A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
Thus this magazine will strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed notions
and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic definitions of ‘Jazz’, ‘classical music’, ‘Blues.’
'Rhythm and Blues’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Pop’, ‘Funk’, ‘Hip Hop’, etc. in order to search for what individual
artists and ensembles do cretively to challenge and transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what
music is and could be.
So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
homage to the endlessly creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its guises and expressive identities.
Saturday, December 24, 2016
Cassandra Wilson (b. December 4, 1955): Legendary, iconic, and innovative singer, songwriter, musician, composer, arranger, ensemble leader, producer, and teacher
Although her recording career has been somewhat erratic, Cassandra Wilson
became one of the top jazz singers of the '90s, a vocalist blessed with
a distinctive and flexible voice who is not afraid to take chances. She
began playing piano and guitar when she was nine and was working as a
vocalist by the mid-'70s, singing a wide variety of material. Following a
year in New Orleans, Wilson moved to New York in 1982 and began working with Dave Holland and Abbey Lincoln. After meeting Steve Coleman, she became the main vocalist with the M-Base Collective. Although there was really no room for a singer in the overcrowded free funk ensembles, Wilson did as good a job of fitting in as was possible. She worked with New Air and recorded her first album as a leader in 1985. By her third record, a standards date, she was sounding quite a bit like Betty Carter.
After a few more albums in which she mostly performed original and rather inferior material, Wilson changed direction and performed an acoustic blues-oriented program for Blue Note called Blue Light 'Til Dawn.
By going back in time, she had found herself, and has since continued
interpreting vintage country blues and folk music in fresh and creative
ways up until the present day. During 1997 she toured as part of Wynton Marsalis' Blood on the Fields production. Traveling Miles, her tribute to Miles Davis, followed two years later. For 2002's Belly of the Sun,
she drew on an array of roots musics -- blues, country, soul, rock --
to fashion a record that furthered her artistic career while still
aligning well with trends in popular music. Glamoured, released in 2003, posed a different kind of challenge; half the material was composed by Wilson herself.
Unwilling to stand still, she gently explored sampling and other hip-hop techniques for 2006's Thunderbird. She followed 2008's Loverly, another album of standards, with Silver Pony in 2010. Ever a musical chameleon, she changed direction again with an album of mostly original tunes entitled Another Country, which she co-produced with electric guitarist Fabrizio Sotti. Recorded in Italy, New Orleans, and New York, it was released in the summer of 2012. Wilson switched labels in 2015, signing to Sony Legacy and releasing the Billie Holiday tribute Coming Forth by Day. The album was produced by Nick Launay, who is best known for working with rock acts like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Supergrass, Midnight Oil, the Cribs, and Nick Cave.
The voice is more visual than audible; shaded, iridescent, tangible,
substantial. It seems to flow effortlessly. Read any of the dozen or so
biographies on Cassandra Wilson and you’ll discover some basics: born
and reared in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s and 70s by musician and
educator parents. Classically trained on piano from age 6 until
the age of 13, she also received further musical instruction as a
clarinetist for the concert and marching bands of secondary school.
During the 70s, she could be found performing Joni Mitchell songs behind
an acoustic guitar, or singing with a blues band in Little Rock,
Arkansas, in front of a large funk band in Jackson, or in the company of
long-time friends in an all-girls ensemble. In the eighties, Cassandra
moved to New Orleans where she performed with local luminaries Earl
Turbinton and Ellis Marsalis. After a year, she relocated to East
Orange, New Jersey where she made a decision to take her chances on the
New York jazz scene. After a stint as the main vocalist with Steve
Coleman’s M-Base Collective, Cassandra began recording on her own.
Her
development can be tracked through her discography. From the standards
on Blue Skies to the Grammy-winning projects New Moon Daughter and
Loverly, to the combination of originals and interpretations played by a
collection of Mississippi and New York musicians on both the 2001
release, Belly of the Sun, and 2003’s Glamoured, Cassandra continues to
evolve as a vocalist, songwriter, and producer. She is a world renowned
vocalist, songwriter and producer, with an extraordinary following, but
at heart she is still a Mississippi girl whose art reflects her deep
musical and cultural roots, anchored in the fertile Mississippi soil. In
2012 Cassandra released “Another Country” which she produced and
recorded in Italy. This album is a whole new appraoch for her and
displays her in an acoustic setting featuring guitarist Fabrizio Sotti.
“Well, first of all, Cassandra really is maybe the best singer in the world.” This is the assessment of Joseph Henry Burnett—aka T Bone Burnett,
one of the preeminent behind-the-scenes figures in American popular
music—during a recent conversation about Cassandra Wilson. It’s almost
the first thing he says, in fact, with the casual certainty of a man
bearing witness to the truth. Burnett is hardly a disinterested party, of course. He produced
Thunderbird, Wilson’s seventh Blue Note album, and has reason to root
for its success. But the man crowned producer of the year by Grammy
voters a few years back (for the sleeper-hit soundtrack to the film O
Brother, Where Art Thou?) doesn’t seem prone to hyperbole. The
antithesis of a wheeler-dealer, he’s the kind of person who considers
the weight of his praise. The scales are already tipped, in this case; Wilson’s excellence as a
vocalist has been well established over the last two decades, and
especially during her 13-year Blue Note career. Her deep-earth contralto
is difficult to describe—it’s late-morning sunlight and bittersweet
molasses, or “sultry” or “sumptuous” or whatever else you’ve got—but
unfailingly easy to recognize, even for the portion of the population
that would be hard-pressed to put a face to her name. Five years ago,
Time magazine hailed her as America’s best singer; the honor, like
Burnett’s appraisal, was designed to transcend genre—which is what
Wilson has been doing, more or less, since she flew onto the cultural
radar. Charting a course with her first Blue Note release, Blue Light Til
Dawn, Wilson has trafficked in what one might reasonably term heartland
music: blues, country, gospel, folk, acoustic pop. But context and
circumstance have accurately pegged her as a jazz artist, as have the
particulars of her aesthetic process. Irrevocably, indisputably, she’s
one of our own. And the strength of her example has gradually altered
the contours of contemporary jazz singing, in ways that some observers
would decry. Not Burnett, though. “She’s the last great jazz singer,” the producer
asserts, proving that hyperbole wins a round every now and again. “I
mean, maybe somebody else will come along, but as far as I see on the
horizon, she’s the last real one. In a lot of ways—though I say this
with some trepidation—she may be one of the greatest of all time.” Cassandra Wilson has been spending a lot of time of late in Jackson,
Miss., where she was born just over 50 years ago. It’s basically Delta
country, musically sanctified soil; a few years back, Wilson recorded
songs there for her last album, Glamoured. Not long before that, she
rented out a train depot in Clarksdale—some three hours north on Highway
55—to lay the tracks, as it were, for her blues-enriched Belly of the
Sun. “Jackson, Mississippi,” Wilson says over the phone, savoring the
cadence of the phrase. “It’s a little run-down. We got hit by Katrina,
so there’s a bit of tree damage, some building damage. But we’re doing
OK.” The hardy resignation in her tone seems to have as much to do with a
difficult personal situation—she was caring for her ailing mother—as
with the posthurricane condition of the region. Of course, hardy
resignation is not so foreign a temperament in a place known as the
cradle of the blues. Another component of the blues is resilience, which happens to be a
priority for Wilson at the moment. She named Thunderbird after the
Native American mythological totem, a great protector often discerned in
lightning patterns and rolling clouds. “I had a hard time through
three-quarters of the process,” she confesses, describing the making of
the album. “There were so many things that were going on in my life, so
many problems I was having outside of the music. And as much as sorrow
and tragedy sometimes feed your creative process, it’s really difficult
if it’s happening at the same time.” When asked about the nature of those problems, Wilson demurs—“I don’t
know if I’m ready to be that honest about my life”—but she’s forthright
about the effect it had on her approach to the music. “I figured
there’s no reason to try to distance my emotions from what I’m doing,
because that’s what I do for a living: I use my emotions in order to
create my work. So I just decided to let those feelings happen. There
was a lot of anxiety. There was a lot of frustration, fear, pain. You
just live through the emotion, and the music then acts as a balm, in a
sense. It can soothe you, it can protect you; it can allow you the space
to experience those really strong emotions.” As a working method, this sounds suspiciously like therapy.
Crucially, the album doesn’t, despite the fact that within its first
minute Wilson sings this stanza: “Smoke and run/Is my mission/Happiness
is all I need right now.” Smoke and run: It’s an awfully restless route to happiness, littered
with outlaw intrigue and evasion. One could hardly imagine a more
appropriate imperative for Wilson’s musical career.
Funny thing about outlaws: They often work in bands. Wilson may be a
classic solitary type—she gives the distinct impression of someone who
dwells alone with her thoughts—but musically speaking, she has forged
her craft in the company of others. This, along with her abundant
talent, is the reason for her reputation as a musician’s singer: She’s a
musician herself, by temperament and training. Wilson’s father, Herman B. Fowlkes, was a guitarist and bassist of
regional renown. “I remember going to one particular place on Farish
Street, a place he frequently worked in,” she says. “There was a certain
feeling that I had there. I’m certain that’s why I became a musician:
because I was exposed to all of these musicians, and this community that
was really vibrant and soulful and intriguing. At that time, it was
predesegregation in the South. So our lives were lived inside of that
community. We really didn’t have to go outside of it for anything. So I
think that the memories of that, even if I can’t really pinpoint it, it
has a smell and a mood to it that I’m always trying to recapture.” As a child, Wilson studied piano and played guitar, singing and
writing songs all the while; she has reminisced about the ersatz
songwriting contests staged by the kids in her neighborhood. Later, as a
young woman in the thrall of Joni Mitchell, she started performing in
folk settings, self-accompanied on an acoustic guitar.
The influence of her mother, Mary Fowlkes, an educator, prompted
Wilson to establish something to fall back on. She studied mass
communications at Jackson State University—not the worst major for a
singer, in retrospect—and, in the early ’80s, moved to New Orleans to
take a job as assistant public affairs director for a local television
station. Significantly, it was the musicians who pulled Wilson deeper into her
art. In New Orleans, she was mentored by the saxophonist Earl
Turbinton, an irrepressible figure with a handle on the intricacies of
the local scene. Then, after a move to the New York area, she famously
fell in with the crowd surrounding another saxophonist, Steve Coleman. It was a time of heady ascendance for Coleman’s M-BASE Collective,
which was working toward a new black music informed by sources ancient
and futuristic, visceral and cerebral. Wilson became the movement’s
house vocalist, appearing on Coleman’s 1985 debut, Motherland Pulse. She
took a leap of her own the same year with Point of View, in the company
of Coleman, trombonist Grachan Moncur III, guitarist Jean-Paul
Bourelly, bassist Lonnie Plaxico and drummer Mark Johnson. For the rest
of the ’80s, she created a body of work on JMT (an adventurous imprint
of Polygram) that was most remarkable for her surefootedness amidst
challenging musical settings. It was self-styled visionary music,
experimental in aim and execution, and Wilson’s presence in it was like
that of an ensemble player; she was even mixed, sonically, like a member
of the band. There was one noteworthy exception: Blue Skies, an album released in
1988 (and now available in reissued form, like most of Wilson’s JMT
catalog, on the German label Winter & Winter). With crisp acoustic
combo backing—Mulgrew Miller on piano, Lonnie Plaxico on bass and Terri
Lyne Carrington on drums—Wilson tucked into what we’d now call the Great
American Songbook, applying a cool elasticity to tunes like “Sweet
Lorraine,” “I’m Old Fashioned” and “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was.” She
sounded quite a bit like her formative influence Betty Carter, a fact
that delighted many more people than it dismayed. Despite limited
distribution, the album was a modest hit, and Billboard named it jazz
album of the year. Wilson’s reaction to this acclaim was to withdraw, regroup and change
courses; she scuttled any promise as a standard-bearer by releasing
Jumpworld, an album of knotty original material conceived as a sci-fi
fusion opera. Many in the jazz world saw this as self-sabotage. Some
still harbor vestiges of that opinion about Wilson’s overall career. What everyone has realized by now is that Wilson never wanted to be
the prototypical jazz singer—let alone “the next Betty Carter”—although
she could have made it if she had. Blue Skies is, incredibly, the only
standards album in her 20-year recording career, and there’s clearly a
hunger for more of its kind. In 2002, Verve issued Sings Standards, a
compilation of songbook tracks scattered across her JMT releases;
without fanfare or much promotion, it reached the fifth spot on
Billboard’s Top Jazz Albums chart. Eclecticism, for lack of a better term, has been the predominant
feature of Wilson’s Blue Note tenure from the beginning. “She had in
mind to do something with her M-BASE-type band,” remembers Bruce
Lundvall, Blue Note’s president and CEO. “I had sort of a disagreement
with her and said, ‘Why don’t you make an acoustic record? Your downtown
band is good, but we’re not looking for musical democracy; I really
signed you as a solo artist and want to be able to hear you.’ I had seen
her a couple nights before this meeting and didn’t feel that it was the
best situation for her. She came back with Craig Street, who I didn’t
even know.” The ensuing story, though well circulated, bears repeating. “She had
moved into the same building that I was living in uptown, and we ran
into each other in the lobby one day,” recalls Street, whom Wilson knew
as an occasional producer of live events; at the time, he was supporting
himself with construction work. “She had just gotten signed to Blue
Note. She said, ‘They’re looking to put me with these big-time
producers,’ and it was one of those things: I just blurted out, ‘I’ll
produce you.’ She went to the label and, in classic Cassandra fashion,
said, ‘I’ve found the producer for my record. He’s a construction worker
that lives in my building.’” Lundvall authorized a short demo
recording, and on the strength of the resulting two tracks—“You Don’t
Know What Love Is” and Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey”—encouraged Wilson
and Street to proceed with Blue Light Til Dawn, the acoustic
folk-blues-jazz mélange that would be widely hailed as a breakthrough. Wilson was hardly the first major jazz artist of the era to look
beyond standards for inspiration; Lundvall is quick to point out that
Dianne Reeves, another Blue Note artist, had already incorporated
elements of pop and R&B. But with Blue Light Til Dawn and its
follow-up, New Moon Daughter, Wilson made bigger waves, in the jazz
world and beyond. Both reached the top spot on Billboard’s Jazz Albums
chart; the latter penetrated the Billboard 200 and won the Grammy for
Best Jazz Vocal performance. The press and public alike seized on the
notion that jazz repertory could come from the byways of American folk
music (both the rustic and confessional varieties) as well as the
songbook mainstream. The power of that realization was profound enough
to make it into a kind of fact; these days, it’s a given that any
serious contemporary jazz singer will delve into rustic folk, world
music or adult pop and soul. It’s also not so strange to hear a jazz
singer backed by acoustic stringed instruments rather than piano, bass
and drums. There’s an audience for such hybrids; for proof, look no further than
Blue Note’s contemporary roster. This spring the label introduced the
Wood Brothers, an acoustic folk-pop project featuring bassist Chris Wood
(of Medeski, Martin & Wood) and his guitar-playing brother, Oliver;
last year it took on Amos Lee, a soul-inspired singer-songwriter. A few
years back, it signed Keren Ann, a breathy chanteuse with a Parisian
address. Just before that, of course, there was Norah Jones, whose first
official release was produced in part by Street—and whose aesthetic
identity is virtually unimaginable without the precedent of Wilson.
“There are people out there who are sophisticated and intelligent and
looking for unique artists and good music,” argues Lundvall, sounding
like a man who knows. Statistically speaking, it’s safe to say that most of those so-called
sophisticated people own at least one recording produced by T Bone
Burnett. The Recording Industry Association of America has certified the
O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack platinum seven times. Since then,
Burnett has had a hand in soundtracks for Cold Mountain, A Mighty Wind,
The Ladykillers and last year’s Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line. Then
there’s his career as an album producer, which includes successful work
with Roy Orbison, Elvis Costello, the Wallflowers, Gillian Welch, Alison
Krauss and Tony Bennett with k.d. lang. An accomplished musician in his
own right, Burnett is scheduled to release a new album, The True False
Identity, on Columbia in May; later that month, Columbia/Legacy is set
to issue Twenty Twenty: The Essential T Bone Burnett. Burnett credits hearing Wilson’s starkly harrowing version of
“Strange Fruit”—the lead track from New Moon Daughter—as the moment he
became a fan. He had only worked with her briefly once, on a
compilation, when she came calling about Thunderbird. “I wasn’t really
producing records anymore,” Burnett says. “I’m trying to get away from
that bad habit. But to get a chance to work with Cassandra was
irresistible.” Thunderbird took shape gradually, over the span of quite a few
months—not the usual timetable for a jazz album. The simplest
explanation for this is that it’s really not a jazz album, strictly
speaking; Wilson’s Blue Note releases have always warranted that
disclaimer, but never as much as this one. It began with a week or so of
freewheeling jam sessions at the Village Recorder in Los Angeles;
later, after the results had been absorbed, there were follow-up
sessions at Capitol Studios in Hollywood, among other places. (This cost
a lot more to make than the typical jazz production, as Lundvall points
out.) The heart of the album is the alchemical reaction between Wilson and
Burnett. “It was a little tentative at first,” ventures Burnett. “We’re
both probably a little shy.” (Wilson counters: “I think that perhaps
what he experienced from me was the distance, the emotional baggage that
I was carrying around with me at the time.”) Over time, their rapport
deepened considerably, a fact that manifests in the music. Thunderbird
is expressly a Cassandra Wilson product, but it has a presence that’s
flintier, weightier and clearer than her last few releases, which were
all superb in stretches but a bit cloudy on the whole. Surely this has something to do with the presence of a gifted
producer, something Wilson hasn’t really had since New Moon Daughter.
Street, her first producer, describes Wilson as “probably one of the
most open and collaborative artists that I have ever met. And so a
person like that really responds well to production.” This would seem
especially true of the production style that Street owns up to borrowing
from Burnett, which focuses more on creating an open atmosphere than on
imposing a particular vision of order. “My philosophy as a producer is to stay out of the way as much as
possible,” Burnett maintains, and to hear Wilson tell it, he did. “He
was able to appear and disappear and make things happen even when he was
not there,” she says. “I got a sense early on that he commanded the
space in a way that was indicative of a very evolved spirit. Most
producers like to be hands-on; they’re there, they’re ever-present,
they’re hovering and indicating and instructing. And T Bone is just the
opposite. If those qualities are there, they’re very discreet. And I
always found that fascinating, that ability.” “A lot of what I did was bring the musicians in and cast the thing in
the first place,” says Burnett. Given Wilson’s history of melding with
her musical environment, the significance of that simple action
shouldn’t be underestimated. Whereas Wilson’s recent albums have
featured versions of her working band, Thunderbird involved a different
sort of crew. In addition to a few musicians known in jazz circles
(Reginald Veal on acoustic bass, Gregoire Maret on harmonica and Marc
Ribot on guitar), the album enlisted legendary session drummer Jim
Keltner, Canadian slide guitarist Colin Linden and, more briefly, blues
guitarist Keb Mo and a pair of additional drummers, Bill Maxwell and Jay
Bellerose. The two most central figures were Mike Elizondo, a bassist
who produced not only Fiona Apple’s bold pop album Extraordinary Machine
(Columbia) but also Top 40 hip-hop singles by 50 Cent and Eve; and
Keith Ciancia, aka Keefus Green, a keyboardist whose credits range from
rappers Dr. Dre and Ice Cube to bluegrass heroine Alison Krauss. By all accounts, Ciancia, who receives a coproducer credit, was the
album’s most vital participant not named Cassandra Wilson. It was he who
worked out many of the arrangements with Wilson, reharmonizing some
songs and conjuring others from scratch. (“I hadn’t worked with her
before, so I kind of just was throwing everything her way,” he says.
“She’s so great at knowing what she likes and what direction she wants
to go in.”) Their partnership transforms “Closer to You,” a ballad by
Jakob Dylan that the Wallflowers played straight, into an intimate
bedroom confessional; when Wilson begins by musing about “how soft a
whisper can get,” the impulse is to lean in and find out. Ciancia, in his other life, works closely with a very different
singer, Jade Vincent, in a group called Vincent and Mr. Green. (When
they began working together 14 years ago, the first song she asked him
to learn was “Whirlwind Soldier,” from Wilson’s Jumpworld.) Vincent and
Mr. Green’s self-titled debut, released a couple years ago on the
underground rock label Ipecac, showcases Ciancia’s knack for ambient
unrest and dark gothic fury. Remarkably, it’s not a stretch to detect
flashes of that ethos at certain points on Thunderbird; listen to a
track like “Daddy,” by Vincent and Mr. Green, and then consult “Poet,” a
song composed by Wilson with Ciancia. The latter track involves far
less psychosis, but its sonic signature is more or less the same.
(Lyrically, the song offers a sensuous counterpoint to “Closer to You,”
with the soft whisper replaced by something “between a scream and a
shout.” You get the picture.) Thunderbird offers other rewards, some of them more recognizably
Wilsonian. The traditional Western ballad “Red River Valley” receives a
poignant reading, with Linden’s guitar providing the only accompaniment;
similar duet chemistry distinguishes Burnett’s Tin Pan Alley-esque
“Lost,” with Ribot applying his unmistakable style. “I Want to Be
Loved,” the Willie Dixon classic best known in renditions by Muddy
Waters and the Rolling Stones, draws back to an unhurried gait, with
Wilson sounding both playful and languid. The sound of her voice is
always gripping, even when it’s multitracked in the background—something
that hasn’t appeared often in her oeuvre. One of the album’s transcendent moments is a version of Blind Lemon
Jefferson’s “Easy Rider” that begins in haunting quietude and then
slowly, in almost imperceptible stages, awakens. Roughly two minutes
in—just in time for the refrain “There’s gonna be a time when a woman
don’t need no man”—the ensemble hits, like a blinding blast of daylight.
It’s the blues, but not the rustic variety that Wilson has always
favored. And it’s not quite an electric roadhouse romp, either.
Something about it suggests the humid sound of Bob Dylan’s recent,
sublime albums Love and Theft and Time Out of Mind (Columbia), a point
of reference one imagines Wilson wouldn’t disown. Regarding an appraisal of the album as jazz, Wilson doesn’t have much
to say that she hasn’t already illustrated in song. But Burnett
ventures a thought. “There are better and worse songs that come out of
each period,” he says. “Some will wash down into the sand and some will
stay at the tip of the pyramid. A singer of Cassandra’s caliber should
be able to sing any kind of song that touches her, and that she can
touch. And then it becomes what it is she does. And I think it would
loosely become ‘jazz’—in the old, coarse sense of the word.” Nevertheless, Thunderbird enters the world as a pop product, and it
will be judged and tested accordingly. There are at least two songs on
the album that have a chance at “penetrating the zeitgeist,” to use a
phrase of Burnett’s. The first is “Go to Mexico,” a catchy
electroacoustic groove tune loosely built on the album’s only sample, a
recording of the Wild Tchoupitoulas Mardi Gras Indian tribe. The second
is “It Would Be So Easy,” which isn’t hard to imagine in a luxury car commercial or on a fashion runway. Tellingly, both of those songs are credited to Wilson, Ciancia and
Elizondo. (Engineer Mike Piersante, an unsung hero of the album, also
gets a credit on the latter of the two.) In other words, the best
candidates for a pop single on Thunderbird were the products,
originally, of spontaneous collective efforts. This says a lot about
Wilson, but nothing her fans don’t already know. Whether a broader audience will embrace the album is the question of
the hour. Certainly there would be a kind of cosmic justice if it won
over a sizeable portion of the millions who fell in love with Norah
Jones. “Nothing would make me happier than for Cassandra Wilson to have a
hit single,” says Burnett, who’s placing his bets on an edit of “Go to
Mexico.” He adds: “She should be held in the highest esteem by our
culture, and I don’t think people know about her yet. She should be up
where Ella Fitzgerald was.” Street doesn’t see why that couldn’t happen. “It just seems like a
no-brainer: T Bone and Cassandra together. It’s like: Go sell a couple
million records. Why wouldn’t you?” Lundvall, both predisposed and
conditioned to taking a more cautious view about the album’s success,
divulges that Blue Note has plans to “market the hell out of it.” In February, a full two months before the album’s release, Ciancia
was awakened by “Go to Mexico” on his clock radio, which was tuned to
the Los Angeles station KCRW. At first he thought it was a dream. The only person who professes not to be thinking about the album's
commericail potential is Wilson, and that's entirely characteristic. “I
didn’t get into this because I wanted to sell a lot of records or become
a pop star,” she says. “I would have taken a totally different route.
People say, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if this song was played on the radio?’
And I say, ‘Yeah, it would be nice, but it’s OK if it’s not.’ Then they
look at me strangely, like they think that maybe there’s something wrong
with an artist not having that kind of ambition. But I’ve always been
really honest about that. I’m not doing this for that. If it happens,
then it’s great. It’s lagniappe; it’s icing. But if it doesn’t, I’m
still really excited about what I do.” The language is revealing: Wilson is nothing if not fascinated by the
pure process of making music; “what I do” rather than what it brings.
And in this regard, Thunderbird—with its new working methods, new cadre
of collaborators and undeniably new sound—would seem a fortunate
occurrence. And a well-timed one; even, to borrow her words, a balm. This is
never more palpable than on “Tarot,” which closes the album on Wilson’s
acoustic guitar playing within a delicately balanced full ensemble. Amid
a dreamlike wash of instruments, she strikes a ruminative tone: I went to the tarot woman yesterday She looked at my cards and told me what they say In your future I see fortune and dreams fulfilled But you are such a restless soul And you always will (Fold on hearts) There’s no way to deny it I can see in your eyes the loneliness (Raise on kings) You’ve been searching forever For a lover that suits you the best The melancholy in these lines, tempered by the sweetness of that
contralto, dissolves as the chorus tumbles into view. “Don’t give up,”
Wilson sings self-imploringly. “Don’t walk away. You’re just a little
bit closer/than you were yesterday.” Wilsonian Doctrine Wilson's impact on jazz and popular singing is immeasurable; consider
the musical variety represented in the following list, an admittedly
impressionistic rundown of 10 recnet albums that bear traces (sometimes
subtle) of her influence. India.Arie, India.Arie’s Song (Motown) The singer-songwriter traffics in organic R&B (erstwhile
neosoul), but she has often expressed her deep admiration for Wilson,
who repaid the favor by including Arie on Belly of the Sun. The
affinities are most obvious during Arie’s warm and transfixing live
performances and on her 2001 debut, Acoustic Soul (Motown); but there
are moments on this new release, a two-disc volume, that also justify
the comparison. Ann Dyer, When I Close My Eyes (Sunnyside) Dyer, an expressive Bay Area vocalist, named her 1990s band No Good
Time Fairies, after the Steve Coleman song heard on Wilson’s first
album. The exploratory element of Wilson’s legacy clearly appeals most
to Dyer, but so does the notion of a wide-open repertoire: Years ago,
Dyer offered a radical revision of the Beatles’ Revolver, and this most
recent release includes a take on Björk’s “Bachelorette.” Norah Jones, Feels Like Home (Blue Note) Who? Just kidding. No one would mistake Jones’ gently rootsy
cosmopolitanism for Wilson’s more elemental fare, but the lineage, at
least, is clear. (Street had a hand in producing Come Away With Me, her
multi-platinum debut.) Conspiracy alert: Olu Dara has guest appeared on
several of Wilson’s albums, and Daru Oda is a background singer on this
sophomore Jones release. Coincidence? Surely not! Sonya Kitchell, Words Came Back to Me (Velour) This teenage singer-songwriter doesn’t bring Wilson to mind
musically; she’s more strictly a Northeastern folkie. But her precocious
acoustic-pop debut, which Starbucks has been plugging hard, is clearly
aimed at a post-Norah world, which in turn is a post-Cassandra one. Got
that? Maroon, Who the Sky Betrays (Head Fulla Brains) Hillary Maroon has cited Wilson as an influence, and it would seem
that, like Dyer, she means the Wilson of M-BASE pedigree; the second
release from this Brooklyn-based group deliberately leans to the
experimental side. Repertory-stretching bonus: renditions of Radiohead’s
“The Tourist” and Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun.” Rebecca Martin, People Behave Like Ballads (MaxJazz) Martin plays guitar and mandolin and engages with top-shelf jazz
musicians in an acoustic folk-rock vein. Her connection to Wilson is
loose and perhaps a touch indirect: through the common prism of
1970s-era Joni Mitchell. Raul Midón, State of Mind (Manhattan) Cassandra is hardly the first influence you think of here—that would
be Stevie Wonder, who helpfully makes a guest appearance—but Midón’s
high-flying musicianship and acoustic lyricism are points of connection.
His best song, “All in Your Mind,” isn’t hard to picture on a Wilson
set list. Gretchen Parlato, Gretchen Parlato (Available at cdbaby.com) A graduate of the Thelonious Monk Institute and winner of the 2004
Monk Competition, Parlato has all the makings of jazz ascendancy. What
she shares with Wilson isn’t a sound so much as a member-of-the-band
ethos; she has held her own with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, and
her rapport with the acoustic guitarist Lionel Loueke is very nearly
profound. Rhonda Richmond, Oshogbo Town (Ojah) Richmond, who appeared on Belly of the Sun, is one of Wilson’s
childhood friends and still a kindred spirit; in February, they
performed together on a concert in Jackson that Richmond produced. This
2003 album teases out connections between African folk forms and
Southern blues and soul; Richmond’s alto isn’t quite the gold mine that
Wilson’s is, but it’s not such a far cry, either. Lizz Wright, Dreaming Wide Awake (Verve) It’s all here: the Southern roots, the rich alto, the rustic acoustic
sound, even the hand of Craig Street. Dig her rendition of Neil Young’s
“Old Man” for a spine-tingling resonance. Happily, Wright has proven
her independence as a young artist; she may be a daughter of Cassandra,
but she’s not afraid of that fact, and her own distinct identity never
fails to emerge.
The Grammy Award–winning jazz vocalist incorporates blues, country and folk into her songs
January 29, 2016
Randall Pinkston: Let's talk about home, Mississippi. What kind of musical influences did you have when you were growing up?
Cassandra Wilson: So many. The home was filled with
instruments because my father was a musician. And he had this huge jazz
collection. I listened to everything from Miles Davis to Hank Williams,
because my mother loved country.
But I understand that your family did not listen to the blues.
Not a lot. There was not a lot of traditional Delta blues. I don't think there was any, actually, to be honest with you.
Why was that?
Well, my father had this idea about the blues being — how did he put
it? It was a rather common form of music. He was a great proponent of
jazz because it's a very complex form. And you have to be extremely —
Sophisticated?
Sophisticated, exactly. And that's true. That's the word. So he
didn't have any blues except for jazz blues, you know, by Cannonball
Adderley or that kind of Chicago-style jazz blues.
Your house was filled with instruments.
Yes.
What did your dad play, by the way?
He started off on the violin when he was very young in Chicago. Then
he picked up the trumpet and played in the Army band during World War
II. And then he went from the — let me get this straight — he went from
the trumpet to the guitar. That was the first instrument I remember him
playing when I was young. And then he went from the guitar to the
bass. And he played bass. Most people know him as a bassist in Jackson.
Which instrument did you pick up first?
First instrument I didn't pick. I actually — you can't pick up a piano.
Oh, OK.
The piano was my first instrument because I went to someone's house
with my parents. And they had a piano. I just fell in love with it. My
mother tells me the story that I started playing on the piano
instantly. I was about 3 or 4 years old.
So at what point did you pick up the guitar?
I was about 12 years old.
Did you know at that time that you wanted to become a musician?
I think at that time, I knew. I felt as if I were a musician already.
Were you singing then, at age 12?
Yes. I started to write. Not sing so much, you know, as I can't describe it. I call them little songs.
‘I
went to someone’s house with my parents. And they had a piano. I just
fell in love with it. My mother tells me the story that I started
playing on the piano instantly. I was about 3 or 4 years old.
‘I
went to someone’s house with my parents. And they had a piano. I just
fell in love with it. My mother tells me the story that I started
playing on the piano instantly. I was about 3 or 4 years old.’
--Cassandra Wilson
You have been described as someone who has a very, very unique
voice. Is that something that you deliberately worked on or a God-given
gift?
I think it's a little bit of both. I think you have to have a desire
to a unique voice in order to have one. But everyone comes into the
world with their unique voice. The question is, do you know how to
develop it? And it takes a lot of work to do that. And there are a lot
of influences that you have to allow in. But then you craft your
singular voice based on all of those influences but not imitating —
which I don't know if that makes sense.
Tell me about some of the influences.
Wow, there's so many influences. The very first influences were — it
was actually an instrumentalist, Miles Davis. I heard "Sketches of
Spain" when it came out. I was maybe about 6 years old. I believe it was
released in 1960. So I was in between 5 and 6 years old. And that was
the music that just really expanded my consciousness. If you can imagine
listening to that kind of music and just going, "Wow, what is that?"
And later you did an album.
A tribute to Miles Davis.
I know probably every song on that album is your favorite. But do
you have one that you always try to include in your performances?
"Run the Voodoo Down" … it's a very strong piece that arose from that project. That piece lingers.
I know Abbey Lincoln was a strong influence. What did you glean from her?
Well, Abbey Lincoln was one of the most creative lyricists, and she
had a way of telling a story through a song that I think is very
reminiscent of Billie Holiday. She could go right to the heart with her
voice. I learned a lot about just taking off all of the frou-frou — I
call it frou-frou — and just focusing in on what do you need to say with
one or two notes that is going to penetrate.
When you talk about frou-frou with respect to music, what do you mean?
I mean showing off your agility. Showing off your chops. Singing something for the sake of showing that you can do it.
As opposed to?
Singing it from the heart. Telling a story and singing it from the heart.
And that's what you like about Billie Holiday?
Yes.
Your most recent release is a tribute to her. "Coming Forth by Day." Talk to me about Billie Holiday's legacy and why you decided to focus on her.
There's a wonderful article that I read, and it's called "The Hunting of Billie Holiday."
There's so much about her life that we don't know. It's all shrouded in
all of this salaciousness. It's all about her addiction or the men that
she was with or whatever. But they don't really focus very much on her
artistry. It's as if she was some sort of primitive creature who
suddenly was able to sing the way that she did. Like she had this
natural instinct for the music. She was much more than that. She was a
great musician. She was a incredible interpreter of stories. When Billie
Holiday sings it, it's about telling your husband or your lover that no
matter what happens, I'm going to be here for him.
And you don't have to explain whatever you're doing.
And you don't have to explain. When I sing it, it's more — I do a
little twist on the lyric and say that "You don't have to explain. But
if I catch you doin' it again, there's hell to pay." There's a little — I
did a little twist there.
So you changed the lyrics?
Slightly … In the lyric that Billie sings, you get the sense that
she's the victim. In the lyric that I sing, I'm not the victim.
You're laying down the law.
I'm laying down the law.
"Strange Fruit." As we know, it's a song that is connected to a horrible legacy in America of black men being lynched, hung on trees publicly for people to see. Many people would like to believe that that's a part of our past. But you say?
I say it's very much a part of our present. The racism is subtle
now. It's not as obvious. Then again, there's some places where it is
quite obvious. We're seeing the rash of young men that are taken out,
killed in the streets. We still have to wrestle with the problems that
we have here in America with racism. Really, I don't think that much has
changed.
So when you're selecting the music that you're going to perform,
are you doing it in part because of its social meaning as well as what
it represents for you musically?
Oh, yeah. I think that enters into it. Because you can't separate
what it represents musically from what it represents socially. They kind
of blend together, in my mind, in the way that I absorb music. I don't
separate the music from the content.
Cassandra Wilson with Randall Pinkston
You've also been described as someone who has been a peacemaker
between jazz and other genres. In this particular quote they were
talking about rock. The writer called you a "genre-bending jazz diva." What do you think about that as a description of your approach to music?
I love the idea of bending things, bending reality. That's always fascinating to me. I don't know if I care for the word "diva."
I saw "Death Letter," and I'm thinking, "What is this about?" Then
I was listening, and there was this really awesome polyrhythmic thing
going. Then you started singing the song, about someone who had died.
And this is something that I've read, that you find a connection to your
dad? Now, explain that, please, how a song titled "Death Letter," about
a cooling board at a morgue, connects you to your father.
Because the emotion that you tap into, you remember. The cooling
board is where the body cools. I remember when my father passed away. He
was at Collins Funeral Home.
On Sarah Street in Jackson.
Yes. I had to go down and look at him before they could sign off.
They wanted it to be as close to how he looked in life. So someone from
the family … has to come down. The memories of that I use when I sing
"Death Letter" because it's a very strong memory that I have of touching
his face and crying.
And connecting to our ancestors.And for you, respect for ancestors, reverence for ancestry also informs your music.
Absolutely. Every day. It does.
We mentioned earlier your tribute to Miles Davis, "Traveling
Miles." You did "New Moon Daughter," "Blue Light 'til Dawn," a few of
the albums. I'm wondering, is there a sequence to the albums and the
songs you choose?
When you're in the middle of making an album, you don't know what
you're doing. I'm speaking for myself. There's a lot of leeway that I
allow in the process for the musicians and for myself, for the music to
create itself.
So you're not thinking so much about a sequence. You're thinking
about moods, shifting moods, shifting from one mood to another. One day
you may do one song. So when you get some distance from the project,
then you're able to weave together a little story sometimes. And that's
how you sequence it, based on the story that you're able to get, you're
able to glean from the work.
I was astounded at the number of musicians who were born in or grew up in Mississippi.Not
only B.B. King and Elvis Presley and Muddy Waters, but Britney Spears.
Not just Robert Johnson but Faith Hill, Leontyne Price. Freddie Waits,
the drummer, and Dick Griffin, trombonist. Jimmy Buffett, John Lee
Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, Brandy, LeAnn Rimes. And Cassandra Wilson.
It's the water, I guess. I don't know.
What is it about Mississippi, you think, that generates such musicality?
Mississippi is a strange place. We're at the bottom, at the very
bottom in so many ways. Metaphorically, physically, we're at the very
bottom. I think that you have to develop a certain kind of curiosity,
eccentricity. There's a certain creativity, I think, you develop as a
result of all of the pressure that there is in being and living in
Mississippi.
If you ever write a book or someone asks you, "What is your legacy
as a musician?" how would you describe Cassandra Wilson's legacy to
music?
I love what you said earlier about being a peacemaker. I think that's
a very part of who I am and what I do, is bringing disparate elements
together and realizing common ground. I think it's important to do that
musically. I think it's important for us to do that in the world. I want
to be remembered for doing that. I also want to be remembered for the
spirituality. Tapping into a spirituality inside of the music is very
important.
And I understand you also are teaching the next generation with workshops.
We have begun to do workshops at the Yellow Scarf in Jackson,
Mississippi. We take on young people who are interested in music, teach
them a little bit about the business. It's not just about learning how
to work with the notes and the tones. It's also about learning how to
carry yourself in the marketplace.
When Cassandra Wilson played New York City’s Blue Note in
February, a lot was riding on her week of shows. She was introducing a
new album, Belly of the Sun (Blue Note), her first in three years, and a
new band, her first in nine years without music director Lonnie
Plaxico. And she was pushing her unorthodox approach even further, a
style that had won an enthusiastic audience but had divided jazz critics
between those who hailed her as a leading innovator and those who
dismissed her as a crossover compromiser.
Wilson looked fabulous as she took the stage opening night. She wore
a rumpled blue shirt over a black-velvet blouse and black high-heel
boots; her almond-frosted dreadlocks were bundled in the back and
spilled down her neck. She peered at the audience from under her
heavy-lidded eyes and cracked one of her signature half-smiles as if she
had just heard a juicy bit of gossip about each and every one of us.
There were no keyboards, horns or trap drums on stage; two hand
drummers, two guitarists and a bassist flanked Wilson. The band stirred
up a groove that didn’t snap, crackle and pop with big accents like
your usual jazz combo; instead the rhythms rippled in overlapping
patterns of small accents as if the music were coming from Brazil, Haiti
or Louisiana rather than New York, Chicago or L.A.
When Wilson started singing, she didn’t lock into those undulating
beats; rather she held out her smoky contralto in long, drawn-out
syllables that created a dramatic tension against the jittery pulse.
The words she sang, “I pulled into Nazareth/I was feeling about
half-past dead,” were instantly familiar but not from any jazz book.
These are the opening lines from the folk-rock classic “The Weight,”
introduced by the Band and remade so memorably by Aretha Franklin. But
no one had ever sung it like this—with a Brazilian-Caribbean beat and a
slow-blues vocal as thick as Mississippi mud.
Right there, in the opening moments of the show, was all the evidence
one needed to argue for Wilson as a major jazz innovator. She has
completely revamped jazz singing—the book, the beat, the very sound of
the voice.
When Wilson first emerged in the late ’80s, jazz vocals had been
stuck in a time warp. The template of repertoire, rhythm and delivery
defined by Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan in the ’40s
had remained near constant while everything else in jazz was changing
around it. Even Betty Carter and Abbey Lincoln, two of Wilson’s biggest
heroes, refined that template without fundamentally altering it.
Wilson has changed it all, and she’s continuing to shake things up
with her new CD. Belly of the Sun begins with “The Weight” and proceeds
to feature tunes by Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bob Dylan and Wilson
herself. It prominently features such unlikely jazz instruments as
mandolin, banjo, bouzouki and resonator guitar; no horn is heard until
the 12th track. And the tension between the purring, moaning vocals and
the rippling hand drums is sharper than ever.
“I don’t think you have to have a piano trio for it to be jazz,”
Wilson insists. “We’ve heard that ride cymbal doing that 4/4 thing so
much that we’ve come to believe that that is jazz. I don’t believe it.
Jazz is not a certain repertoire or instrumentation; it’s about being
truly in the moment and being able to improvise, being able to swing and
drawing on the blues. We do all those things.”
It’s 11:30 a.m.—early morning by the jazz clock—the day before her
Blue Note opening, and Wilson is seated in the corner booth of Dylan
Prime, a restaurant that’s just a short stroll from her Tribeca
apartment. Wearing a black turtleneck and dangling orange-bead
earrings, she leans over a steaming mug of tea and ponders each question
with the same patience she brings to her singing. When she grabs hold
of an idea, she draws it out the way she does a note.
“Some people want to lock jazz up in an ivory tower where there’s no
place to breathe or grow,” she complains. “If the music has to be a
certain way, if you have to do Cole Porter and Irving Berlin tunes,
you’re just recycling the same music over and over again.
“When people say, ‘The new pop songs aren’t as good as the old pop
songs,’ I say, ‘Listen again.’ It’s just ridiculous to think that good
songwriting ended in the ’50s. We’re in 2002, and you’re telling me no
one has written a good melody and good lyrics in 50 years? It’s so
liberating to look outside the traditional jazz book for material.”
No singer has been more aggressive or consistent in expanding the
jazz book than Wilson. When she moved to New Jersey in 1982, she
started gigging as a jazz singer in nearby Manhattan. One night she
sang “Cherokee” at a jazz-club tribute to Charlie Parker, and afterward
the alto saxophonist Steve Coleman came over and struck up a
conversation.
“He told me bebop is important,” Wilson recounts, “but he said it was
even more important that I create my own music and my own style. He
said I’d never be noticed if I kept doing that same repertoire and that
same style from another era; so many singers were doing those same Tin
Pan Alley tunes.”
It was a life-changing conversation, and Wilson began to hang out
with Coleman and friends like Greg Osby, Geri Allen, Lonnie Plaxico and
Jean-Paul Bourelly, who made up Brooklyn’s M-Base movement. Unlike so many singers who combined jazz and
R&B by simplifying everything, Wilson combined the two genres by
complicating everything—keeping the funky beats and the altered chords,
the gospel wail and the improvised scatting. And she started to write
original material, either by herself or with Coleman, Bourelly and her
band.
“I had never heard of a female jazz vocalist other than Abbey Lincoln
writing her own material,” Wilson says. “The more songwriting I did,
the more I loved it. You’re able to create a vehicle specifically for
your own voice, specifically for your own experiences. Not that you
can’t express your experiences through other people’s material, but with
your own songs less tailoring is required.”
Wilson recorded six M-Base-dominated albums for JMT Records and a
one-off project for DIW/Columbia, but in 1993 she signed with Blue Note
and decided it was time for a major overhaul of her music. She hired a
new band and found a new producer, Craig Street, who helped her find her
way back home to the music of her youth.
“Craig did this Freudian thing,” she recalls, “and had me lie on a
couch as he asked me questions about how I felt about the music I had
grown up with. I told him about playing Joni Mitchell songs on guitar
while I was in college in Mississippi and said, ‘But how am I going to
be a jazz vocalist and do the folk thing?’ He said, ‘Why not? It’s who
you are.’ So I decided to come out of the closet.”
On the two albums that Street produced, 1993’s Blue Light ’Til Dawn
and 1995’s New Moon Daughter, Wilson tackled songs by Mitchell, Van
Morrison, U2, Hank Williams, Neil Young, the Monkees, the Stylistics,
Ann Peebles, Robert Johnson and Son House, and she made them all sound
comfortable in a jazz setting.
On her frequent guest appearances during the ’90s, Wilson sang Muddy
Waters with Javon Jackson, the Zombies with Kurt Elling, the Temptations
with Regina Carter, Elvis Costello with Bill Frisell, Prince and the
Beatles with Bob Belden, Aretha Franklin with David Sanborn, Afro-pop
with Angélique Kidjo and hip-hop with the Roots.
“I think these songs stand up musically,” Wilson argues. “Joni
Mitchell writes great melodies and great chord changes. She writes very
freely, maybe because she’s unschooled, and the things she does with
guitar tunings have always fascinated me. And the language that she and
Bob Dylan use is so powerful. Their lyrics are connected to folk, the
common folk, whereas Cole Porter and Harold Arlen are more connected to
the wealthy, the bon vivant. Dylan, Mitchell and Robbie Robertson [of
the Band] are writing for the disaffected, discontented and
disenfranchised; they’re saying, ‘Hey, it’s not perfect down here; we
have some demons to deal with.’
“And the blues—it used to be that jazz artists prided themselves on
knowing the blues. But how many young jazz musicians are willing to
transcribe Robert Johnson or Blind Lemon Jefferson the way they
transcribe Bird or Trane? You can’t tell me that this music is too
common or too easy. Those songs are bottomless.
“And don’t talk to me about sophisticated harmonies; you can always
change the chords. That’s what I do—I’m a jazz musician; I live for
chord substitutions. If Ella Fitzgerald could turn a nursery rhyme like
“A Tisket a Tasket” into a jazz song, what can’t we use?
“Have you ever heard the original version of ‘Green Dolphin Street’?
It’s your standard movie theme song, but someone said, ‘I can change
these chords and make it interesting.’ That’s what John Coltrane did
with ‘My Favorite Things.’ He said, ‘I like this melody, but I’ll put a
minor feel in there and an Indian raga, then I’ll hold that pedal point
forever.’” Along with Wilson’s new repertoire came a new way of singing. Notes
were no longer flung like dishes; they were kneaded and stretched as if
they were still wet clay. Instead of singing like a piano, she sang
more like an organ, trading in the usual percussive attack for a more
sustained, rounded approach to each note.
On Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “You Gotta Move” from Belly of the
Sun, for example, she pulls and twists at the line endings. “You may be
high,” she sings, and the “high” slides up and over an extra beat.
“You may be low,” she adds, and the “low” tumbles off a cliff. “You may
be down,” she sympathizes, “no place to go,” and the “go” is held until
a hint of despair creeps in. “But when the Lord”—the single syllable
of “Lord” marches in on two notes like a monarch—“gets ready”—“ready”
falls down like a judge’s gavel—“you gotta move”—and the “move” trails
off like a train disappearing down the track.
There were two main sources for Wilson’s new vocal style. One was in
the Mississippi Delta, where singers like Robert Johnson, Son House and
Muddy Waters had blurred the boundaries between singing, the moaning of
despair and the moaning of orgasm. The other was postwar New York,
where Billie Holiday and Miles Davis gave birth to a cool alternative to
hot bebop.
“What I’m doing is more a Billie way of singing,” Wilson explains.
“Billie was so different from Ella and Sarah. It was not based on
dexterity so much as on the roundness of her tone, the color inside the
voice. And how much of her life is in that? When you concentrate on
singing really fast or imitating horns, the tone becomes less important.
But when you take time to sing the song; you have to leave spaces in
it.
“Those spaces invite an audience into the sound you’re creating.
Being a Southerner, I’m probably predisposed to that slower, thicker
sort of sound; that ‘built for comfort not for speed’ kind of thing.
I’m taking what Billie did and using it to create longer lines where I
can sail on what the rhythm section is doing. I want the option of
locking in with them on certain passages and floating above them on
others; that way I can create tension and release it.
“And, of course, when I went back to the blues in Mississippi, that
changed how I sing. I think a lot of jazz musicians are afraid of the
blues, because there’s a certain emotional vulnerability when you get
into this material. It’s so bare that you really have to be inventive;
you can’t rely on the usual jazz vocabulary of quoting melodies and
running scales and going, ‘scooby-dooby-doo.’ That’s why a lot of jazz
musicians feel safer keeping an academic distance from the blues.
“I’ve done a lot of jerky singing in the past,” she adds, “but now
I’m hearing something different. It has something to do with the fact
that I’ve been listening to Miles Davis so much over the past few years.
I feel the need to stretch things out more and savor a note,
especially if it’s a good note that’s really singing with the other
instruments. It’s not always the same note every night, but when I hear
a note really ringing, I hold on to it and let it enjoy a long decay.” The longer Wilson held out those notes and savored their lingering
overtones, the more she found herself fighting against musicians who
wanted to cover up every vacant space. She had a special problem with
drummers, whose splashy cymbals ate up a lot of sonic territory. She
didn’t know what to do until producer Craig Street came to the rescue.
“Craig taught me something very important about drums,” she
acknowledges. “I’d always assumed that you had to work with a regular
drum kit. But on Blue Light ’Til Dawn and New Moon Daughter, I realized
that I could hear more of the overtones and undertones of my voice if I
didn’t have the kit. What was getting in the way was not the drumheads
but the cymbals. It’s easier for a horn player to work with cymbals,
because a horn has a narrower aural focus and can cut through. But the
human voice is multitimbral, and all those other tones get lost in a
wash of cymbals—especially my voice, which is a contralto and in the
same range. Even the snare and the hi-hat get in the way. And these
young drummers are trying so hard to sound like Tony Williams and Elvin
Jones that they don’t know how to use brushes or mallets, how to work
with a singer. There’s something about the way they’re constantly
pushing the tempo with the ride cymbal that gets on my nerves.
“When I got rid of the kit and started using hand drums, it led to
different patterns. The conga player states the main rhythmic pulse,
but the percussionist doesn’t play the same thing; he plays something
complementary. So you have that push and pull without all that cymbal
noise. When we’re working out arrangements, if I hear something I can’t
float over, we rework it so there’s enough space for my voice. And
these different drum patterns led us to Brazilian music.”
The new album features Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Waters of March” and
James Taylor’s “Only a Dream in Rio,” and it was scheduled to include
Caetano Veloso’s “Little Lion” until the song was pulled from the disc
at the last minute. With two hand drummers and two guitarists, Wilson’s
band is well designed for this repertoire and she skips through it with
a lilting finesse. She sang all three songs at the Blue Note, and when
she delivered Jobim’s line about “the joy in your heart,” she leaned
out over the stage edge as if to press the point home.
“I’ve always loved Brazilian music,” she says. “There’s a natural
connection between bossa nova and jazz—they both come from Afro-European
cultures; they both emphasize rhythm and rely on improvisation.”
But the exotic land that had the biggest influence on Belly in the
Sun was her native Mississippi. Wilson was born there in Jackson 46
years ago, the daughter of Herman Fowlkes, a postman, and Mary Fowlkes, a
teacher. They lived in the city, but their next-door neighbor had
chickens in the yard, and Wilson’s grandmother went into the woods
behind their house every day to gather herbs for cooking and healing. “I only came inside to sleep, eat and change my clothes,” the former
tomboy remembers. “There was a closeness to nature that we as
African-Americans have lost. We have become dangerously urbanized.
This environment is not healthy for anybody, but especially for us,
because we can’t escape as easily as a lot of white people who can jump
in the car and go visit grandma. Our children are surrounded by
concrete, when nature should be the first instructor for the young.”
Wilson was a maverick even as a teenager. Instead of going to
predominantly black Jackson State College, she went to the city’s
predominantly white Millsaps College “to investigate white people and
study their habits, almost like a National Geographic expedition.” She
studied Camus and Hegel in the classroom and Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan
back in the dorm.
She dropped out of Millsaps in 1975, moved to Little Rock to front a
blues-rock band, returned to Jackson in 1978, enrolled in Jackson State
and graduated in 1980. During her second fling at college, she formed a
folk band called Past, Present & Future. Drawing inspiration from
Mitchell, Dylan, Nina Simone and Richie Havens, the quartet featured
Wilson on acoustic guitar and vocals, Rhonda Richmond on violin and
keyboards, Niecie Evers (Medgar’s niece) on congas, and Nellie McInnis
on bass. Even today she thinks of Jackson as “home.”
“By the end of 1999,” Wilson says, “I was exhausted. I had done four
albums since 1993, each followed by a long tour and one led right into
the next. So I needed to take some time off, and I went home to get my
bearings. I always go home when I want to gather the information I need
to move forward. It’s such a different pace from here in New York; you
have time for long conversations over big meals. The lifestyle is so
gracious that it gives you time to reflect.
“The other thing I like about Mississippi is that I’m nobody down
there. We always joke that Michael Jackson could walk down the street
in Jackson and people would go, ‘Oh, that’s Michael Jackson,’ and keep
on walking. People there are not easily impressed. So when people
spend time with you, you know it’s because of you and not because of
what you do.”
As the Christmas holidays of 1999 spilled over into 2000, Wilson
reconnected with the members of her college folk band. The returning
prodigal daughter was so impressed with the songs Richmond was writing
and singing that Wilson decided to help her former bandmate make a
record.
Wilson set up shop at a Jackson studio as Richmond recorded six of
her own compositions plus songs by Nina Simone, Duke Ellington and Muddy
Waters. Not only did Wilson produce and sing harmony on the album,
Oshogbo Town, but she also formed Ojah Records to put it out last year.
(It can be ordered from Wilson’s Web site, www.jazztrance.com.)
“I don’t own any of my own masters,” Wilson laments, “and ownership
is so important in this business. So I wanted to start a company where I
could own something. By keeping the overhead low, I can make a profit
without having to sell a lot of copies. I like the idea of keeping it
small.
“I haven’t signed anyone else yet, but I’m looking at some people. I
want to document some of the great musicians in Mississippi who choose
never to leave. I know it contradicts the stereotype, but life is so
seductive down there that if people can play music and support
themselves, they never want to leave.”
After recording Richmond early in 2000 and making the rounds of the
jazz-festival circuit that summer, Wilson overhauled her band in the
fall. Lonnie Plaxico, her bassist and musical director since 1993, was
ready to be a bandleader in his own right. When he left, he took
pianist George Colligan and drummer Lionel Cordew with him.
Wilson held on to guitarist Marvin Sewell and percussionist Jeffrey
Haynes and decided to return to her twin-guitar, twin-percussion lineup
of the mid-’90s. So she brought guitarist Kevin Breit, percussionist
Cyro Baptista and bassist Mark Peterson—all of whom had worked on New
Moon Daughter—back into the band, not only for the recording sessions
but also for the live shows.
“A lot of times the label wants you to use famous names in the
studio,” she says, “and then save money on the road by hiring younger,
unknown guys. But it breaks up the continuity if you don’t use your
studio band on the road. It’s more work because you have to teach the
new people the songs, and then it doesn’t sound the same anyway. I’m
fortunate because I don’t get that kind of pressure from Blue Note.”
As she considered how to best use this new band, Wilson remembered
how much she had enjoyed working in Mississippi on Richmond’s album.
But for Belly of the Sun she wanted to get out of Jackson and up into
the heart of the Delta. There are no state-of-the-art studios in that
northwest corner of the state, so she decided to record in the old
Clarksdale train depot, the same spot where so many sharecroppers bought
a one-way ticket for Chicago in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. Her engineer,
Danny Kopelson, set up a mobile recording truck outside, and Wilson
went to work.
“I wanted to get my musicians out of New York,” she explains. “I
wanted to take them down to Mississippi and show them the ‘crossroads.’
These are such great musicians that I knew they could play anywhere;
the important thing was that they absorb the emotion of where I come
from, that they put the rhythm of Clarksdale into their music. I don’t
think the record would have sounded the same if we hadn’t gone down
there.”
While she was down there, Wilson discovered Abie “Boogaloo” Ames, a
member of the Charles Brown/Champion Jack Dupree schools of mid-century
jazz-blues piano. Ames, who died earlier this year at 81, joins Wilson
for an unaccompanied voice-and-piano version of “Darkness on the Delta.”
If it sounds like two utterly relaxed people sitting side-by-side on
the piano bench, just fooling around, that’s because it is.
More local talent got involved when Wilson recorded one of Richmond’s
songs, “Road So Clear”; the composer played piano and Mississippian Olu
Dara played trumpet, the only trace of a horn on the whole disc. And
when the band got kicked out of the depot to accommodate a previously
scheduled wedding reception, Wilson dragged everyone into a nearby
boxcar for echo-heavy treatments of “You Gotta Move” and Robert
Johnson’s “Hot Tamales.”
Last fall, Wilson found herself back in New York in her new
neighborhood of Tribeca. After years of living in Harlem, she had moved
downtown to experience a different slice of New York culture—and to
enjoy better take-out delivery, she adds. On the morning of Sept. 11,
however, her manager Michael Simanga called her and told her to look
outside her window.
“I looked out,” she recalls, “and there were all these businessmen
walking and running, which is something you never see on my street. So I
turned on the TV and saw what they were running from—the World Trade
Center, only eight blocks away. It was like being in a really bad
movie; it was terrifying and exciting at the same time. The whole city
had been brought to its knees.
“As Americans, we always feel that we’re secure, that someone was
taking care of the bad guys before they got to us. That day we all felt
absolutely vulnerable. And out of that vulnerability came some amazing
displays of humanity. Something strange kicked in for me, and I
decided not to move. I felt a protectiveness for my new ’hood. This
was my home now, and I didn’t want to run away from home.” Out of those experiences came a new song, “Just Another Parade.”
“Yesterday’s news,” Wilson wrote over a skipping acoustic-guitar melody,
“is tomorrow’s blues, but today I am alive/Today I did much more than
survive.” As soon as she wrote it, she knew it was the song she had
been seeking for her scheduled duet with new folk-soul star India.Arie.
They quickly cut it in New York and added it to Belly of the Sun.
Arie is just one of the young female singers, along with Jill Scott,
Norah Jones, Patricia Barber and others, who seem to be taking their cue
from Wilson’s unorthodox approach to repertoire, songwriting,
arrangement and delivery. These fellow travelers suggest that Wilson is
not merely blazing a divergent path for herself but may be launching a
whole new subgenre.
“Today you have a lot of strong, self-reliant women in the music,”
Wilson argues, “and you can’t expect them to keep singing the songbook
of the ’30s and ’40s. Those lyrics may have been appropriate for their
time, but I was always taught that jazz was all about being in the
moment. It has always been important to me to be relevant to my own
time, to express my own feelings.
“When you canonize a certain group of songs and a certain way of
singing, you don’t give the singer enough room to change. And if a
musician can’t experiment and improvise, how can this be jazz? Someone
has to push the boundaries of the music forward. Maybe that’s what I’m
supposed to do.”
Released in the fall of 1993, Cassandra Wilson’s recently reissued Blue Note debut, Blue Light ’Til Dawn, made
her a jazz superstar and marked a paradigm shift in vocal-jazz
repertory. Essential to its success was Blue Note’s then-president Bruce
Lundvall, whose reputation for generosity and facilitating creativity
seemed to flout every known negative stereotype about record executives.
In this excerpt from his new Lundvall biography, Playing by Ear (ArtistShare), Dan Ouellette details Wilson’s historic ascent at Blue Note.
One afternoon in the fall of 2012, Bruce Lundvall heads up to the
SiriusXM satellite jazz radio studio at Columbus Circle, housed next
door to the Jazz at Lincoln Center performing venues, to host his weekly
Blue Note Records hour with Sirius Real Jazz program director Mark
Ruffin.
As he has done for dozens of these radio sessions, Lundvall tells
stories and Ruffin cues up tracks. It’s an essential Blue Note primer.
Today, new Blue Note president Don Was and senior vice president/general
manager Hank Forsyth are sitting in with the chairman emeritus as he
talks the talk about a few of the myriad signings he’s been responsible
for in the last two decades.
Part of today’s focus is on Cassandra Wilson. Mark plays her
rendering of “Time After Time” (the Cyndi Lauper hit pop song that was a
concert staple of Miles Davis’ in the last decade of his life) from
Wilson’s 1999 Blue Note album, Traveling Miles—her tribute to the music of Miles.
Lundvall is thrilled to hear that unmistakable dark-roasted contralto
voice and her impeccable lyrical sensibility with her singular
drawn-out syllables and bending pitches.
While Lundvall signed many important jazz musicians during the ’90s,
one of the most extraordinary artists he brought to Blue Note was
Wilson. She had already recorded seven albums for Polydor’s Munich-based
JMT label (including 1988’s luscious Blue Skies, a collection of straight-up jazz standards) as well as an electric album for DIW/Columbia in 1993, Dance to the Drums Again. But she was not feeling entirely fulfilled as an artist.
Wilson began her jazz singing odyssey in the mid-’80s working with
saxophonist Steve Coleman’s adventurous M-Base Collective (she was one
of the founding members) and launching her solo career by recording two
albums of funky, electric music, 1986’s Point of View and 1987’s Days Aweigh.
“I learned how to mine different kinds of repertoire and to peel apart
the structures within songs to understand them,” she told me a decade
ago about her M-Base days. “But the whole thrust of that movement was to
incorporate the music of our day, to make it personal.”
Although she continued to record her own solo albums, Wilson also
performed and recorded with Coleman and fellow M-Baser Greg Osby, while
taking to the road with Henry Threadgill.
Influenced by both Abbey Lincoln and Betty Carter, Wilson set off to
develop her voice. Even though she didn’t want to imitate Carter, she
admits that she was following in her footsteps a little too closely.
Carter, interviewed by DownBeat, was asked about the
up-and-comer. “Betty said she’s all right,” Wilson says, “but she’s got
to find her voice. And she was absolutely right.”
At a live DownBeat Blindfold Test at the Monterey Jazz
Festival in 2008, Wilson commented on the song “In the Still of the
Night” that Carter recorded on her 1992 album, It’s Not About the Melody:
“You don’t hear singers today doing what she’s doing rhythmically.
She’s focused squarely on delivering some of the most amazing, swinging
shapes and forms that a vocalist to date has done. And her pitch is what
I describe as a moveable pitch. She’s not trying to hit the center of a
note, and sometimes she just slides right into it or goes around it.”
Wilson said that it wasn’t only the music but the pioneering way she
led her own band: “She was in the trenches with the musicians. Most of
the time you see a singer in front of a trio or quartet and not enjoying
being with the musicians supporting her. But Betty was one of the first
singers I saw who was a musician onstage. She was having conversations
with everyone in the group. That turned me on to jazz.”
But Wilson knew she needed to move beyond the Betty zone. Coleman
gave her similar sage advice, agreeing that finding her voice was
Wilson’s Holy Grail. “I studied bebop seriously to where I was
transcribing Charlie Parker solos and digging deep into the history and
the lore,” she says. “So I thought it natural to follow Betty—Betty
‘Bebop’ Carter—but Steve convinced me that that wasn’t an option. He
said that all the singers were doing the same thing, singing the
standards, and that I’d never be able to sing them the way they did. So,
find your own voice.”
Freed from that looming presence, Wilson found that she also began to
“grow tired of all the music around me. So much was happening in terms
of instrumentation, and at that point in my career, I wanted to hear my
voice with less instrumentation.”
Cassandra Wilson's Billie Holiday tribute album is titled Coming Forth By Day.Mark Seliger/Courtesy of the artist
Vocalist Billie Holiday was born 100 years ago this week. Today, her place in music history is clear.
"I
think we witness in Billie Holiday's music the beginning of the jazz
vocal age, really," fellow vocalist Cassandra Wilson says. "Her phrasing
is very conversational, and it swings — it moves with the musicians.
She's very much in charge of her place in the music. She's in control of
the story, and in control of her cadence."
Wilson — one of the premier jazz singers of her own age — is about to release a tribute album to Holiday, titled Coming Forth By Day.
But as she says in an interview with NPR's Arun Rath, she aspired to
much more than re-creating the original iconic recordings.
"I
couldn't wait to get inside of this material and spruce it up, reinvent
it, do some wild and crazy things to it," Wilson says. "I'm in that line
of singers that really mine the emotional content of a song. You steer
clear of the cliches and go straight for the heart of the song.
"It's
beyond improper — it's considered rude, in jazz, to imitate someone. So
for me to do a tribute to Billie Holiday and imitate her style or her
context would be almost insulting."
For example, Wilson's take on "Don't Explain," a song Holiday wrote about a cheating lover, comes from an empowered perspective.
"It's
a different version, because it takes more of a womanist reading,"
Wilson says. "The reading is not so much, 'I'm the victim,' or 'You
cheated on me.' It's more of a sense of, 'You may be doing something,
but it needs to stop right now.'"
Wilson also takes on "Strange Fruit," a protest against racism —
specifically, the lynching of African-Americans. Her version takes on
renewed purpose in light of the recent high-profile police killings of
unarmed black men, and the Black Lives Matter movement which rose in
their wake. "When I sing this song, it sounds more like there's
a chorus, in terms of the musicians who join me," Wilson says. "And it
is more emphatic, because it's ridiculous that we would still be dealing
with these issues in 2015."
Wilson did contribute one original
song, which she calls "Last Song (For Lester)." Holiday and tenor
saxophonist Lester Young were the closest of collaborators — "musical
soulmates," Wilson says — who had a falling out. When Holiday first
learned of Young's death, Holiday immediately flew back to the U.S. from
London to be at the funeral, where she expected to be able to sing for
her dear friend. When she was barred from performing, she was
devastated. "I'll be the next to go," she predicted — and indeed,
Holiday died four months later.
Wilson's song imagines a message from Holiday to Young. As she sings:
You are my morning star Forever rising, forever breaking my heart But I'd do it — I'd do it all again If they would let me sing the last song for you
Cassandra Wilson is one of the most innovative and compelling
musicians working today in the increasingly hard-to-define (and maybe
that’s good) world of jazz. She’s a singer, a contralto who sometimes
reminds me of Betty Carter and sometimes of Abby Lincoln but who is
always true to her own evolving musicianship. She has recorded about a
dozen albums as a leader, including the best-sellers Blue Light ’Til Dawn and New Moon Daughter.
These recordings are distinguished by innovative arrangements and
textures and an extraordinarily eclectic choice of material, including
songs from sources as diverse as Robert Johnson, Joni Mitchell, Hoagy
Carmichael, Van Morrison, U2, Neil Young, and Hank Williams, as well as
her own compositions, which easily hold their own amid the masters. She
has also lent her vocal talents to numerous projects of her peers,
perhaps most notably in her performance as Leona, a slave, in Wynton
Marsalis’s jazz oratorio Blood on the Fields. Her new album Traveling Miles is a tribute to Miles Davis and features compositions made famous by the legendary trumpet player.
Glenn O’Brien Was
doing an album of Miles Davis material your idea? I know you were
commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center to do a Miles tribute, but what
was the origin of it?
Cassandra Wilson The idea first came out on the Blood on the Fields
tour. We talked with Rob Gibson at Lincoln Center who commissioned the
Traveling Miles tour and I suggested the tribute to Miles Davis and that
led to doing a recording.
GO You’d done a couple of things associated with Miles before, right? Like Round Midnight, I think that’s on one of your records.
CW Yes.
GO It’s in your bio that when you were a kid you heard Sketches of Spain around the house. Was your father a Miles fan?
CW Big Miles fan. Miles, Cannonball Adderly, and he loved Jimmy Smith. Sarah Vaughan he loved, Nancy Wilson. Yeah, Sketches of Spain
was one of the first albums I remember listening to as a toddler and I
remember the album cover, especially, as a kid you get drawn to what’s
highly visual. I’d just sit and look at the cover and listen to the
music.
GO Did you connect with jazz at a young age?
CW I didn’t know it to be jazz, I just knew it to be music. So when you use that word . . . Did I at five or six years old know that this was jazz?
At that age I don’t think I knew what the name of it was. But I knew
that my daddy loved this music and I would sit and listen to it and play
while he was listening. I was, you know, always at his feet, hanging
out and doing the things that he enjoyed, finding pleasure in the things
that he enjoyed.
GO And what was the first record you ever bought?
CW A Monkees record, the one that had “Last Train to Clarksville” on it— which I put on New Moon Daughter.
GOWas that ’cause you’d seen them on TV?
CW Yeah. I used to watch The Monkees
out of the corner of my eye when I had my piano lessons. Saturdays
about three or four o’clock every week, that’s when it would come on, at
the tail end of my lesson. My brothers were watching it in the other
room, and I’d be really distracted. I’d be trying to do my lesson and
watch The Monkees.
GOWhat did your piano teacher think of The Monkees?
CW He didn’t really care. (laughter)
He didn’t. He had a very relaxed approach to teaching. The one thing I
remember about him was that he didn’t care about the numbers for the
fingerings on the page either, which was really unusual. Most piano
teachers follow that like the Bible. You know? There are numbers under
each note to tell you which finger you’re supposed to use and he may
have used them, but he didn’t care about it; that was not really a
sticking point for him. When you performed, when you played in front of
him, he looked at the whole piece and what you brought to it.
GOWhat kind of pieces did you learn on?
CW The usual stuff: The Clementi-type sonatas, the Beethoven stuff, “Für Elise,” “Moonlight Sonata.” That whole course.
GOYou had a little group when you were in high school?
CW
Yes. The first group I had was in high school with these guys who
played guitar and we did a lot of cover material. We did a lot of James
Taylor, some Joni Mitchell tunes, Bob Dylan, Richie Havens—that version
of “Here Comes The Sun”—that kind of stuff.
GOAnd did you start to write original stuff in that context?
CW Well, I was writing original material when I first started playing the guitar when I was 12.
GODid you play in that group or did you sing?
CWI played and sang in that group, yeah.
GO Guitar or piano?
CWGuitar.
GO Is that your best instrument?
CW
I don’t know if I would describe it as my best. I go back and forth
between the piano and the guitar, whenever I get bored with one.
Switching makes it easier for me to get reignited.
GO Is one more useful for you in songwriting than the other?
CW The piano is still very much an instrument that I relate to
technically, although I certainly didn’t have as formal an education on
it as most people but still there’s a connection I make mentally every
time I sit down at the piano. There’s a connection I make to ways of
looking at how to create music technically. That doesn’t happen on the
guitar because I taught myself the guitar. There was no teacher for the
guitar. My father gave me a couple of guitar method books. I think he
realized I was tired of taking lessons and thought it’d be a good idea
for me to learn an instrument on my own and create a relationship with
an instrument without someone conducting the lessons.
GO
I remember reading this thing about Miles—I don’t know if it was an
interview or on liner notes—but he was talking about his influences in
his playing and none of the people he mentioned were trumpet players. It
was like Ahmad Jamal, Frank Sinatra, Orson Welles’s voice. As a singer
were you more influenced by singers or instrumentalists?
CW
I don’t know if that’s something I can measure. I think I’ve been
influenced by both, and I go through periods where I’m more influenced
by instrumentalists, and periods where I’m influenced by singers. It’s
not something I can quantify.
GO You’ve made records with horn players on certain tracks but have you ever had horn in your regular group?
CW No. (laughter) I have not.
GO Are your vocals the horn in the group?
CW Yes.
GO You live in New York, right?
CW Yes.
GO
It seems like 30 or 40 years ago, even more recently, there were a lot
of clubs where musicians used to go to sit in with each other. But does
that kind of community exist anymore? How do you know everybody?
CW
I think everybody still knows everybody and knows of everybody. I don’t
think people have that immediate sense of what’s happening anymore
because of what’s happened uptown especially after the clubs in Harlem
began to disappear. Then the younger musicians started depending more on
the downtown scene in order to jam and to learn the music. When I first
came to New York in ’82 there was a very strong scene uptown in Harlem
as well as downtown. So a young musician could go into a club like
Lickety-Split or Small’s Paradise or Carl’s on the Corner, which was at
145th and Broadway—there’s a McDonald’s there now. You could go to these
clubs and hang out and see the older musicians and develop a
relationship with them and learn from them, you know, serve a kind of
apprenticeship. I don’t know if that’s still intact today. I think there
are a lot of younger musicians who go out and hang out and develop
ideas on their own, but I don’t think the older musicians are there as
much.
GO Maybe New York
isn’t such a friendly place for older musicians to live anymore. It
seems like the old bop guys would rather live in Stockholm or Paris. The
other night I saw that you have a couple of really young guys in the
group. How did you find your drummer and piano player? Those guys were
great, by the way. Your piano player was pretty laid back and then
suddenly he played this solo and I was practically falling from my
chair.
CW I feel very
fortunate. That’s Jason Moran. Jason fascinates me. I would love to be
able to create more space for him to improvise. But I get the sense he’s
content because the spaces he does get he really develops well and he’s
comfortable and that’s good. Marcus Baylor is the drummer. He has got a
lot of technique and we work on him: Lonnie, my musical director, and I
talk to him constantly about getting other sounds in the music—you
know, how to invest yourself emotionally. It’s not all about having the
chops or showing off how much you know or how much you can do on the
drums, but having something inside the music that you can connect with
emotionally. He’s come a long way.
GO How long have you been working with your bassist and musical director, Lonnie Plesico?
CW We met about 15 years ago, but he didn’t join my band till about six,
seven years ago. He’s worked with so many people. Art Blakey, Dexter
Gordon. Before he joined me he was working with Greg Osby a lot.
GO
In the old days, pre-electric Miles, the producer put the session
together and sat there while the tape ran. Now, I guess, through the
impact of technology and also the influence of pop music, the producer
is a whole different thing. I know you’ve produced yourself a lot and
worked with a lot of pretty interesting producers, but how . . . how do
you see that role? I mean . . . uh, save me . . .
CW No, go ahead. (laughter) That’s what I say to my producers: “Save me.”
GO Is that the role of the producer, a savior?
CW Yeah, that’s one role.
GO You worked with a pretty interesting producer, Craig Street.
CW I learned a lot from him.
GO
I really liked the stuff that you did with him. It was very original.
And I was kind of knocked out by that k. d. lang record he made. I don’t
know, it opened my eyes to her. And it had some really interesting
textures on it. Do you think it’s important that a record is duplicable
in performance?
CW No, not
at all. Most of the time it isn’t. Because you have this rarefied
environment where you create this music. You’re not going to recreate it
live, so you just use it as a road map. It’s a framework, a foundation.
And I find that all the music we begin to perform live is so different
from what we started with.
GO How much is improvised from night to night? I mean, how is it different from Wednesday to Thursday?
CW
Depends. Each night is very different because of the improvisation. The
structures are the same, the song forms may or may not be the same as
every other night. I want to get the band to the point where we can
alter the form right there—you wanna just hang inside of a certain
change, or be in a space for a couple more bars than you did the night
before and allow room for the development of ideas. That has to
happen to keep the music in a growth mode. It has to constantly evolve
and, hopefully, take us from this project to the next.
GO I don’t know if it was in the review in the Times
that you got, or somewhere else that I read a reference to you talking
about the jazz police, I guess referring to people with very strict
ideas about what jazz is supposed to be. And then—I don’t know if you
saw it—in the Times yesterday, all the critics named their
ten best uncategorizable records for the year. There were some really
interesting choices, things from all around the world and weird American
stuff that doesn’t fall into any easy category. I guess that’s
something that you deal with because you like doing songs by a variety
of artists from U2 or the Monkees to Robert Johnson and Son House. Do
you think that the business is going to get any better as far as dealing
with really great artists where they don’t know which rack to put them
in or what radio station to play them on? Do you see things opening up
at all, as far as transcending category goes?
CW Sure. I hope so. I do.
GO
It’s a big problem with radio. There’s a few college stations that will
play anything, but it seems like in this country, it’s very bad as far
as stations being regimented by playlists goes.
CW
Radio’s sad. I don’t listen to radio because you turn to a station and
you hear basically the same song being recycled. It’s the same music, a
particular kind of music, and it’s all become so specialized that you
don’t get the music that falls in between. Instead of the really
interesting music you get the more formulaic music. And I don’t recall
music being that way when I was coming up in the ’60s and in the ’70s.
GO
I remember things crossing over in the ’60s, which could never happen
today. Ray Charles had a lot of hits on the country charts and there was
that guy—I forget his name—who had that song in
Japanese—"Sukiyaki"—that went to number one! (laughter) I just
don’t think anything like that could happen today. I tried to find that
k. d. lang record all over Tower Records and couldn’t. I looked under
vocalists, I looked in the pop section on the first floor, and finally I
said, “Do you have the k. d. lang record?” They said, “Oh yeah, that’s
country.” And if you listen to the record there’s nothing at all country
about it but I guess it’s hard to break out of the category. What do
you listen to? You don’t listen to radio, do you listen to music?
CW Yes. I cover a lot of ground and try to listen to as many different kinds of music as possible.
GO
I try to push myself not to just listen to old music all the time
because I could very easily just listen to old masters and not check out
anything new. The things these critics from the Times
wrote about are things that you have to go out of your way to find.
That’s their full-time job. But today, the burden is really on the
listener.
CW Yes. What’s new is not really readily accessible.
GO
But if you go to Europe and turn on the radio, sometimes you’ll hear
the weirdest mix of things. Something African followed by some pop song.
It’s very educational in a way.
CW Yeah, yeah. But they’re much more mature. (laughter) They’re farther along in terms of openness than we are here in the States.
GO Your record Jump World
presents a theory about music and its spiritual effects. Obviously
there’s a lot of music that’s uplifting and healing but do you think
there’s music that has negative effects?
CW We hear about people committing suicide. And (laughter)
they listen to music—I’d say—that’s pretty negative. Certain kinds of
music have negative effects, sure, I think that’s possible.
GO
Sometimes I hear things and think well, maybe I’m just like, old. Maybe
if I were 17 I would understand what this speed metal is all about, but
. . .
CW I think the
nihilism is real, it’s there. And it’s a phase, a trend, and it tells us
a lot about who we are. You can’t really separate yourself from the
people who are listening to that music and digging it; there’s a reason
why.
GO But it’s kind of difficult to figure out where it comes from and where it finds that form. I mean there was this thing on 60 Minutes
a couple of weeks ago about an Israeli conductor and this controversy
over him performing Wagner, whose music is almost illegal in Israel, and
he was saying that there’s nothing racist in the music—just because
Hitler liked it.
CW You
can’t look at Wagner in a vacuum. You associate his music with a
particular epoch or period in man’s evolution and history, you connect
it with some sort of dogma. I think people will look upon some of the
more negative rap music the same way. You connect it with a certain
ideology. That might be too big of a word for what exactly is happening
but I think you can’t separate the music. You can’t look at it as this
pure thing that exists outside of its context. People will always
associate certain kinds of music or certain trends in music with the
historical context, don’t you think?
GO
Yeah, I do. I know that you’re really into the Delta blues stuff. It’s
interesting what happened with blues in the ’60s—it being adopted by
mass pop culture, exposing that music to a whole new audience. But maybe
there’s a negative side. I think it’s great if someone takes that music
and plays it the way it was written. But then sometimes people try to
change something and so what effect does that have on the blues? You
have a beat—it’s like a classical beat that maybe comes from Africa or
Haiti, that’s a very specific rhythm, or a very specific chord. People
change it to make it theirs, to make it original, and maybe that
adulterates it in some way.
CW
No. It’s your responsibility as a jazz musician not to adulterate, but
to augment, to extend, to amplify, to reconfigure, because that’s the
whole foundation, that’s the whole basis of this music, jazz. That’s why
it’s considered to be derived more from an African aesthetic than a
European aesthetic. It’s dynamic and life can enter into it. There’s a
parallel between the religion and the music. It’s a living music, as is
the religion—that has not been really acknowledged as a part of that
tradition, but I think the two parallel each other. Religion goes
through so many manifestations in order to survive.
GO
I thought one of the good things about hip-hop was that you could take a
phrase from a record and appropriate it and repeat it the way it was
without feeling like, Well, I have to change this, ’cause of copyright
laws, or to make it seem like I wrote it or so I can put my name on it.
In a way that was a breakthrough because I don’t think you can own a
chord, a chord change—
CW No, you can’t.
GO
So to say, Yeah, it’s okay to repeat that, I think was good. And I
guess that was what the bop guys did when they would take standards—
CW Oh my God! (laughter)
GO —and rearrange them.
CW
That’s a large part of the methodology in bebop. You take things and
turn them upside down. Bird did that constantly. You write tunes over
tunes. Then people come along who will write tunes over his tunes.
Throughout the tradition of jazz you have people constantly rearranging
the music and calling it something new. I talk about this on the set
when I do “Prancing,” which is a tune derived from Miles Davis’s
original, “original” called “Francing,” but if you break it down and you
slow it down and listen to the main melody line, it’s a blues lick from
Muddy Waters. And I’m sure that somebody else wrote it a long time
before Muddy Waters. It’s a basic blues lick—everybody knows it,
everybody plays it. Muddy Waters created a song based on that motif.
Miles Davis came along and added a bebopping inflection to it, threw
some triplet fields inside of it and called it “Francing.” Change the
chords that ride beneath the melody and it becomes a bebop standard.
GO Was it easy for you to pick out the stuff from Miles’s repertoire that you were gonna do? There’s so much there.
CW
Yeah, it was pretty easy. I just let things happen. It all kind of came
to me, instead of me going out looking for it. There’s such a large
body of Miles Davis’s work; it spans five, six decades. So I really had
to wait and see what would pop up and what would resonate.
GO I really liked you writing lyrics for some stuff that didn’t have lyrics. Did you ever hear Carmen McRae’s Monk album?
CW Yeah, it’s fantastic.
GO
She wrote words to songs that never had lyrics and they’re
phenomenal—it’s like they were sitting in the same room composing the
songs.
CW It is beautiful.
GO What are you listening to these days for pleasure?
CW A lot of Brazilian music for some reason. I love Brazilian music, I love it. I just have to have it with me constantly. There’s an album called Elis and Tom
with Antonio Carlos Jobim and Elis Regina who’s a famous Brazilian
singer, she sings these pieces and just blows me away. The orchestration
is so rich. Pixinguinha is a guy I’ve been listening to who was a
contemporary of Duke Ellington. It’s very orchestrated, but kind of
weird music—very, very complex rhythmically. I gravitate towards music
that is rich rhythmically.
GO You ever been to Cuba?
CW No, but I plan on going there real soon, real soon. Gotta get there.
GO I think that’ll have a great effect on music when that opens up . . .
CW Oh God, I can’t wait.
GO Have you been to Brazil?
CW Yes.
GO Played there?
CW
Yes. I was there about four years ago in São Paulo and Rio, did the
festival there. I didn’t get to Bahia, that’s the spot I wanted, I still
want, to get to. I saw Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil in concert
together, and it was remarkable, I was so touched by that concert. The
thing I really love about Brazilian music is that there’s always the
underpinning of the religious and spiritual beliefs. And it’s so funny.
Almost every one of those artists sings about Brazil, and you almost
always hear some point in any song where they go, (singing) “Oh Brazil.” (laughter)
We don’t do that in America, we don’t have any kind of music that
points to our pride in our country. And I was thinking about that the
other day. There’s a great deal of poverty in Brazil, I’ve seen it, I’ve
witnessed it firsthand. Yet, the people are still so devoted to their
national art, and culture, and you hear that in their music.
GO There’s one question I really wanted to ask you. Are you conducting the band with your hair? (laughter)
CW I’m conducting the band with everything. Everything!
I conduct the band with my feet if they can see them—I stand on
tip-toe. My hands, everything, whatever I can use, I try to give them
cues to what I’m feeling.
Cassandra Wilson tells Peter Culshaw about avoiding musical perfection, her
African heritage and a surprising discovery about one of the great blues
standards.
by Peter Culshaw
10 Nov 2010
The woman who for many people –
including me – is the pre-eminent jazz singer of our time, is telling me
she thinks she is related to Henry VIII. Cassandra Wilson is worried
that people might think she is “out of her mind” for making the claim,
but a family member has done the research and even had DNA tests and is
convinced they are very distant cousins.
She has spent time since her discovery researching the Tudors, and also thinks the New Orleans standard St James Infirmary – a version of which is on her new album, Silver Pony
– refers to the old St James’s Hospital for lepers in London. “St
James’s Palace is now on that site – built by Henry VIII. So a song
everyone thought was a New Orleans traditional standard is based on an
old English folk song.”
The
other, more obvious part of the jazz singer’s heritage is an African
one. Although brought up a Presbyterian in Jackson, Mississippi she has
become a Yoruba priestess, following the spiritual path of her West
African forebears. “I’m a Priestess of Oshun, the deity of music and
rivers.”
There is
certainly a depth to Cassandra Wilson’s music and her rich, emotive
contralto voice suggests some powerful roots are being drawn on. Now 55,
she is at the peak of her powers, winning her second Grammy award last
year. Her jazz DNA stands in lineage from Billie Holiday to her mentor
Abbey Lincoln and runs counter to the Peggy Lee pop-jazz line being
mined by the likes of Norah Jones and Diane Krall. Not that she is snobbish (unlike many jazz buffs) about the likes of
Jones, who is on the same Blue Note label. “What she does is amazing and
wonderful – and a great thing for the label. But I wouldn’t want to
change places with her. I much prefer to be under the radar: it gives
you more freedom. ”
Wilson’s version of being “under the
radar” is still fairly high-profile. Her breakthrough album of 1995, New
Moon Daughter, sold 250,000 copies and won her her first Grammy. What
has defined her work throughout her 30-year career has been a mission to
bring other kinds of music – pop, rock, soul, blues and gospel into
the hermetically sealed world of jazz. Her 1990s albums were notable for
the rich variety of covers from Hank Williams to Joni Mitchell and even
a jazz reworking of the Monkees hit Last Train to Clarksville. “I was brought up on both the Beatles and Miles Davis – it feels natural to do a big range of tunes.”
Her new album includes a Lennon-McCartney evergreen, Blackbird, and a Stevie Wonder tune, If It’s Magic, as well as a version of the Charlie Patton blues classic Pony Blues.
“Not many people have covered him. People know a little of Robert
Johnson, and they look at him as being the father of the Delta Blues,
but Charlie was the real pioneer.”
Half of Silver Pony
was recorded live on her tour of Europe last year, the other half at
Piety Studios in New Orleans, a city she lived in at the outset of her
career in the mid-Seventies. “I remember everywhere you looked, you
would hear music. The French Quarter was so vibrant.”
A
particular favourite joint was the great pianist Professor Longhair’s
infamous club, Tipitina’s. “I’ve never witnessed anything like that
scene. It was so juicy and rich – New Orleans at its best.” After
Hurricane Katrina, though, she says wistfully, the city isn’t the same,
“A lot of those street musicians haven’t come back because there is
simply nowhere for them to come back to.”
Silver Pony
is an album filled with nostalgia. The cover photo comes from a
formative childhood experience for Wilson. “A man came around my
neighbourhood in Jackson with a pony and camera, and you could pay to
get your picture taken.” Her brothers declined, but the young Wilson
longed to have a go and her mother hesitated before relenting. “I’m
happy that she let me ride the pony. I was fearless, and I guess she
wanted to encourage that.”
She spent a lot of time
looking after her mother, who had Alzheimer’s and who died last year.
The album is a kind of memorial to her spirit.
Wilson
also lost her mentor and friend, the jazz singer Abbey Lincoln, who died
last August. “You get a lot from an artist like that just being in the
same room, listening to her and watching her. I learnt a great deal: how
to approach music and how to really inhabit a song. I saw her four days
before she passed away. Even then I felt she was teaching me.”
Wilson has continually tried to plug into history. In the Eighties, she
lived in the same apartment block in Harlem that had once been home to
such luminaries as Count Basie and Lena Horne. “The apartments had a
really powerful vibe,” she says. The vibe, in both her home and studio
life, is “the most important thing”.
Although she has recorded with Wynton Marsalis as lead singer on his Blood on the Fields
Oratorio, she has no time for his purist approach or belief that jazz
is “America’s classical music”. “I love European classical music, but
his approach is using someone else’s values to gauge who you are.” When I comment that the guitar part on her version of St James' Infirmary
is way out of tune, she says: “It’s richly out of tune, beautifully out
of tune. That’s the music I pray for. If it’s too in tune, it can get
stale. We end up being where we’ve been before.” The important thing is
“not to be a copyist. That’s the really big challenge with each album.
Even if you are copying yourself, it’s not really jazz.”
'Silver Pony’ is released on Blue Note Live on November 22.
With her 1993 recording Blue Light ‘Til Dawn,
Cassandra Wilson changed the course of jazz. Until then, most jazz was
either traditional, experimental or a fusion of jazz and pop. Wilson
showed that it could be all three by blending jazz and Delta blues and
applying her sound to a repertoire that ranged from blues and jazz
standards to classic rock. The recording was a landmark commercial and
artistic success. Since then, a lot of boundaries have fallen, and
musicians feel more comfortable playing what’s in their hearts and heads
rather than taking sides in an academic argument.
Never one to rest on her laurels, Wilson has continued to develop and broaden her sound with each new disc. Her latest, Silver Pony (Blue Note Records), will be released on Nov. 9. She took a minute or two to field some questions from The Root about the recording, her work with John Legend and her upcoming tour with Prince.
The Root: Your last recording, Loverly (2008), was a collection of jazz standards. How did you transition from that disc to Silver Pony, and why are some of the songs recorded live?
Cassandra Wilson: A few of these songs were in our
repertoire with the group that performed on that recording, but as the
new group came together, we began to pick and choose new songs. We just
played them in the studio and some worked; some will never see the light
of day. (Laughs.) We were really having a good time performing them, so
we decided to put some of the songs in front of an audience, just to
see what would happen.
TR: How did your collaboration with John Legend on the song “Watch the Sunrise” come about?
CW: Happenstance. Some of our friends overlap, and John conveyed a message that he had a song for me. He was a big fan of New Moon Daughter [Wilson’s 1995 opus]. I was shocked and flattered, but when I met him, he was really humble.
TR: You’re on Prince’s “Welcome 2 America” Tour. How did that happen?
CW: He came to see me a few years ago when I played
the Jazz Cafe in London and was kind enough to chat after the show. He’s
a beautiful spirit, full of charm and grace. As for being invited to
join Prince on the “Welcome 2 America” Tour, I’m tickled purple!
TR: You’re from Mississippi. Isn’t some of
that the music you heard growing up? I would imagine you heard a lot of
blues, both urban and rural.
CW: A little, but not really. It wasn’t something
that we listened to a lot at home. We listened to what was considered
more cultivated music. It wasn’t until later when I was able to
investigate my roots that I heard a lot of blues.
TR: So the same schism that permeates our
community now between urban and rural — I mean, why is “country” an
epithet? — was present even down South when you were growing up? Those
biases are sturdy.
CW: Yes, definitely. I got a lot of that when I did Blue Light ‘Til Dawn. There was a great resistance. People said I was turning away from something more sophisticated for something less.
TR: I liked your Facebook
post on Super Bowl Sunday about the New Orleans Saints and what their
win meant for their fans and the city. Are you still living in New
Orleans?
CW: I live everywhere, or at least it feels that
way. We have the place in New Orleans, Jackson [Miss.], Woodstock
[N.Y.], and we just got the apartment back in New York City. I haven’t
spent more than two weeks in one place in a long time. It’s hard to find
your center when you live like that; you have to have a different
anchor. But I feel a connection to each place.
TR: Do you spend much time on the Internet?
CW: I use as many social networking vehicles as
possible to connect with people. It’s important, though sometimes you
have to tell people to step off. I had to do that with someone when the
discussion of the Park51 project turned heated. It’s good to do
sometimes, clear your space. TR: What are you listening to these days?
CW: Abbey [Lincoln], some Billie [Holiday], too.
There are some singers that I’m constantly learning from. I’m always
finding new elements that draw me to their music. Right now it seems
that I’m listening to their phrasing a lot. When they sing, certain
words pop out of a song in a unique way. Martin Johnson is a regular contributor to The Root.
Once you hear her deep-amber voice, honeyed and smokey, it is
unmistakable. But the repertoire of jazz vocalist Cassandra Wilson
continually surprises.
The bewitching singer, at Jazz Alley in the coming days for her first
Seattle gig in this decade, has one of the most diverse discographies
of any top jazz chanteuse.
The
Jackson, Miss., native recently released a retrospective of pop covers,
“Closer to You,” featuring her arrestingly unique interpretations of
songs by the likes of U2, Neil Young, Cyndi Lauper.
Over her 20-year-plus career, she’s also cast her
sensuous spell on Broadway melodies, the instrumental tunes of trumpeter
Miles Davis, Brazilian sambas, old-time Delta blues, self-penned
experimental-jazz originals.
In
a voice softer and higher than her deep-river singing timbre, Wilson
chats by phone about being a song connoisseur, collector, historian and
medium.
“I always say that I don’t choose the material, it chooses me,” she
declares. “Because a song, especially if it’s got a good story and
something I can connect with emotionally, will just stick around in my
head and I won’t be able to get rid of it.”
One tune sticking lately? “Pony Blues.”
“I found it in a real weird,
roundabout way,” she says. “I was involved in this project about
Langston Hughes, and in his book of poems, ‘Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for
Jazz,’ he quoted a lyric that began, ‘Hello, Central.’
“It was from a song called ‘Hesitation Blues,’ and in a book I was
reading about the Delta blues, I found out blues singer Charlie Patton
wrote it, so I tracked it down. I like to research those kinds of
patterns in the blues.”
Wilson also has Joni Mitchell stuck in her brain. On her gorgeous hit
1996 disc “Blue Light ‘Til Dawn,” with producer Craig Street, she
carved out a rootsy, acoustic sound in a spooky-stunning version of
Mitchell’s “Black Crow,” that propelled her music in a whole new
direction.
But Wilson passes on songs, even by her favorite artists, when they
don’t speak to her. “It’s really not so much about the style or the
genre, because you can tear that up or build a new structure. It’s about
the message.”
Billie Holiday is one of her big influences (with jazz divas Betty
Carter, Abbey Lincoln and Nancy Wilson). But she chose not to record
“Deep Song,” a Holiday blues tune recommended to her.
“It has an exquisite harmonic architecture, but the lyric was too
dark for me,” Wilson notes. “I said the same thing to Craig Street about
the Bono song ‘Love is Blindness,’ but that one has a little
tongue-in-cheek stuff in it, too. There was none of that in ‘Deep Song.’
It was pretty desperate.”
The divorced mother of a 21-year-old son, Wilson hasn’t made it to
Seattle lately because she’s worked mainly on the East Coast and in
Europe. She divides her off time between homes in upstate New York,
Mississippi and New Orleans. “I love all three for different reasons.
New Orleans has a lot going on, musically there’s a real flourishing
down there.”
Wilson has finished a new disc, which she says she
might just release via Facebook. And to her delight, pop star John
Legend wrote a new tune for her.
“There are quite a few younger artists out there like John, who are
learning their history, and making their way to an understanding of a
broader traditional dynamic,” she says. “John has a really powerful,
distinct voice. His material is wonderful, and I know it will continue
to evolve.”
These days, for live gigs, Wilson works alternately with two combos. Each reflects a different side of her musical personality.
“One band is guitar-based, in the style of the [album] ‘New Moon
Daughter’ material. The other band I’m bringing to Seattle. It’s from my
jazz head, a group of five or six pieces with very expressive, powerful
soloists.”
She muses, “I wish I could work with both bands at the same time,
choosing back and forth from different material. That would be great.”
Cassandra Wilson, the unconventional singer, changes it up with Another Country and talks about what it means to be a “jazz” musician finding a distinctive voice.
Photo: Marco Glaviano
There
isn’t a more unique voice in American music than the one belonging to
Cassandra Wilson. Her dusky contralto can move, within a phase from
meditative to angry, romantic to jazzily precise, blues-drenched to
delicate. No matter the mood that drenches her delivery, Wilson is
immediately herself—perhaps the most distinctive and expressive singer
of the last two decades. Wilson’s new record, Another Country, is another exemplar of these two critical characteristics. From the start and throughout, Another Country
is plainly Cassandra Wilson, yet it also represents a surprising
variety and sense of change. Here is that distinctive voice, that
one-of-a-kind sound, yet it is up to new and varied tricks.
Talking about the new recording, her first in almost 20 years away
from Blue Note Records, Wilson agreed that she become more herself the
more different directions she goes in. “Yes! I feel more confident
because I’ve placed myself in so many different contexts. That fuels
your belief in yourself. It helps you dig deep.”
For example, Wilson taking on an aria? Yes. Yet she still sounds utterly like Cassandra Wilson.
A Partnership, Again
In the past, Wilson has frequently teamed up with other strong voices to help push her harder into deeper territory. On Another Country she chose to work with jazz guitarist Fabrizio Sotti, recording in his neck of the woods—Florence, Italy.
Early in her career, Wilson worked with Henry Threadgill’s Ensemble
New Air, a strong collaborator to say the least. Around the same time,
she was working a recording extensively with musicians from Steve
Coleman’s “M-BASE Collective,” where she was often somewhat hidden in an
ensemble of strong personalities and surging electric grooves. “That,”
Wilson notes, “was really, really difficult. It was a great experience
but very challenging. I learned a lot. I had to keep up with them. I had
to work and study. I had to challenge myself.”
Wilson started to sound like the artist we recognize today in 1993 with her first Blue Note disc, Blue Light Till Dawn.
“That was the beginning of me finding a sound that suited my voice. And
it helped me to develop a singular voice.” That disc was also a triumph
of collaboration with producer Craig Street. “I lucked out when I
signed with Bruce Lundvall on Blue Note. He was so knowledgeable and
sensed that I was tapping into something. And he allowed me to do it. He
wasn’t afraid and didn’t feel I had to follow a particular formula to
sell records. He wanted me to express myself. He was really happy with
the direction that Craig Street and I were going with the album. He gave
me that support that an artist needs to pursue her own voice.”
And on and on. Just as Wilson was becoming clearly herself she signed
on to record on a tour with Wynton Marsalis’s brilliant extended work Blood on the Fields, she challenged herself by recording a tribute record to the biggest personality in modern jazz in Traveling Miles, and as recently as 2008 she brought a major soloist in Jason Moran into her Loverly, a recording mostly of jazz standards.
Sotti and Wilson, Exploring Everything
Fabrizio Sotti had collaborated with Wilson before on her disc Glamoured,
but he is equally well-known as a highly eclectic player and producer
with a track record in pop and hip-hop as well as jazz. What he brings
to Another Country is a sense of genuine collaboration that spans multiple cultures, not just the Italian touch provided by “O Solo Mio”.
“It was great to be able to collaborate with him,” Wilson says of
Sotti. “It’s the first time I’ve had that kind of collaboration where we
wrote the songs together and talked about what they meant, about the
structure. For me it’s important to grow, to expand, and this
collaboration provided another opportunity.” The range of this collaboration is remarkable. “Olomuroro”, for
example, appears to wrangle a children’s choir to place a set of
Japanese lyrics (later sung in English) over a groove built from Sotti’s
acoustic guitar, accordion, and hand drums. Wilson weaves her voice
around the rest of the song in ways subtle and slinky. Wilson’s voice is
a near-whisper on “Almost Twelve”, which uses the same instrumentation
but sets it around a lively Brazilian groove that jumps on the strength
of Sotti’s strumming. And “Passion” uses a slinky bass figure in
combination with flamenco-styled guitar sound to set up a sexy minor
melody. The opener, “Red Guitar”, lets Sotti play some electric guitar
with jazz flash even as the rhythm section stay in a cool acoustic mode.
More than any other Wilson project since her M-BASE days, Another Country
moves the singer into the shadows at times. “Deep Blue” features Sotti
alone on acoustic guitar, working a very effective piece of moody
impressionism. “Letting You Go” is for two guitars, with Sotti playing a
lead line with a gorgeous muted tone. Both of these pieces are
intimate, suggesting that Sotti is finding his voice in this context as
much as Wilson is.
Different Styles But One Sound
As diverse as the bags are on Another Country, Wilson and
Sotti smartly keep the band small and consistent from tune to tune,
making sure that the album’s sound is a through-line amidst the
variations. Bassist Nicola Sorato and Accordion player Julien Labro work
the tunes with tasteful care, and Mino Cinelu and Lekan Babalola add
percussion groove on many tunes. The title track is one of the effective
at letting the groove take over in a blend of styles rather than a
single pose. Even on “O Solo Mio”, which seems perhaps like a stunt, the
sound of the group works to turn things into a kind of folk song. Wilson consciously works with her bands as a collaborator rather than
just a singer out front. “As you experiment and associate with
like-minded musicians, that when the process is in full swing—you’re
well on your way to developing your own unique approach.”
Ultimately, Wilson sees herself as a musician rather than some
kind of singer/diva. “You have to remember, I’ve been a musician since I
was five years old. The most important thing to me has been the music.
When you get together with great musicians, you don’t separate yourself
from them. You join them in the quest to make great music. That is the
dynamic you need in order to best manifest this music that we call
jazz.”
Still a Jazz Singer?
This far down the road of developing her voice, it’s clear that
Wilson doesn’t feel bound by any one style. She has worked through pop
songs and blues, folk material and American standards—and plenty of
traditions from outside the US. But what kind of musician typically
feels the freedom to do all of that while still imprinting everything
with a very clear, individual sound? That remains the realm of jazz.
“Jazz” is still somewhat Wilson’s identity, even though her art goes
beyond the clichés of the style. Still, there is reverence in Wilson’s
voice when she uses the word. “The word is just a word. It’s not my
favorite word to use to describe improvisational music that grows from
the blues,” she says.
But clearly Cassandra Wilson appreciates the importance of the jazz
history and legacy that she comes from. “It’s a discipline, an approach,
a way of life, of looking at things—much more than a genre. You have
people who may understand the mechanics of it, but do they understand
the mission of it? “If you look at the history of the music, how it grows out of an
African-American experience, then the music is about freedom. And that
is the emotion you need to have to express the music.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Will
Layman is a writer, teacher and musician living in the Washington, DC
area. He is a contributor to National Public Radio and frequently
appears as a guest on WNYC's "Soundcheck" as a jazz critic. He plays
both funk and jazz in the bars and clubs in and near the nation's
capital. His fiction and humor appear in print and online.
THE MUSIC OF CASSANDRA WILSON: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MS. WILSON:
Austin City Limits opened its 41st Season on October 3rd, and four decades strong, has an astounding line-up for the year ahead, including Don Henley, Gary Clark, Jr. and James Taylor.
In an hour long celebration, Grammy award winner Wilson, who was voted
“America’s Best Singer” by Time Magazine in 2003, will sing selections
from her album Coming Forth by Day, which she released this
past April. In Wilson’s first Austin City Limits appearance, she’ll
perform with a stunning group of backing musicians, including an 8-piece
string section, pianist John Cowherd and Kevin Breit on guitar. In an exclusive Elmore preview of the show, watch a clip of Wilson performing her astounding rendition of “God Bless The Child” below.
Catch the amazing performance on PBS this Saturday at 8pmCT/9pmET,
but if you miss it, don’t fret, because you can stream the episode for a
limited time immediately after the broadcast here.
Cassandra Wilson on Tavis Smiley April 2, 2015
The two-time Grammy winner shares on
her new project, “Coming Forth By Day,” which serves as a tribute to the
great Billie Holiday.
A world-renowned vocalist, songwriter and producer, Cassandra Wilson was crowned by Time magazine as "the true heir of Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan." With a string of four consecutive years as Down Beat
magazine's top female jazz vocalist, she still maintained a crossover
fan base. A native of Jackson, MS, she was classically trained on piano
from age 6. After college and a period in New Orleans, she took her
chances on the New York jazz scene. The multiple Grammy winner has
gained respect from critics, fans, and fellow artists, including the
likes of Prince, with whom she toured in 2011. Her latest project,
"Coming Forth By Day," honors the great Billie Holiday, who would have
turned 100 years old this year.
Cassandra Wilson (born December 4, 1955)[1] is an American jazz musician, vocalist, songwriter, and producer from Jackson, Mississippi. Described by critic Gary Giddins[2] as "a singer blessed with an unmistakable timbre and attack [who has] expanded the playing field" by incorporating blues, country, and folk music into her work, Wilson has won two Grammy Awards.
Cassandra Wilson is the third and youngest child of Herman Fowlkes, Jr., a guitarist, bassist, and music teacher;[3] and Mary McDaniel, an elementary school teacher who earned her PhD in education. Her ancestry includes Fon, Yoruba, Irish and Welsh. Between her mother’s love for Motown and her father’s dedication to jazz, Wilson’s parents sparked her early interest in music.[4]
Wilson’s earliest formal musical education consisted of classical
lessons; she studied piano from the age of six to thirteen and played
clarinet in the middle school concert and marching bands.[4]
When she was tired of this training, she asked her father to teach her
the guitar. Instead, he gave her a lesson in self-reliance, suggesting
she study Mel Bay
method books. Wilson explored guitar on her own, developing what she
has described as an “intuitive” approach. During this time she began
writing her own songs, adopting a folk style. She also appeared in the musical theater productions, including The Wizard of Oz as Dorothy, crossing racial lines in a recently desegregated school system.
For college, Wilson attended Millsaps College and Jackson State University. She graduated with a degree in mass communications. Outside of the classroom, she spent her nights working with R&B, funk, and pop cover bands, also singing in local coffeehouses. The Black Arts Music Society, founded by John Reese and Alvin Fielder, provided her with her first opportunities to perform bebop. In 2007, Ms. Wilson received her Ph.D in Arts from Millsaps College.
In 1981, she moved to New Orleans for a position as assistant public
affairs director for the local television station, WDSU. She did not
stay long. Working with mentors who included elder statesmen Earl
Turbinton, Alvin Batiste, and Ellis Marsalis, Wilson found encouragement to seriously pursue jazz performance and moved to New York City the following year.
Musical association with M-Base
In New York, Wilson's focus turned towards improvisation. Heavily influenced by singers Abbey Lincoln and Betty Carter, she fine-tuned her vocal phrasing and scat while studying ear training with trombonist Grachan Moncur, III. Frequenting jam sessions under the tutelage of pianist Sadik Hakim, a Charlie Parker alumnus, she met alto saxophonist Steve Coleman,
who encouraged her to look beyond the standard jazz repertoire in favor
of developing original material. She would become the vocalist and one
of the founding members of the M-Base collective in which Coleman was the leading figure, a stylistic outgrowth of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and Black Artists Group (BAG) that re-imagined the grooves of funk and soul within the context of traditional and avant-garde jazz. Peter Watrous in an article for The New York Times states:
The M-Base group in Brooklyn, working with both jazz and pop forms,
makes music that at first sounds like funk from the 1970s. Like the
music played by Mr. Marsalis (and his brother Wynton) the music made by M-Base - Steve Coleman, with Greg Osby, Cassandra Wilson and Geri Allen
– is, at its best, filled with subtle ideas working behind the mask of
popular music. In Mr. Coleman's group a singer is supported by an
electric bass, guitar, drums and electric keyboards, a shiny musical mix
that has familiar rock and funk references; yet, because of all its
rhythmic and metric manipulations, sounds new.[5]
Although the voice – typically treated as the focal point of any
arrangement in which it is included – was not an obvious choice for
M-Base's complex textures or harmonically elaborated melodies, Wilson
wove herself into the fabric of these settings with wordless improv and
lyrics. She can be heard on Coleman's debut as a leader Motherland Pulse (1985), then as member of his Five Elements on On the Edge of Tomorrow (1986), World Expansion (1986), Sine Die (1987), and on M-Base Collective's sole recording as a large ensemble Anatomy of a Groove (1992).
At the same time, Wilson toured with avant-garde trio New Air featuring alto saxophonist Henry Threadgill and recorded Air Show No. 1
(1987) in Italy. A decade her senior and an AACM member, Threadgill has
been lauded as a composer for his ability to transcend stylistic
boundaries, a trait he and Wilson share.
Solo career
Like fellow M-Base artists, Wilson signed to the Munich-based, independent label JMT. She released her first recording as a leader Point of View
in 1986. Like the majority of her JMT albums that followed, originals
by Wilson in keeping with M-Base dominated these sessions; she would
also record material by and co-written with Coleman, Jean-Paul Bourelly, and James Weidman as well as a few standards. Her throaty contralto
gradually emerges over the course of these recordings, making its way
to the foreground. She developed a remarkable ability to stretch and
bend pitches, elongate syllables, manipulate tone and timbre from dusky
to hollow.[6]
While these recordings established her as a serious musician, Wilson
received her first broad critical acclaim for the album of standards
recorded in the middle of this period, Blue Skies (1988). Her signing with Blue Note Records
in 1993 marked a crucial turning point in her career and major
breakthrough to audiences beyond jazz with albums selling in the
hundreds of thousands of copies.
Not only did Wilson effectively reconnect vocal jazz with its blues
roots, she was arguably the first to convincingly fashion post–British Invasion pop into jazz, trailblazing a path that many have since followed. Furthermore, producer Craig Street
drew from pop production techniques to create a rich ambient
environment around her voice, magnifying it and giving sonic depth to
Brandon Ross' sparse but incredibly vivid arrangements, which used steel
guitar, violin, accordion, and percussion.
The late Miles Davis was one of Wilson's greatest influences. In 1989, Wilson performed as the opening act for Davis at the JVC Jazz Festival in Chicago. In 1999 she produced Traveling Miles as a tribute to Davis. The album developed from a series of jazz concerts that she performed at Lincoln Center
in November 1997 in Davis' honor, and includes three selections based
on Davis' own compositions, from which Wilson adapted the original
themes.
Personal life
Wilson was married to Anthony Wilson from 1981 to 1983.[7]
She has a son, Jeris, born in the late 1980s. Her song "Out Loud (Jeris' Blues)" on the album She Who Weeps is dedicated to him. For many years she and her son lived in New York City's Sugar Hill, in an apartment that once belonged to Count Basie, Lena Horne and the boxer Joe Louis.[8]
In 2000, Wilson married actor Isaach de Bankolé, who directed her in the concert film Traveling Miles: Cassandra Wilson (2000).
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
Vocalist Billie Holiday was born 100 years ago this week. Today, her place in music history is clear.
Cassandra Wilson is one of the most innovative and compelling
musicians working today in the increasingly hard-to-define (and maybe
that’s good) world of jazz. She’s a singer, a contralto who sometimes
reminds me of Betty Carter and sometimes of Abby Lincoln but who is
always true to her own evolving musicianship. She has recorded about a
dozen albums as a leader, including the best-sellers Blue Light ’Til Dawn and New Moon Daughter.
These recordings are distinguished by innovative arrangements and
textures and an extraordinarily eclectic choice of material, including
songs from sources as diverse as Robert Johnson, Joni Mitchell, Hoagy
Carmichael, Van Morrison, U2, Neil Young, and Hank Williams, as well as
her own compositions, which easily hold their own amid the masters. She
has also lent her vocal talents to numerous projects of her peers,
perhaps most notably in her performance as Leona, a slave, in Wynton
Marsalis’s jazz oratorio Blood on the Fields. Her new album Traveling Miles is a tribute to Miles Davis and features compositions made famous by the legendary trumpet player.
