Abbey Lincoln.(The Pop Side)(Interview)

Great jazz singers haw it all over great opera singers in one respect: they tend to last a lot longer. Witness the remarkable jazz stylist Abbey Lincoln, who began recording in the 1950s and just last fall released a new solo CD, It's Me, on the Verve label. It's a lively mixture of pop classics (the Carmichael--Mercer "Skylark") and Lincoln's own compositions ("They Call It Jazz"). Although she is a deeply spiritual woman, Lincoln in conversation is no-nonsense; one senses right away that if the discussion of music gets too highfalutin, she'll run out of patience fast.

OPERA NEWS: Your rendition of "Skylark" on the new CD is marvelous. I've always thought that in so many ways it seems such a hard song to sing.

ABBEY LINCOLN: There are no hard songs to sing. If I were singing opera, that's another thing. But these songs are not difficult. Put it in the key that you want to sing it in, and do it. But it is a great song. Mr. Hoagy Carmichael was brilliant, and so was Johnny Mercer.

ON: Who was the first jazz singer you ever heard?

AL: It was Billie Holliday--on the Victrola, back in Michigan [where Lincoln grew up]. I was a child going to school, and I would sing in church once in a while, but I wasn't pursuing a career as a singer. But the feeling! She went right to my heart. But you know, I come from a people who embrace music. My father was the one who made it possible for me to approach the piano. He got us a piano. Music is something natural to me.

ON: It's too bad that children today don't get a better music education.

AL: They've taken it out of the schools as a skill. There's a real shortsighted spirit that's in the land. People do the best they can.... I wasn't thrilled with the musical form they call rap, but it's a music that holds center stage just the same. You can't pretend that people don't have music. So the music they call jazz is mine. I heard a lot of it over the years. When I was ten or twelve, I heard and met Duke Ellington. Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan--Billie Holliday is just one of them. I liked her, because she was social. She didn't just sing about a man she didn't like. She sang about other things.