Within two days last week we lost two jazz greats, both of whom gave us much more than entertainment. For over fifty years, Abbey Lincoln sang and wrote unflinchingly about a woman's survival in a tough world. On August 14, heart failure took her at the age of 80. The...

Adelaide is a charming but sleepy little town in South Australia. It's a place I might never have visited, had I not been flown there to speak at the 2007 Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Performers from all over the world convened there for three weeks in the best panorama of cabaret...

Loving cabaret as I do, I'm used to audiences who genuflect at the feet of great elderly singers -- those vessels of wisdom and experience, whose wear-and-tear offers proof of lives fully lived. But in the world of rock, passing 50 is seen as a betrayal, and it can turn...

Judy Collins has been touching my heart since my teens, when I discovered two albums she made in the early 1970s, just before she bid the waning folk movement goodbye. Living and True Stories (and Other Dreams) are deliciously sad collections of folk-art ballads; they cover subjects ranging from Che...