Ms. Lincoln’s career encompassed outspoken civil rights advocacy in the 1960s and fearless introspection in more recent years, and for a time in the 1960s she acted in films, including one with Sidney Poitier.

Long recognized as one of jazz’s most arresting and uncompromising singers, Ms. Lincoln gained similar stature as a songwriter only over the last two decades. Her songs, rich in metaphor and philosophical reflection, provide the substance of “Abbey Sings Abbey,” an album released on Verve in 2007. As a body of work, the songs formed the basis of a three-concert retrospective presented by Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2002.

Her singing style was unique, a combined result of bold projection and expressive restraint. Because of her ability to inhabit the emotional dimensions of a song, she was often likened to Billie Holiday, her chief influence. But Ms. Lincoln had a deeper register and a darker tone, and her way with phrasing was more declarative.

“Her utter individuality and intensely passionate delivery can leave an audience breathless with the tension of real drama,” Peter Watrous wrote in The New York Times in 1989. “A slight, curling phrase is laden with significance, and the tone of her voice can signify hidden welts of emotion.”

She had a profound influence on other jazz vocalists, not only as a singer and composer but also as a role model. “I learned a lot about taking a different path from Abbey,” the singer Cassandra Wilson said. “Investing your lyrics with what your life is about in the moment.”

Ms. Lincoln was born Anna Marie Wooldridge in Chicago on Aug. 6, 1930, the 10th of 12 children, and raised in rural Michigan. In the early 1950s, she headed west in search of a singing career, spending two years as a nightclub attraction in Honolulu, where she met Ms. Holiday and Louis Armstrong. She then moved to Los Angeles, where she encountered the accomplished lyricist Bob Russell.

It was at the suggestion of Mr. Russell, who had become her manager, that she took the name Abbey Lincoln, a symbolic conjoining of Westminster Abbey and Abraham Lincoln. In 1956, she made her first album, “Affair ... a Story of a Girl in Love” (Liberty), and appeared in her first film, the Jayne Mansfield vehicle “The Girl Can’t Help It.” Her image in both cases was decidedly glamorous: On the album cover she was depicted in a décolleté gown, and in the movie she sported a dress once worn by Marilyn Monroe.

For her second album, “That’s Him,” released on the Riverside label in 1957, Ms. Lincoln kept the seductive pose but worked convincingly with a modern jazz ensemble that included the tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins and the drummer Max Roach. In short order she came under the influence of Mr. Roach, a bebop pioneer with an ardent interest in progressive causes. As she later recalled, she put the Monroe dress in an incinerator and followed his lead.

The most visible manifestation of their partnership was “We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite,” issued on the Candid label in 1960, with Ms. Lincoln belting Oscar Brown Jr.’s lyrics. Now hailed as an early masterwork of the civil rights movement, the album radicalized Ms. Lincoln’s reputation. One movement had her moaning in sorrow, and then hollering and shrieking in anguish — a stark evocation of struggle. A year later, after Ms. Lincoln sang her own lyrics to a song called “Retribution,” her stance prompted one prominent reviewer to deride her in print as a “professional Negro.”

Ms. Lincoln, who married Mr. Roach in 1962, was for a while more active as an actress than a singer. In 1964 she starred with Ivan Dixon in “Nothing but a Man,” a tale of the Deep South in the 1960s, and in 1968 she was the title character opposite Mr. Poitier in the romantic comedy “For Love of Ivy,” playing a white family’s maid. She also acted on television in guest-starring roles in the ’60s and ’70s.

But with the exception of “Straight Ahead” (Candid), on which “Retribution” appeared, she released no albums in the 1960s. And after her divorce from Mr. Roach in 1970, she took an apartment above a garage in Los Angeles and withdrew from the spotlight for a time. She never remarried.

In addition to Mr. Wooldridge, Ms. Lincoln is survived by another brother, Kenneth Wooldridge, and a sister, Juanita Baker.

During a visit to Africa in 1972, Ms. Lincoln received two honorary appellations from political officials: Moseka, in Zaire, and Aminata, in Guinea. (Moseka would occasionally serve as her surname.) She began to consider her calling as a storyteller and focused on writing songs.

Moving back to New York in the 1980s, Ms. Lincoln resumed performing, eventually attracting the attention of Jean-Philippe Allard, a producer and executive with PolyGram France. Ms. Lincoln’s first effort for what is now the Verve Music Group, “The World Is Falling Down” (1990), was a commercial and critical success.

Eight more albums followed in a similar vein, each produced by Mr. Allard and enlisting top-shelf jazz musicians like the tenor saxophonist Stan Getz and the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson. In addition to elegant originals like “Throw It Away” and “When I’m Called Home,” the albums featured Ms. Lincoln’s striking interpretations of material ranging from songbook standards to Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

For “Abbey Sings Abbey” Ms. Lincoln revisited her own songbook exclusively, performing in an acoustic roots-music setting that emphasized her affinities with singer-songwriters like Mr. Dylan. Overseen by Mr. Allard and the American producer-engineer Jay Newland, the album boiled each song to its essence and found Ms. Lincoln in weathered voice but superlative form.

When the album was released in May 2007, Ms. Lincoln was recovering from open-heart surgery. In her Upper West Side apartment, surrounded by her own paintings and drawings, she reflected on her life, often quoting from her own song lyrics. After she recited a long passage from “The World Is Falling Down,” one of her more prominent later songs, her eyes flashed with pride. “I don’t know why anybody would give that up,” she said. “I wouldn’t. Makes my life worthwhile.”
Nat Chinen
The New York Times

Entitled “Spirit in the Dark” they were joined by fellow musicians Yo La Tengo, Yim Yames of My Morning Jacket, Lambchop, Marshall Allen and the Sun Ra Horns and Exene Cervenka.

Each group rolled in with one or two selections followed by a jam with the Blind Boys who sat in a line on chairs near the front of the stage. Sun Ra, in electric colored outfits opened the musical festivities playing a laid back, dreamy Mississippi blues riff. That set the agenda musical agenda. Kurt Wagner’s fervently evangelical voice peeled out over Yo La Tengo’s brass section.

In “Give It” Blind Boys’ angelic cadences lifted the song to a new level of authenticity. While these bands are described as “country” based, they veered closer to jazz – considering the improvisational flourishes, fractured rhythms and bent notes.

In the grand finale, the Blind Boys took charge singing “Down in the Hole,” “Amazing Grace” and a final jamboree with all the musicians shouting out “If I Had A Hammer.”
C. Ipiotis

Highest honors went to saxophonist and flutist James Moody, for Lifetime Achievement in Jazz, and to veteran music journalist Don Heckman, for Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism.
Pianist-composer Vijay Iyer was named Musician of the Year, while multiple Awards were received by Joe Lovano (Record of the Year for Folk Art, Small Group of the Year for the band Us Five, and Tenor Saxophonist of the Year), Maria Schneider (Composer of the Year, Arranger of the Year) and Darcy James Argue, as Up and Coming Artist of the Year and for the Large Ensemble of the Year, his big band Secret Society.
An entire list of the winners can be seen at www.JJAJazzAwards.org.

A bevy of men and women raised their voices in celebration of the countless classics imagined by Sondheim. Many of the artists who gave their all are almost synonymous with Sondheim. From Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters to Patti LuPone, Michael Cerveris, Audra McDonald and Ms. Stritch, they rattled the air with Sondheim’s memorable song tracks. Keeping matters on a festive plane, Pierce insisted on Sondheim’s global impact tossing in foreign words to Sondheim lyrics.

The cast of West Side Story stormed the narrow lip of the stage in a performance of “America.” Ballad to kicky popular tunes, Sondheim’s oeuvre proved rich and unforgettable weaving across decades from “Sweeney Todd” and “Follies” to “Company” and “Sunday in the Park With George.”

Positioned on-stage, the orchestra conducted with verve by Paul Gemignani, shifted musical moods with the help of lighting designer Alan Adelman’s mood changing colors and projections.

Not surprisingly, the best was kept for last – the arrival of a collection of Sondheim ladies sporting red: Patti LuPone, Laura Benanti, Audra McDonald, Elaine Stritch, Marin Mazzie, Bernadette Peters. Each star turned out a single Sondheim song.

But when LuPone delivered “The Ladies Who Lunch,” the songs original interpreter, Ms. Stritch gave her a spontaneous standing ovation. One could only guess at the thoughts crossing the Lades in Red’s minds.

A result: everyone who followed sang with unstoppable verve. Finally, Stritch got her time in the Sondheim sunshine electrifying the audience with her rendition of “I’m Still Here.”

The audience leapt to its feet, cheering. Finally, Sondheim (who was wandering, a bit shyly through the theater all evening) came on stage to quote Alice Longworth Roosevelt, “First you’re young, then you’re middle-aged, then you’re wonderful.” “This was wonderful—thank you.” And wonderful it was.
C. Ipiotis

Indeed, where else? And what a production of mixed genres! Based on the 1632 Baroque Opera by Henry Purcell, the alternate title could be “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” the musical.

This semi-opera form is a mash up of musicians, singers, actors and dancers--burlesque, camp, opera and pop. The brainchild of William Christie and Jonathan Kent, it takes advantage of the Baroque era’s fondness for excess and minor asides like flying machines.

But don’t think the music suffers as a result of all this theatrical falderal—not under the baton of Christie and Les Arts Florrisants. Instead, the music (the majority of which is played in the second half) illuminates a rarely heard Baroque Opera. Fanfares flourish and seep into airy arias.

By visually straddling contemporary and Baroque eras, the production feels like it got a new coat of paint. The magic woodland fairies—Oberon (devilishly good looking), Queen Titania, and Puck wield a mean love arrow in the direction of two hapless human couples. In an attempt to escape their parents’ unacceptable marriage edicts, Hermia and Lysander--Demetrius and Helena, fall in and out of love with the ferocity and frequency of a ticking heart.

Characters of every stripe submerge a tilted stage, including black winged angels, bunnies in heat and bodies flitting about in the air.

The set and costumes by Paul Brown contribute enormously to the production’s success. In what could have been a tricky balancing act, the singers and actors hit common artistic ground.

A great cure for anyone who thinks Baroque opera is esoteric and stoic, this production brings the drama as well as the music out to play.
C. Ipiotis

Long passages shimmy up and down the scale supported by circular breath, not unlike John Coltrane, in a poignant lament about love, devotion, and excitement. Almost dipping into a trance Alim, joined by her daughter Fargana, Rafael Asgarov on balaan, Rauf Islamov on kamancha, Zaki Valiyev on tar and Javidan Nabiyev on naghara held the audience at the Asia Society in thrall.

Nonstop music for nearly 90 minutes, at the end the performers were spent. The musical intensity is not just physically demanding, but also emotionally exacting. Taken out of time and place to another land sheerly through the power of music is proof of art’s power to concisely describe other cultures from the inside-out.

In a smart move, Asia Society projected supertitles translating the songs.

Reminiscent of the Russian Constructivist sensibility, the curtain pops with newspaper print and blocky poster-style images including references to the official who lost his nose--an image of a man with the nose Xed out. The black and white color scheme, greedily including bright dollops of primary colors, repeats throughout the production.

Mirroring the montage of images, a montage of jazzy sounds, circus bombast, folk tunes and atmospheric sheets of music snake through Shostakovich’s score driven by a Stravinsky-like urgency.

In this absurdist tale, bureaucrat Kovalyov (Paulo Szot) loses his nose. Adding insult to injury, his high-falutin’ nose mockingly saunters through town escaping the supercilious arm of the law. The teeming townspeople join in the hunt for the nose, while his antics are mercilessly chronicled in the tabloids.

Already a star because of his remarkable performance in Lincoln Center’s production of South Pacific, baritone Szot captures the theatrical nuances, physical acrobatics and after about a 20 minute-warm-up, the role’s musical demands.

When merging an innovative artist’s views with an opera, sensory competition and overload become a valid concern. In this instance, Kentridge shaped an articulate canvas of music, theater and art.

His visual architecture spans vertical as well as horizontal space (sets designed with sabine Theunissen). Bridges, streets and houses hang slightly askew in mid-air and on the slanted stage.

I can’t help but believe that if Shostakovich were alive today, he would fully embrace this production. It is thrilling in its modernist simplicity and musical bombast. Add to this menu, the orchestra’s animated musical direction by conductor Valery Gergiev and you get a resonant, memorable new production that looks as if it were a revival of the original.

Running one hour and forty-five minutes without intermission, the production features a huge chorus and a number of strong performers including Vladimir Ognovenko as the cut-throat barber (images of Sweeney Todd), Claudia Waite, the barber’s take-no-prisoner’s wife; Andrei Popv as the pompous Police Inspector; and the likeable Sergei Skorokhodov as Kovalyov’s servant.

Based on Gogol’s 1936 satirical story, “The Nose” was produced in St. Petersburg in 1930 and promptly banned. But I will bet this graphic opera finds a long and happy life in the 21st century.
C. Ipiotis