Abbey Lincoln - Straight Ahead (1977 Japanese Candid Stereo Vinyl LP)

Abbey Lincoln - Straight Ahead | Vinyl LP - 1977 Japanese Candid Stereo Reissue (SMJ-6190, Candid Jazz Series)

Abbey Lincoln spent the late 1950s being sold as a glamorous supper-club singer. By the time she made Straight Ahead she had thrown that image over completely, pushed on by Max Roach and the civil-rights ferment around them. The session was cut in a single February day in 1961 for Nat Hentoff's Candid label, with a band that reached from the swing-era giant Coleman Hawkins right up to the young modernists Booker Little and Eric Dolphy, alongside Julian Priester, Mal Waldron, Art Davis and Roach. The songs carry the weight. Lincoln wrote her own lyrics to Monk's "Blue Monk", with Hawkins stepping out for a solo. "Left Alone" is Mal Waldron's, its words by Billie Holiday, who never recorded it. "African Lady" sets a Langston Hughes poem to a Randy Weston melody with Dolphy's flute curling through it, and "When Malindy Sings" comes from a Paul Laurence Dunbar poem. This is a singer using a jazz record to say something.

It works as a companion to We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, the Roach and Lincoln civil-rights suite Candid had put out the year before with several of the same players. The two married in 1962. Booker Little, whose bruised tone shapes the horn parts here, was dead within the year at twenty-three. Straight Ahead has held up as the strongest thing under Lincoln's own name from this period and one of the records that put the civil-rights movement directly into jazz.

This is the 1977 Japanese pressing in Candid's Jazz Series, catalogue SMJ-6190, with the green obi, an insert carrying the English lyrics alongside Japanese credits and notes, and a promotional insert.