Bidding Farewell to Two Cultural Warriors

When Abbey Lincoln and Esteban Jordan passed away last week, we lost two historic musicians and tireless cultural warriors. Although they possessed extremely different styles — Lincoln composed her own socially-conscious jazz tunes while Jordan often phase-shifted traditional Mexican songs into psychedelic polkas — their lives left equally deep impressions in the musical landscape.

Abbey Lincoln was a singer, composer, actress and longtime civil rights activist. In 1960, she sang on the We Insist! — Freedom Now Suite, a jazz milestone and probably the first explicitly political album of the Civil Rights Era. Lincoln continued to write and record for the next 50 years, shunning sentimental love songs for more political messages. She simultaneously developed an acting career, starring with the likes of Sidney Poitier, Jane Mansfield and Denzel Washington. She received a Golden Globe nomination for her acting and, in 2003, the Jazz Masters Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. She died last Saturday. She was 80 years old.

Fifty years later, Lincoln's leads on Freedom Now still give chills:

Esteban "Steve" Jordan has been called the "Jimi Hendrix of the Accordion" after revolutionizing the instrument within the Tejano conjunto tradition. Born the fifteenth child of a Texas migrant worker family, he was blinded at a young age and never learned to read or write. Despite these barriers, Jordan pushed Tex-Mex conjunto to the limit, plugging into fuzzboxes and synthesizers and fusing polka, jazz, western and mariachi music.

Although "El Parche" (The Patch) isn't well known outside his Chicano conjunto fanbase, his impact on Mexican-American music can't be overstated. He was memorialized in an hour-long special on Latino USA, and appeared in the Chicano classic Born in East L.A. as, well, an accordion player. He passed away last Friday at the age of 71.

Here's a young Jordan closing out the Johnny Canales show in the 1980s:

Photo Credits: Pvb2009 and Carlos