Listening Diary: May
sounds like spring.
a listening diary from May.
Abbey is Blue by Abbey Lincoln
Riverside Records (1959)
think Carrie Mae Weems’ photograph Moody Blue Girl / think B*yoncé, behind-the-scenes, reviewing her Ring the Alarm performance: “And I just hate all that ugly blue light. I'm a Black girl, you can't put blue lights on Black girls." / think Harmony Holiday1: “The sound in my belly, my baby born kicking and screaming as my song, the most patient phantom, every person you’ve ever come across or through or from, has origins in the depths of the black woman’s scream.”
Abbey Lincoln performing in Amsterdam on 13 July 1966. Photographed by Jack de Nijs.
The jazz singer Abbey Lincoln’s fourth album, Abbey is Blue, marked an important shift in her career as she began to use her art to sing songs about the civil rights movement, as well as publicly advocate and speak against anti-black racism. Consistently spirit-raising, her catalogue is noteworthy in its entirety but her political commitments seemed to become more clear at this point in her body of work. Unsurprisingly, although she worked closely with her former husband and creative partner, the jazz drummer and composer Max Roach, she received a disproportionate amount of backlash for this turn.
I am thinking of the titular blue of the album beyond its reference to emotion. The siren blue light, which I am reading as a symbol of surveillance transfixed on Blackness, followed Abbey Lincoln throughout her career. She was unwavering under it and in doing so, she made it a beautiful thing. This is not to romanticize the baggage of hyper-visibility but to regard her insistence. She did not waver when the critic Ira Gitler called her a “professional negro” as her work became more overtly political. She did not waver when criticized by the public for wearing her natural hair and speaking openly about the disproportionate standards imposed on Black women. She did not waver in the live performance of We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite, a free jazz project developed by Roach and lyricist Oscar Brown, in response to Emancipation Proclamation and the emergence of African independence movements in the 1950s. Abbey Lincoln is the key singer of the suite, which touches on themes of unity and liberation, connecting the struggles of African-Americans to the fight for freedom in South Africa. Three minutes into the third track, “Triptych: Prayer, Protest, Peace,” Lincoln breaks out into a wordless scream that is as haunting as it is familiar.
“Triptych: Prayer, Protest, Peace,” begins at 9:58.
The year following this historic performance on Belgian TV, in February of 1961, she disrupted a United Nations meeting to protest the assassination of the Congolese politician and founder of the Congolese National Movement, Patrice Lumumba. She was accompanied by The Cultural Association of Women of African Heritage, a collective that included writers such as Maya Angelou and Rosa Guy.
Lincoln sang in the tradition of Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, and Ella Fitzgerald. Her voice gestures to this lineage but remains singular, sweet and thick like honey. I have yet to delve into her entire discography but Abbey is Blue was such a special discovery, I couldn’t resist writing about it and documenting the beginnings of my appreciation.
Favourites: Afro-Blue, (I also really like Robert Glasper’s rendition with Erykah Badu!),Thursday’s Child, and Lost in the Stars
Ten Fold by Yaya Bey
Big Dada (2024)
Ten Fold by Yaya Bey carried me through many afternoons this month. The album collages her reflections in processing the grief of losing her father, hip hop artist, Grand Daddy I.U., as well as the familiar anxieties of making rent, navigating generational healing, and more.
I recently watched Poetic Justice (1993) for the first time and was struck by its depiction of grief as ambient to Black life. Days after, I read a Bandcamp interview with Bey in which she reflects on the decontextualization of techno as a Black invention: “There’s a perpetual sense of grief because we keep making things and then losing them. That’s what it means to be Black in America, is to have that perpetual grief.” What felt familiar in the movie, as well as in Bey’s album, is the proximity between beauty and decay. It can be unfathomable to think of these things coexisting but in practice, I recognize this as survival. It makes so much sense to me that Justice, Janet Jackson’s character in the film, is a hairdresser and poet. I think of Christina Sharpe’s framing of beauty as a practice and method, especially amid precarity.
Ten Fold offers a blueprint for the impossible. Her lyrics are affirmations and observations to hold close, bringing to mind Toni Cade Bambara2’s urgent reminder, which Sharpe quotes at the beginning of her essay: “Words set things in motion. I’ve seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges. I’ve felt them doing it. Words conjure. I try not to be careless about what I utter, write, sing. I’m careful about what I give voice to.” Soulful and warm, with production from Corey Fonville of Butcher Brown, Karriem Riggins, Jay Daniel, Exactly, and Boston Chery, Bey’s latest project isn’t focused on providing universal instruction but in writing through the specificity of her own experience, there’s a reminder that healing can be set into motion.
The title of the album is a reference to the biblical story of Job. In an interview with Elle, she shared: “The story is about how Job loses everything,” she explains, “but then God gives it back to him tenfold. My dad was a musician and he lived in a time where the music industry was just super rotten and corrupt, and that ultimately ended his career. And now I’m coming in behind him, so I like to imagine myself as the tenfold.”
Favourites: career day, eric adams in da club, and east coast mami
Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace by Shabaka Hutchings
Impulse! Records (2024)
The duality of spring provides its own sound. My ear goes between the buzz of warm afternoons and evenings cracked open by rain. Heat comes fast and it sings, notes sticking to my skin. My breathing is asynchronous with the demands of everyday life. Amidst the disorientation, I stumble upon Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace. Hutchings’ first solo album is flute-centric; a shift from his prolific work on the saxophone.
The project reminds me that I don’t mean to escape through sound, the beauty is in going deeper into what I am feeling. I can project my own story onto the sounds but it is clear when there is a resonant context or architecture. A song begins and a door creaks open. I am welcomed inside: I can scream, speak, or breathe.
I am echoing Abbey Lincoln: “I gravitate to songs that help me to live because if you sing something over and over, you say something over and over, and if you set to it music, it really is a prayer. It goes up into the atmosphere and it will bring you the return of what you've been saying.”
Hutchings, in his own way, echoed Lincoln while talking about hip-hop and spirituality on The New Movement podcast. He begins with a definition: “For me, spirituality is the thing that makes you get up and animate yourself. To not have spirit is to be inert. It’s to not have any vital energy that makes you rise out of bed or rise out of unconsciousness.” He then offers hip-hop as an example of that which can provide spirit to its listeners from the sound of an emcee or rapper’s voice to the vibe that the music creates. Hip-hop can invigorate.
Silence envelops me each morning, disguising itself as newness. The day breaks open but it is a continuation. We are living in the ongoingness of violence and repair. It’s that perpetual grief. Heeding the reminder offered by “Managing My Breath, What Fear Had Become,” a track featuring Saul Williams, I adjust and quickly remember that silence has nothing to do with survival and everything to do with illusion. I throw it off and I speak.
Favourites: End of Innocence, Managing My Breath, What Fear Had Become ft Saul Williams, and Song of The Motherland (Song of the Motherland was probably my most-played song last month. It is a re-recording of a poem written and performed by Hutchings’ father, Orville Hutchings, also known as Anum A. Iyapo, a dub poet and graphic designer!)
Moten/Lopez/Cleaver by Fred Moten, Brandon López, and Gerald Cleaver
Reading Group (2022)
“Art don’t work for abolition / Art works for bosses, like you and me / If let’s abolish art sounds too close to let’s abolish you and me / It’s cause it is / I love art / And I love you too / And this is a love song.” — lyrics from the opening track, the abolition of art, the abolition of freedom, the abolition of you and me
Ahead of Fred Moten and bassist Brandon Lopez’s performance for the Western and World Symposium later this week in Toronto, I dove into their collaborative project with drummer Gerald Cleaver, Moten/Lopez/Cleaver. There’s such athleticism to Moten’s poetry in collaboration with Lopez and Cleaver’s playing.
Listening to Moten/Lopez/Cleaver, I sift through sonic references and think of the poet Jayne Cortez and her band, the Firespitters. I’ll hold back on expanding and picking favourite tracks because eventually, I’d like write about their upcoming live performance alongside Cortez’s work with the Firespitters. For now, I will leave you with this clip, an incantation from Cortez accompanied by Denardo Coleman’s drumming: “Find your own voice and use it. Use your own voice and find it.”
My favourite musical projects of the month feel unified by the theme of inheritance3. I often think of inheritance as a choreography. The past moves or arranges our bodies in certain ways. These movements are modes that can be embraced, rejected, altered, or expanded. Choreographs of violence, choreographies of expression, and everything in between.
What does it mean to inherit and re-choreograph a lineage, like Yaya Bey or Shabaka Hutchings? What does it mean to inherit and re-choreograph an artistic tradition, like the synergistic spirit of Moten/Lopez/Cleaver? And in thinking of Abbey Lincoln, in her bold blue, I wonder: what does it mean to inherit and re-choreograph a howl?
More on-repeat favourites from May:
June’s listening agenda:
110 Years of Sun Ra: June Tyson Tribute by Keiyaa (NTS Radio)
Khari Lucas and Omari Jazz: Black Decelerant (RVNG Intl)
Raveena: Where the Butterflies Go in the Rain (Empire)
Tems: Born in the Wild (RCA/Since ’93)
Kaytranada: Timeless (RCA)
Tiny Desk is releasing nine concerts from Black women artists to celebrate Black Music Month and Chaka Khan’s performance just dropped:
Abbey Lincoln’s Scream: Poetic Improvisation as a Way of Life by Harmony Holiday is a must-read.
Noting this synchronicity: Abbey Lincoln was one of the contributors of The Black Woman: An Anthology by Toni Cade Bambara (1970).
I’ve been reflecting on inheritance ever since attending an iteration of Tender Possibilities, an incredible poetry reading group by Farhia Tato.
I’ve been wanting to learn more about music and reading your passion and knowledge is such a gift. I also love your words on choreography and these final questions to sit with. <3
I love you!!