            "It takes a certain type of person to play jazz. You may have equally gifted people playing classical music, but classical musicians are trained to be strict and play a note in a set way -- the way Beethoven wrote it. It takes a kind of uptight, almost servile temperament to be able to deal with that. Whereas a jazz musician is not the type of person who would take that shit. You're rebellious about the whole thing.

            "I'm not saying jazz musicians don't have to learn some rules. But after you learn them, you learn to break them. But you have to learn them first. As opposed to a classical musician, who has to follow the rules. You can't take a classical musician’s paper away. He wouldn't know what to play. Jazz is interpreting and re‑creating the piece. If a classical musician interprets too far, he won't be working.

            "Jazz is about what you have to say. Some of the younger musicians that the record companies have hyped ‑‑ these cats don't have anything to say yet. They got the guys too young. You have to have lived to play this music. It’s like Bird said, ‘If you haven't lived, it won't come out your horn.’ And living takes time. You don't get it from books."

"Religiously, I'm a devout musician. Jazz music transmits spirituality and it receives spirituality. That's why it gives me so much joy. The spirit travels through the musician. You have to have a spiritual belief to play jazz. It’s part of the love. You have to love God. You have to love jazz to go through the things you have to go through to succeed at it.

            "Playing jazz is like being born again or something. We don't believe in God as in a big white man in the sky. I mean, give me a break. That is ridiculous. If God were anything She would be a woman. Only women can create life. But it is beyond sex. We call it the Cosmics. Beyond everything. Different completely than the things we see on Earth. It is a spiritual force. A whole committee of cats. It has to do with your ancestors. You can't even explain it. All you know is that the Cosmics are there and you live accordingly. As long as we're true to ourselves, true to the music and try to be as nice as possible, we don't have to worry about the rest. I mean, I don't even step on bugs man. I guess if my house was getting overrun by termites I would get them exterminated, but ordinarily, if I was just walking down the street and saw ants, I wouldn't step on them. That would jeopardize me with the Cosmics. And I might not be able to keep on playing. Something could happen. I'd fall and knock my teeth out or something. I don't know. So I try to stay on the good side....

            I asked Lester what the connection was between the Cosmics and beauty.

            “The Cosmics are beauty. The Cosmics handle everything to do with beauty. I guess other things too. But then again maybe not. Man has more to do with hate, shit like that. But we don't try to define it so much. Once you know about the Cosmics, just play the music. It is not just even an issue anymore. You'll see the Cosmics soon enough. Meanwhile you don't have to be on your knees five times a day, like the Moslems. I don't see how people do that. But I think it’s about control.”

            "I remember one time I was in Paris. I had a really painful, terrible case of hemorrhoids. But I played my heart out. Couldn't figure it out. I could hardly walk. Everybody was like, ‘Damn what's happening? We thought you was sick.’ So you never know. I just relax and go with the flow. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn't happen, I just try to do the best I can, and use the years of experience knowing how to play the song. When it's happening, it's just like bam! But if you are a pro, you play regardless of whether the spirit is with you. You can't quit and come back tomorrow."

"Integrity with your work is essential. Once you lose integrity, things can get out away from you. So you have to be into the integrity of the music. Into the integrity of everything: yourself, your family. If you have to make a choice between yourself and the music, you have to go with the music. Between your music and your family, the music has to be above everything. It is always the music first. Family second. Or whatever way you want to structure your stuff in. But the music has to be number one. That is the only way it works.

“I have never had to starve a day in my life. Even when we had no money. Even when we were living in tents, travelling around Europe, we always ate well. Steaks for dinner and nice bottles of wine. We barnstormed all over Europe. There were plenty times when we were broke. But you don't let that phase you, because you know it is going to work out. You will either get paid, or you won't. It is no big deal. As long as you are living true to yourself, and can still play, things always work out.

“By living by these beliefs, my life has been fantastic. There is so much joy in jazz. Fun. Friendship. I get paid to just talk shit and play trumpet. That's pretty goddamn good I think. Sometimes I almost feel guilty about getting paid. But just for a second. . .”

Lester Bowie died a year after our interview of liver cancer.