In 1960, Detroit-born singer, songwriter, actress, and civil rights activist Abbey Lincoln’s Abbey Is Blue (Riverside) served up her singular interpretation of some mighty enduring songs, among them Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday,” Oscar Brown, Jr.’s “Long as You’re Living,” the first vocal rendition of Mongo Santamaría’s “Afro Blue” (Oscar Brown, Jr. penned the lyrics), and Lincoln’s own “Throw It Away.”
We begin with Lincoln’s poignant late-life reinfusion of the latter, which she recorded several times in distinct musical settings over the course of her career. At age 77 she revisited it one last time on Abbey Sings Abbey (Verve, 2007), her final album. The setting is spare and singular (accordion, guitars, mandolin, cello, bass, and drums), klezmer-country jazz with an old world feel if you will, anticipatory, intimate, elegiac.
We follow with nine distinctive interpretations of “Throw It Away,” and Indra Rios-Moore’s revelatory incantation of Oscar Brown’s “Long as You’re Living,” a kindred song which as already noted, Lincoln instantiated on her 1960 release.
The measure of an enduring song is less how many reinterpretations it inspires than how a melody and its lyrical structure of feeling can voice, acknowledge, confront, embrace the precious, vexatious character of the human condition, and dispel the heedless hungry ghosts, mendacious zombie souls who in all their cruel compulsion neither know nor care what, whom, and how very much they would throw away. For them, the dustbin of history.
Title | Artist | Album | Composer | Label
Throw It Away | Abbey Lincoln | Abbey Sings Abbey | Abbey Lincoln | Verve
Throw It Away | Vincent Peirani | Thrill Box | Abbey Lincoln | ACT
Throw It Away | Colette Michaan | Earth Rebirth | Abbey Lincoln | Creatrix
Throw It Away | Terri Lyne Carrington w/ Melanie Charles & Somi | New Standards Vol. 1 | Abbey Lincoln | Candid
Throw It Away | Jowee Omicil | Smiles | Abbey Lincoln | BasH! Village
Throw It Away | John Scofield | A Moment’s Peace | Abbey Lincoln | Emarcy
Throw It Away | Stefon Harris | Sonic Creed | Abbey Lincoln | Motéma
Throw It Away | Ayo | Royal | Abbey Lincoln | Wrasse
Throw It Away | Leon Parker w/ Mélanie Dahan | The LEO | Abbey Lincoln | Ropeadope
Long as You’re Living | Indra Rios-Moore | Freedom Road | Oscar Brown Jr.; Tommy Turrentine; Julian Priester | Vamana
Throw It Away | Søren Bebe Trio | Gratitude | Abbey Lincoln | From Out Here
