"I wasn't supposed to be a singer, just "pretty". After "Freedom Now", someone of them said, 'Now I'm gonna hear Abbey scream!" But first of all there wasn't anybody as beautiful as Billie Holiday on stage, ever!"
     "But Max and the other great musicians he introduced me to carried me through all that. When I was getting ready to record "Blue Monk" with my lyrics, Max called Monk and asked him to come and check the rehearsal. When I finished Monk came over and whispered in my ear, 'Don't be so perfect'. "I didn't know what he was talking about. When I asked Max, he said, 'Make a mistake!"
     The inference being that all the strained concentration on "not making a mistake" is misplaced in this American Classical Music, because such focus would be better used to free the musician's improvisational creativity. Or as T. Sphere, himself once said. "There's two kind of mistakes. The regular ones and those that sound bad!"
     "Monk started me to seeing myself as a composer. He told these people once, 'Abbey Lincoln is not only a great singer and a great actress, but a great composer.' And I hadn't composed anything then. But I would. The first song I composed and wrote the lyrics was "The People In Me" (The People In Me ITM 0039 CD)
     She certainly would, her compositions and lyrics are one aspect of the unique musical artist that Abbey Lincoln is. Since her complete embrace of the most advanced musical forms, the poetic impact of the lyrics, hers and others is an indelible power that keeps the whole song, voice, words, arrangement, composition spinning in one's head. Always from the stance of singer as musician, instrument, poet, actress, philosopher.
     For those who can actually hear the sweet and swinging composite of skillfully wrought emotional and intellectual artifact, we are always stunned and in awe at her accomplishment. Yet, like anyone who takes life more seriously than what is "given" to us by those who think life is merely a continuum of pay days, meals and the passing of expensive feces, Abbey had had to take her share of knocks. For her highly personal creativity and her highly public aesthetic, cultural and social-political self-portraits.
     A big for instance are the sizzling records she made with Max Roach, whom she married in 1962. The daunting aesthetic departure of the great We Insist: Freedom Now Suite, 1960 Candid, 9902, or It's Time, 1962, Imp 62, was clearly inspired by the whole context of the real world in which everyone lives, even though it pays to claim it doesn't even exist. The "screaming" that the one anonymous ignoramus laid at Abbey's feet is, in fact, if said sad person was babbling about "Tryptich: Prayer, Protest, Peace"where indeed the center piece is Abbey doing exactly what Mao asked artists to do, create works that are "aesthetically powerful and politically revolutionary", where indeed the vocal narrative reaches the force of unstoppable rising collective human passion.

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