1980 · Album
Love Having You Around: Live at the Keystone Korner, Vol. 2
Recorded March 1980 · HighNote Records (reissue 2016) · Venue: Keystone Korner, San Francisco, California
Voice and Whip: Lincoln at the Keystone
Lincoln's voice cuts through with the clarity of someone who has earned her authority.
The room is tight, the drums are close—you can hear Doug Sides' snare crack with physical presence, each hit deliberate. Phil Wright comps quietly on piano, leaving space. The bass is felt more than heard in the low end. Abbey Lincoln's voice enters not as decoration but as another instrument in the room, direct and unadorned. This is March 1980 at the Keystone Korner, and nothing here sounds rehearsed or polished in the glossy sense. It sounds lived-in.
Lincoln was well past her early career by this point—the years when her voice and presence had anchored the civil rights movement in jazz, when albums like We Insist! (1960) weren't just music but urgent statement. By 1980, she had moved into a different register: still powerful, still precise, but commanding the room as a mature artist with decades of repertoire behind her. The setlist mixes standards like "Little Girl Blue" with her own material, and the difference in how she inhabits each is worth hearing. Jazzwise critic Peter Quinn noted her stripped-down rendition of "Driva Man"—the original a Max Roach collaboration—reduced here to voice and percussion, Sides' snare becoming the crack of the whip. It's specific, intentional, devastating in its restraint.
Derek Taylor in Dusted Magazine caught something important: that Lincoln by this era had moved beyond being a milestone in jazz history and into the role of a mature songstress, her program reflecting that shift. What comes across on this recording is engagement—with the material, with the band, with the audience. She negotiates complicated lyrics with skill and brings earthy inflections to everything she touches. This isn't a comeback recording or a nostalgia play. It's a working jazz singer doing exactly what she does, and the Keystone's intimacy captures that without artifice.
Who's playing
James Learybass
Phil Wrightpiano
Doug Sidesdrums
